‘And Just Like That’ Review: Season 2 of Max’s ‘Sex and the City’ Sequel Compels and Comforts Despite Lack of Cohesiveness

Robyn Bahr
·5 min read
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I swear, this review is not a defense of Che Diaz.

I won’t apologize for their crimes against stand-up comedy, their pursuit of gold in the Identity Olympics, or the way they make their paramour Miranda (Cynthia Nixon) walk on egg shells whenever they’re breathing the same air. Sara Ramirez’s Che is smarmy and self-absorbed. They’re ostensibly a comic by profession, but have no clue how to produce or wield humor. (“The only thing I’m worried about is that spice all over your lips,” they clunkily purr to a fretting Miranda. “Because I’m not trying to have curry-lingus later.”) Che is what haters’ dreams are made of. And if Twitter memes are to be taken as fact, they are the complete opposite of a fan favorite: They’re a fan bête noire.

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Which is precisely why I love the existence of Che Diaz. On the first season of Max’s And Just Like That, the sequel series to Sex and the City that follows Carrie Bradshaw, Miranda Hobbes, Charlotte York Goldenblatt and a handful of their new friends as they navigate sex and relationships in their 50s, Che stormed into Miranda’s life and upended her marriage to beloved turtle Steve Brady (David Eigenberg). For the first time, Miranda found herself attracted to someone other than a cis male and, after Che’s seduction, decided to leave Steve and their teenage son to follow Che to L.A. while they worked on a pilot based on their life as a uniquely Mexican-Irish non-binary bisexual comedian.

Miranda needed this. She needed a break from her domestic rut, a break from an alcoholic spiral preceded by romantic boredom and overwork as a corporate lawyer. Che provided an outlet for her. And in Season 2, as we watch this post-honeymoon-period couple actually get to know each other once the lust has lost its luster, it’s quite clear that Che is a classic SATC-style shithead boyfriend, replete with all the familiar prickliness and vulnerabilities but wrapped up in a fresh package. You call Che a monster; I call them the most three-dimensional new character in the Sex universe.

This is all to say that throughout the adrift but watchable first seven episodes of AJLT season two, I found myself most compelled by Miranda and Che’s rocky dynamic. (The premiere begins three weeks after the events of the first season finale.) Che becomes increasingly unreachable to Miranda as their TV pilot falters, their emotionally and sexually alienating behavior reaching its peak as they feel pressure from the studio to look a certain way or cave to audience demands. (It’s impossible to watch a scene in which Che observes a focus group tear into the pilot and not read into how AJLT‘s writers or Ramirez possibly felt about viewers’ antipathy toward Che.) I actually started to feel… empathy for them?

The rest of the storylines are fairly toothless, each of the women’s narratives wrapped around the semi-dull theme of “getting back to me” following the end of a relationship or the end of an identity. As my mother would say, most of these plots are from hunger. Carrie (Sarah Jessica Parker) is still mired in confusion following the death of her husband last season and struggling emotionally with the publication and promotion of her Joan Didion-esque grief memoir. Charlotte’s (Kristin Davis) teenage children have begun rebelling against her Upper East Side starchiness, leading her to realize she’s outgrown the persona of perfect stay-at-home-mom. (As her eldest whines when Charlotte begins to lecture her about female pleasure during hook-ups, “Mom, mom stop. You have gone from sex-positive to sex-annoying.”)

Seema (Sarita Choudhury), Carrie’s real estate agent turned Samantha Jones replacement, is finding herself more and more at odds with her love-em-and-leave-em maneater era, while Charlotte’s documentarian mom-bud Lisa (Nicole Ari Parker) is constantly battling for professional recognition in her own high-end marriage. Actress Karen Pittman unfortunately has very little to do as Nya Wallace, Miranda’s Columbia professor friend figuring out whether to end her decades-long marriage or not. In fact, I forgot Nya was even a character whenever she was offscreen. There are just too many people to cram into 45-minute episodes and, even more frustratingly, their plots are so siloed and tonally disparate they might as well be starring in completely different TV series.

While Charlotte trudges out in a blizzard fetching condoms for her daughter or drools after a literal high-school boy who put her on his “MILF list,” Carrie remains perpetually forlorn, her former bubbliness gone flat. At least Lisa gets to wear some bitchin’ gowns and wigs (Nicole Ari Parker is the true heir to SATC’s fashion legacy, a collector’s Barbie come to life).

And Just Like That… was certainly more thematically cohesive during its first season as it explored the dissolution of friendships as people age, but at least shines in its second when it embraces its predecessor’s routes: The characters coming together over brunch to discuss the merits/drawbacks of things like dry orgasms and penis pumps. (“Who knew you were a cumslut?” Miranda marvels at Charlotte.) But SATC wasn’t always cosmos and girl talk — and AJLT successfully embraces high drama during a mid-season argument between Miranda and Steve that ends with a superbly acted monologue by Eigenberg. (Kudos to Nixon for directing a top-notch episode that so effectively brings her character’s painful choices to the forefront.)

Some guest turns have already blazed through entertainment news, namely the so-called returns of Kim Cattrall and John Corbett as Carrie’s ex-best friend and ex-fiancé, respectively. Snooze. I’ll take the comic delights of Candice Bergen, playing Carrie’s curmudgeonly ex-Vogue editor, Enid, and Ashlie Atkinson as Carrie’s one-liner-lobbing book agent, Amanda, over pandering fan-service nostalgia any day of the week. That being said, I can’t help but applaud Cattrall for the well-publicized cash grab from her upcoming cameo. Get that money, girl. This train isn’t going to wreck itself!

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