There's a reason why And Just Like That isn't called Sex and the City

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https://www.vox.com/22869278/and-jus...ot-dark-comedy

"The title change signifies a show that isn’t about the big things that make life glamorous, but rather the way that life hits you — the struggle to exist and remain relevant as culture, friends, love, and life passes by," says Alex Abad-Santos. "The only thing that remains constant for the show’s three heroines is an onslaught of indignities. What is And Just Like That if not the humiliation of life persevering? The old canard is that time heals all wounds, but the reality is it creates a lot of new ones. The grievances never stop, and it’s an inevitability that they will team up with the years to gnaw away at you. Being alive, and especially aging, means facing a new set of embarrassments that money can’t remedy. The original series seemed to believe that the only way out of this was to be fabulous. Eating at the hottest restaurants, wearing the best shoes, and dating the best men would be the way out of the woods. And Just Like That’s answer is more rational and less optimistic, that life is nothing but the acceptance that being alive is mortally embarrassing. It’s no use being anxious about the next setback because it will always follow. The sooner you accept that, the easier it is to laugh.

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• Sara Ramirez's Che Diaz is the "absolute worst" character on TV: "I am an And Just Like That… apologist," says Kevin Fallon. "Yes, there are moments of HBO Max’s Sex and the City sequel series that are absolutely mortifying to watch, but I find there to be some verisimilitude to that. There’s no way these characters would adapt to a new generation and era of social mores without teetering in their stilettos trying to navigate things...Be that as it may, the series is nothing if not polarizing. For everyone delighting in the indefatigable charms of Sarah Jessica Parker each week, there are those who seem to be personally offended by the series’ lapse in quality...Yet in these divisive times—in all things related to Carrie Bradshaw or otherwise—there is comfort in knowing that there is one thing that seems to have united us all: a passionate hatred for the Che Diaz character on And Just Like That…There is no exaggerating how insufferable this character is. To call them unwatchable is not hyperbole. 'Cringing' is not a strong enough verb to describe what the body reflexively does when they are on screen, like a physical defense mechanism. It’s more like an elaborate tuck and roll off the couch followed by an army crawl to hide under the bed before letting out a high-pitched scream of 'No!' like the one I learned to do from Oprah during an episode of her talk show on how to protect yourself from being abducted. Che, played by Grey’s Anatomy alum Sara Ramirez, is one of the new characters added to the series in a woke panic, meant to address the original run’s cardinal sin of unforgivable whiteness—a lack of diversity that would of course need to be rectified in any sort of reboot or revival. Several of these characters are truly captivating; I’m loving the friendship being formed between Carrie and Sarita Choudhury’s Seema Patel, a dynamic that is starting to fill the void of the Carrie-Samantha friendship, if not necessarily the unapologetic raunchiness. Every moment Che Diaz is on screen, however, is absolutely mortifying."
• The And Just Like That characters seem "Rip Van Winkle-like": “It’s as if its characters must have been asleep for 20 years and awakened utterly gob-smacked to find themselves encountering such things as Black professors, nonbinary children and queer longings,” says Joy Castro, a writer and professor of English and ethnic studies at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. Rhonda Garelick, the dean of the School of Art and Design History and Theory at Parsons/The New School, adds: "The characters do seem Rip Van Winkle-like, as they stumble upon and blink in amazement at very unsurprising things. 'Wow! Instagram? Podcasts?' marvels Miranda at some of Carrie’s latest endeavors, as if these were edgy new enterprises. Some of the 'Van Winkle-iest' moments involve Miranda’s foot-in-mouth disease when interacting with Nya Wallace, the Black professor in her new human rights law graduate program. Charlotte, too, evinces a weird awkwardness as she cultivates a new friendship with the glamorous Lisa Todd Wexley, a wealthy, stylish Black woman she meets through her daughters’ private school."
• And Just Like That may embrace diversity, but its detour into Indian culture this week felt superficial and hollow: "Things kick off when Seema brings Carrie to a sari store downtown, telling her that, in India, Diwali is a celebration of 'light triumphing over dark,' but that in Queens it’s an occasion for her family to ask why she isn’t married and pressure her about an arranged marriage," says Bindu Bansinath. "Never mind that Seema is 53. It seems as if the show’s writers heard 'Indian woman' and this was the only plotline they could think of. A self-professed 'bad Indian daughter,' Seema tells Carrie that her parents want her to have an arranged marriage because they 'won the lottery' with a successful one and learned to love each other. However, we never get any deeper into the issue than that. It’s not that the “arranged marriage” trope doesn’t have any truth to it. But without specificity, it just feels superficial and like a hollow way to tell stories about brown women."
• Nicole Ari Parker praises And Just Like That for embracing diversity: "You know, I never really watched the show for that," says Parker, who is a long-time Sex and the City fan herself. "It's like watching Friends or Seinfeld. It didn't seem like New York City, but that was their version of what they wanted to talk about. But the fact that they were introducing characters of color – two African American women, an Indian actress (who's one of my friends of 30 years, Sarita Choudhury), and Sara Ramirez… My happiness is that (And Just Like That… creator) Michael Patrick King and the writers, they diversified the writers' room. So, they did it right. They were staying on brand with the comedy format, but they let these characters stumble over the absence of these people in their lives."

