And Just Like That The World Changed. But The Show Didn’t.

By Erica and Karen

One of us watched the original Sex and the City. One of us did not. But, regardless, we had the same reactions to And Just Like That. The script portrays older women (by that they mean women in their 50s) purporting to confront sensitive issues like age, sex and race. Unlike the original, which struck a chord with so many of us, we’re sad to say this reboot just makes us cringe.  

The original series, which first aired in 1998 and concluded in 2004, was the story of four young white women living and working in New York City. Though social issues and inequities played a minuscule role, the series nonetheless resonated. Few would ever dress like Carrie, but her Manolos were aspirational and her relationship issues somehow made us feel better about our own. Miranda’s struggle to balance family and career felt familiar; we all knew an idealist like Charlotte; and public relations professional Samantha was the successful, sexy and slightly raunchy rebel we all wanted in our orbit. The dialogue was snappy, the circumstances were sort of recognizable, like The West Wing was for the political set, and it was all good fun. 

The world has changed since Sex and the City first aired. We are all more sensitive today to diversity and prejudice and inequities and wealth disparity. Age is being redefined and recast, too. Few sentient people think the mid-50s (the age of the cast) is old. And yet, the way the series deals with a changed world is, frankly, unenlightened. 

Take an opening sequence where Miranda, a 55 year old, experienced lawyer, after engaging in early morning drinking so she can face attending a class with younger people, engages in an interaction with the professor, Dr. Wallace, who is young and Black. Over and over again, she dominates the first moments of the class with comments on Dr. Wallace’s race and hair. Her “white savior” tendencies then continue as part of the conversation.

The actor playing Miranda calls the script “delicious” because she thinks her character is trying her best, and her heart is in the right place, though she often slips on a banana peel and falls. “That’s the nature of comedy, right?” Maybe, but that’s not what is going on here. There is nothing “delicious” about portraying a white woman of 55 as ignorant, and racist, and old. Women even older than 55 are not doddering fools and are actually capable of understanding the world around them. They do not think themselves excused from keeping up because they are over 50.

The discredited trope that older people are funny because they don’t know which end is up is not amusing. It is outdated and agist. Agism is one of the last isms to be tolerated—even though academics, and many others, have been vociferous about the issue for some time, and even though agism is prejudice against our future selves. The original series did not think that far ahead, but now that they have arrived in their 50s has no-one gained any perspective?

Take Carrie. Hair still down to her waist, a continuing fixation on shoes even when mourning her husband. Really? Those shoes, once striking as a contemporary statement of the times, have an unevolved Carrie clinging to her past and her youth.

Back to Miranda. The look is better, but the behavior and story lines are confounding. She berates a stranger for offering her 17 year old son a toke, apparently because this is how a Rambo Mom is expected to behave, but she permits disrespectful talk from the son’s girlfriend, and raucous nightly sex in the family home from both of them, apparently so she can be seen as with it. She is unhappy with her life and her marriage, which apparently gives her an excuse for having sex in the kitchen while she ignores the friend she agreed to help. This is how mature women are portrayed?

We are particularly mortified that these characters seem unable to get over their horror at being in their mid-fifties. Do they really define themselves by what they were decades ago? Do they really continue to live in their lost youth? Does anyone really think in 2022 that 55 is old? Or that women older than 50 are this vacuous?

And Just Like That does. And that makes it an immature exercise in looking backwards.

What do you think?