And Just Like That... Today's New York Disappeared From "Sex and the City"

Let’s just agree to leave aside the obvious issues. That Samantha would never have ditched Carrie over a PR job. That Carrie didn’t call 911. That everyone suddenly loves Big (except, Susan Sharon, god bless her).

The real missing character in And Just Like That… is New York City.

The city, as we know it now, is unrecognizable in the series reboot. The pandemic is acknowledged right off the bat, yes, but it's merely given lip service. The first episode opens with the new trio waiting for a table.

“Remember when we legally had to stand six feet apart?” asks an unmasked Carrie. “Do we hug or bump elbows?” asks (an unmasked) Bitsy von Muffling, played again by Julie Halston. “Carrie, party of three,” calls (an unmasked) hostess who allows said party to enter without checking vaccination status or ID, something no one in New York has been able to do since shots became widely available earlier this year. Later, Lily’s piano recital is conducted inside (in a room of maskless attendees). Similarly, Natasha wasn't the only person missing from Big’s indoor funeral: so were mourners wearing masks!

In the show's version of New York City, the pandemic is something that exists in the past. A punchline. No longer a reality. This is true of much of the country. It is not true in New York, a place that has been transformed in nearly every way imaginable since March 2020, and that has demonstrated, yet again, it is possible to thrive under uncertainty while adhering to a social contract and belief in science.

It’s a puzzling omission for a show that from the very start, way back in 1998, cast New York as the fifth girlfriend in Carrie's quartet. The city was so present in the narrative that an entire generation of women came here because of it. People made pilgrimages; for years there were (and perhaps still are) Sex and the City bus tours, something Aaron Sorkin made of point of deriding in an episode of the Newsroom (a show that itself, now deservedly, inspires derision). After September 11, the series arguably helped New York City recover, or, at the very least, lift its spirits. Even now, nearly two years into a global pandemic, there remains a line outside of Magnolia, a bakery that appeared in season three of the show for a total of about 90 seconds.

The love was in the details, too. In the series finale, when Carrie follows Aleksandr Petrovsky to Paris, the man behind the desk at the Hôtel Plaza Athénée hears her butchered French, and says with barely muted Parisian contempt, “American?” “New Yorker,” Carrie corrects him. “Ahh,” he says with a smile. Sex and the City was never an American show, but rather about a certain strata of white female New Yorkers. It was show about how New York enabled them to live in a way other women weren’t able to; had never been able to.

Writing COVID into a television show in 2021, particularly a show set in New York, is a real choice. Succession, for instance, has opted out of it. Lily Collins, the star of Emily in Paris (a city that underwent a similarly severe lockdown in 2020), recently explained to Variety that COVID will not exist in their Season 2 Paris because its absence brings “a sense of escapism and joy and laughter in a time that we need it the most.” Which seems like a fair argument. Whatever the streaming version of Calgon is, we are all more than happy to be taken away.

The challenge for And Just Like That… is that New York was the escapism. The brunches, the shopping, the parties, the sex. And currently in New York there is no escaping COVID. That was true even before the onslaught of Omicron—and the onslaught of Delta before that—which overnight has sent the city backwards in time to a strange redo of March 2020. COVID is how we live in New York now; masks and vaxx apps are as much a part of our daily lives as cosmos or cupcakes were twenty years ago.

Even with the desire for escapism, it’s impossible to see this as anything but a missed storytelling opportunity. Imagine the mask fashion. Imagine the bitching about designer mask fashion. Imagine all the dialogue around the hoops we are all jumping through in order to live life together. The comedy of testing, and the deep relief of being vaccinated. Mask etiquette! There is no other show that could have taken this new reality and given us the opportunity to laugh and grieve at the same time.

Much like, there is something moving in the experience of aging along with characters who have been a part of our lives and given it a language (for better or worse) for a quarter century, there would have been something equally powerful about being able to do so with the New York we're all experiencing today. If we want to talk loss in the context of And Just Like That…, this is it.

It’s not like Sex and the City hasn’t had to deal with a transformed city before.

September 11 took place midway through the filming of Season Four. There was a lot of agonizing at the time about how television would deal with such a moment in American life, yet SATC was one of the shows that managed it without betraying its ethos. The finale that year, titled “I Heart NY” ended with Big leaving Manhattan for Napa (“If you're tired, you take a nap-a you don’t move to Napa!” says an aghast Carrie). Fall arrived for the first time, against a backdrop of Moon River, and a monologue about loss, followed by a dedication to “our city of New York.”

The opening episode of the next season (with the Towers now absent from the credits) is essentially a half hour advertisement for the magic, and pitfalls of the city. It concludes with Carrie ditching a handsome sailor who tells her New York is not for him: “If Lewis was right, and you only get one great love, New York might just be mine. And I can’t have nobody talking shit about my boyfriend.”

In And Just Like That… they are barely talking about the city's transformation over the past two years. There are crumbs of love letters dropped throughout. Carrie has an ‘I Voted’ absentee sticker on her phone (arguably, a missed opportunity for an ‘I Got Vaccinated Under the Whale’ sticker). She's also seen carrying a WNYC bag (Parker has guest hosted there in the past). There is an “I Heart NYC” bag in the corner of Big’s closet. A vaccination card she pulls out of Big’s wallet in the search for evidence of Natasha. And just like that: bupkis. These bread crumbs lead nowhere.

I couldn't help but wonder, was no one on the writing staff actually in New York these past eighteen months? Did they, like much of the cable news talking heads, make a run for it and report on the imagined reality from a safe distance?

The exception is Sarah Jessica Parker herself, who is a die-hard New Yorker and wrote a wonderful Grub Street Diet in January when the city had largely re-shuttered to contend with a winter Covid wave. The piece, doubled as its own love letter to a then-missing New York and a call out to all the people missing in it.

There is a moment in episode two of And Just Like That… when Carrie walks home alone from the funeral home after putting an overly emotionally Charlotte in an Uber (another missed opportunity: New York cabs barely survived the double whammy of COVID and Uber's vampiric practices). She wanders down a side street and sees a (maskless) couple eating outside. In Ariel Levy’s memoir The Rules Do Not Apply, a bereft Levy writes of returning to New York after losing her baby. She attends a holiday party where she spots the family of the recently deceased Nora Ephron and wonders at their “blown apart” grief. She ends the night at Bemelmans Bar. “I still have New York,” she writes, “and I am still a writer.” I thought, perhaps, we'll get a similar observation from Carrie. Instead, she just walked on.

And Just Like That… is about the absence of a man, a terrible man (in the show, but as it is turning out, perhaps outside of it, too). In the telling, the new series seems to have killed off New York City, too, a character that was her life partner long before Big and will be long after. Those of us here in the real New York still have the city, even if it is currently wobbling more than we’d like. The three remaining SATC ladies have something else. Whatever it is, it’s not New York.

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