TV depicting a post-COVID world feels even more awkward in wake of the Omicron surge

"In the real world, the Omicron variant may be driving case counts into the stratosphere, but on TV, the pandemic is playing dead," says James Poniewozik, adding: "It’s striking that TV, whose strength is the ability to stay on top of the moment, has generally worked so hard to avoid the biggest thing to happen to its collective audience in the past two years. You could easily imagine face masks becoming a staple, even a cliché, of period dramas some day — a visual shorthand for 'the turbulent days of 2020' the way a shot of the corner of Haight and Ashbury says 'the ’60s' — even as future rerun-watchers puzzle at why they’re nowhere to be found in the TV of our own time." This dissonance has been remarked upon before, but the disparity between real life and fiction is even greater as the Omicron surge has led to skyrocketing COVID cases. As Poniewozik notes, Carrie Bradshaw recently quipped on And Just Like That, “Remember when we legally had to stand six feet apart from one another?” Meanwhile, fellow HBO Max show Love Life tackled the pandemic for one episode, then began the next with people in theater unmasked. "Some prime-time series about doctors, police and other emergency workers made fitful efforts to depict Covid, but their mask discipline sagged over time," says Poniewozik. "Grey’s Anatomy, for instance, brought the pandemic full-on to Seattle Grace hospital in fall 2020. By fall 2021, it opened with the disclaimer that it now 'portrays a fictional, post-pandemic world which represents our hopes for the future.' These are all understandable choices, and maybe the only creatively practical ones. But they make for some potent cognitive dissonance. When I watched a 'post-pandemic Grey’s episode recently on Hulu, it opened with a pre-roll ad urging me to get a booster shot. For programs that simply try to show how people live daily life, the pandemic’s challenges are both subtler and more pervasive than those presented by past catastrophes. After 9/11, there was no need for homeland-security alerts to impinge on Friends, and the subsequent fixation on terrorism was even a natural driver of plot for action thrillers." Poniewozik adds: "There’s a note of wistful, wishful thinking in all this retconning of reality — would that we could write a time jump into our own scripts! But there’s also the simple matter of timing. TV generally works on a faster schedule than movies or books, but it’s not instantaneous (and shooting during Covid tends to take longer). So TV creators — suddenly conscripted, like educators and restaurant managers, into making public-health decisions they never expected to be part of the job description — have been left to guess at Covid’s future like a hapless pop culture C.D.C. In some cases, what’s onscreen now is a time capsule from the heady early days of vaccine optimism... Maybe it’s only fitting that TV producers should muddle through this garbage storm like everyone else, unsure what the rules will be by airtime, wishing they knew where the pandemic fell on the spectrum between temporary emergency and permanent way of life. And I’m sure plenty of viewers would rather be reminded of anything else. But you’re reminded anyway, if only by the twinge of uncanniness from seeing TV characters act as if the pandemic were history, even as you’re still trying to get your hands on rapid antigen tests."

