Like many young women before me, I found Sex and the City at a ripe time in my life. I fell in love with the city they lived in, which seemed like a playground for interesting people. I related to the dating stories and how the nightmares seemed worth it if you could laugh with your girlfriends about it at lunch the next day. The show was funny, real, and even though parts of it have aged poorly (like any show that’s over 20 years old), it remained fresh to me, even as someone who watched it in the 20-teens. I return to it any time I need a little dose of comfort or any time I take a Delta flight.
When And Just Like That premiered in 2021, many fans were skeptical. They wondered just how these women would age into the 2020s, especially without Samantha (Kim Cattrall declined to reprise her role). From the get-go, it fell into common reboot pitfalls. It shoehorned social justice issues into its plotlines and failed to handle them delicately. Its characters evolved in a way that was hard to believe, and nothing seemed to land comedically. The show has been almost universally panned by critics and fans of the original series alike, and I have to agree with them. The writing is bizarre, the characterizations are not faithful to the original, and the acting is spotty. It failed to be even half as good as its predecessor.
Where the show failed in artistic prowess, though, it succeeded in getting me to watch every single one of its 33 episodes. I tuned in week after week (or binge after binge) to gawk at what I knew would be almost-unwatchable television. And I’m not the only one. The general mood from fans online seemed to be just that. While everyone agreed the series lacked merit, it was still fun to talk about, laugh about, and watch. Nostalgia is certainly a factor in this, perhaps, masochistic urge to continue to stream. Fans like me have spent years with these characters, rooting for them throughout their on-screen lives. We weren’t going to give up that quickly. We were going to see these women through middle age, whether we liked it or not.
But even more than nostalgia, a sense of hater-ness kept the fandom fires blazing. It’s fun to have a common enemy, especially online. It’s how so many memes are born. An easy-to-laugh-at target comes to the fore, and we laugh at it. We did it with the Coldplay couple, the morning routine guy, and even the Vice President. It gives the haters something to organize around, uniting their fun-poking efforts. And Just Like That is a good target. It’s easy to make fun of, yes, but it’s not vulnerable. It’s an expensive show put out on a prestige streaming service by producers and actors whose careers, at least financially, are rock solid. Therefore, it was perfectly meme-able. Pundits on Twitter and Reddit ran to their keyboards every week to examine the show’s latest fail. There is a community in hate-watching, and community isn't always the easiest to come by on a divisive and divided internet.
Hate-watches are nothing new to the media landscape. It’s why we have villains on reality TV and a 24-hour news cycle. It’s not always interest or desire that glues our eyes to the screen. It can be something else, like horror, disgust, or morbid curiosity, like the human urge to look at a car wreck on the highway. We want television that makes us feel something, anything other than numb. AJLT is not a low-fi show that you watch in the background, like so many streaming offerings these days. It’s a show that you watch with your jaw on the floor, unable to comprehend why they made that particular choice.
Perhaps And Just Like That failed because the New York City of the original series doesn’t exist anymore. The idea of living in a Gramercy Park mansion, like Carrie does in the series (even if it’s with her rich late husband’s money), seems farther away than ever before. Even farther than the idea of somehow affording a one-bedroom in the West Village on a columnist’s salary. But more likely, the show failed because it was poorly written, poorly conceived, and generally out of touch. The internet loves nothing more than to rag on the out-of-touch.
The finale was the culmination of everything that went wrong with the show. It focused on side plots that were left unfinished, it introduced new characters in the eleventh hour, lingered on some baffling toilet humor, and left everyone wanting more, or… less. I watched with my mouth agape, wondering what in the world happened to this cinematic universe, one that used to seem so real. Why does Charlotte seem like a muppet? Why is Carrie so serious and prudish? What did they do with Miranda, and who is that on my screen? But as the credits rolled, I felt a sense of sadness. I’ll miss those characters, as bodysnatched as they seemed to be, but more than that, I’ll miss Twitter on Thursdays after it aired.