And Just Like That continues the story of Carrie and her friends, navigating love lives, successful careers, and plenty of cocktails in glamorous New York. Two unsuccessful movies and many years later, the spin-off series And Just Like That is now in its third season. The women are all over fifty. Carrie (Sarah Jessica Parker) lost her husband in a bizarre exercise bike accident. Charlotte (Kristin Davis) is still married to Harry (Owen Handler) and mother of two daughters. Miranda (Cynthia Nixon) separated from her husband Steve (David Eigenberg) and discovered she is attracted to women.
Samantha is no longer part of the group, and they are joined by Seema (Sarita Choudhury), a single real estate agent of Indian descent searching for love, and Lisa Todd Wexler (Nicole Ari Parker), an African-American film director balancing career and family. This storyline attempts to address the African-American experience, but her character is wealthy and successful, and the documentary she makes about black women lost in history is an ironic contrast to her life.
The original series and its spin-offs are urban fantasies about wealthy, successful women whose social calendar ranges from a party at Tiffany’s to gallery openings or luxury brunches. Challenges they face, even real-world ones like illness and death, are presented in a glamorous package. The writing remains witty, beloved characters undergo changes but retain their charm, with clothes, shoes, and hats ranging from beautiful to bizarre, including a particularly unusual hat worn by Carrie in one scene.
Attempts to portray the experience of the younger generation, represented by Charlotte’s daughters, Miranda’s son, and Lisa’s children, fall into clichés, sometimes in jarring and tasteless ways. For example, in Charlotte’s gallery exhibit, the young female experience is depicted using body fluids intended to provoke physical disgust.
The current season finds Carrie in a period of change and crisis after Aidan (John Corbett), her boyfriend who returned to her life, disappears again due to a family crisis. At the end of the previous season, Carrie agreed to wait five years for him to sort out his affairs and remained alone in the house she must now design and manage without the man who was supposed to live with her. Like the previous season, where she struggled with smart home technology, here she faces an alarm announcing the kitchen door is open and runs through the house trying to deactivate it. It is a comedic moment but also illustrates her personal crisis.
And Just Like That excels in using objects in the characters’ lives to symbolize their emotional states. When Aidan suddenly appears with many suitcases, Carrie must carry them upstairs, symbolizing the emotional burden he imposes on her, made tangible. The theme of “emotional baggage” is also explicit in Miranda’s romance with British Joy (Dolly Wells), who may or may not bring happiness into her life. Carrie’s relationship with Duncan (Jonathan Cake), the British writer living below her who writes a biography of Margaret Thatcher and smokes a pipe, also illustrates cultural contrasts through American eyes.
Duncan complains that Carrie always walks in heels in the apartment and refuses to remove them even briefly. Carrie’s shoes are series icons, and even the cat she adopted in the previous season is named Shoe, another accessory in her life where clothes, shoes, and hats are magical elements. Both writers find common ground and collaborate on reading and reviewing books. Carrie writes a historical novel about a 19th-century woman intended to resonate with the current series plot. Unlike Sex and the City, where Carrie’s narrator voice neatly aligned with each episode, here the connection feels more forced.
The third and final season of And Just Like That is aimed mainly at fans of the original series who enjoy revisiting the beloved, familiar characters. The series portrays flawed characters with empathy, accurately depicting each one’s blind spots, especially Carrie: selfish, childish, capricious, yet touching in her constant desire for love whether she is 37 or 57. In the final Thanksgiving episode, the series breaks conventions and delivers an ending with both literal and metaphorical mess. This ending angered loyal viewers but breaks the glamorous façade, rendering it more real, like life itself.