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• It's jarring to watch shows like And Just Like That and This Is Us in their post-COVID world: "Of course, I wasn’t expecting AJLT to, say, address how COVID-19 has ravaged New York City and exacerbated existing economic inequities," says Marina Fang. "The appeal of the show, like its predecessor, is its soapy escapism. So I expected AJLT to be set firmly in a post-pandemic world. Still, I wince a little when a character refers to COVID-19 in the past tense, like in the show’s initial episodes, when we learned what some of the characters did during the pandemic. It feels especially discordant to watch Carrie, Miranda and Charlotte spend carefree days around the city, attending social events and going to restaurants and bars. Even prior to the omicron wave, when some of us were able to safely resume some of our pre-pandemic activities — albeit with much caution and ambivalence — it felt like watching a fantasy world. That discomfort has only deepened as the omicron variant has led to a new surge in COVID-19 cases. Many service-oriented businesses are shuttering yet again because of the variant’s high transmissibility, and their workers have already suffered immensely throughout the pandemic. AJLT is not the show to tackle that story. But it’s jarring nonetheless, especially here in New York, where the trauma of the first wave of the pandemic has permanently shaken so many of us. It’s also jarring to watch shows that previously did an admirable job of directly incorporating the pandemic, but have now fast-forwarded to a post-COVID world. Last year, NBC’s This Is Us devoted much of its season to the effects of the pandemic. We saw members of the Pearson family self-isolating, navigating changing rules and restrictions, and not being able to physically be there for each other. We saw them trying to figure out pandemic modifications to major life events, like births and weddings. And we saw how the pandemic altered their jobs and livelihoods, like with Beth (Susan Kelechi Watson), who finally fulfilled her dream of opening her own dance studio ― only to have to close it, like so many small businesses and performing arts organizations over the past two years. This week, the show returned for its sixth and final season, beginning to wrap up the Pearsons’ storylines. It would be cumbersome to do that while continuing to set the show in our COVID-19 reality. But it’s strange to hear the pandemic mentioned in a casual, throwaway line, no longer of importance, like in Tuesday’s season premiere."

Philippine Leroy-Beaulieu's Sylvie Grateau is key to Emily in Paris' improvement in Season 2 -- and its superiority to And Just Like That

"The treatment of older women in Emily in Paris marks one clear way the Netflix show pulls ahead of And Just Like That," says Alison Stine. "The women of HBO Max seem surprised to find themselves the age they are. Charlotte talks about Miranda's fully gray hair as though it just happened overnight. The three women all act as confused about this modern land with its pronouns and its privilege as Dorothy coming out of her ruined, black and white house into a world of color and munchkins. Their seeming inability to understand the world they've been presumably living in all this time, 'reduces the original characters to a baffled trio,' according to The Guardian. The women all behave much older than they are, feigning technological ignorance incongruous with characters only supposed to be in their 50s. And while Sex and the City clothes were always flamboyant, in And Just Like That they look desperate, not in pace with what women of substantiable means would wear. Costume designers for the show said they 'didn't think about age at all.' But maybe they should have. 'Just because it's expensive doesn't mean it's luxury,' as Sylvie says. Leroy-Beaulieu, who is 58, wears a bikini in Emily in Paris, coming out of the sea like Venus, or Phoebe Cates in Fast Times at Ridgemont High. The sight stuns Emily, a beat long enough to give the viewer pause; it certainly wouldn't be Emily's worst romantic choice. But, like all of the French actors in the show who both act better and look better than the Americans in every scene, Sylvie captures attention whether in an evening dress with a gold arm band or high-necked sweater dress. Compared to Emily in her clownish outfits (and the general buffoonery of the women Sylvie's age in And Just Like That), Sylvie looks radiant and acts like an understated queen. She slips from French to English to Italian as effortlessly as flicking a long white shawl over her shoulder. She's married, though only on paper (still, she makes out with her estranged husband sometimes). She's been the mistress of a perhaps older, definitely married man, and now she's the girlfriend of a younger, unmarried, and devoted one. She's the head of Emily's marketing firm, and is soon to run her own business. But she's not the French Samantha Jones; Sylvie is more competent than the bumbling women of And Just Like That, even the one who got away."