For three seasons and four years, And Just Like That… has held Sex and the City fans hostage—but now that its final episode has aired, we’re finally free again. I know plenty of fans like myself who despised the series but nevertheless couldn’t put it down, mostly for the sake of seeing what our beloved ladies are getting up to in their middle age. It was the TV equivalent of the whole milk latte you order every morning despite the bowel-churning it inevitably causes. People either loved to hate it or hated to love it or both, somehow, at the same time.
Just a couple weekends ago, I made new friends at a birthday party when a band of women who didn’t know each other formed a circle just to talk shit about the show and the sudden announcement of its cancellation, which we couldn’t quite wrap our heads around. Even though we were in agreement about the aforementioned bowel-churning, we all knew the show checked all the boxes of what movie and TV studios consider a safe, profitable bet these days: a follow-up to a legacy show with a legacy cast primed to capitalize on everyone’s ‘90s nostalgia.
While showrunner Michael Patrick King claimed the series is ending simply because it was at “a wonderful place to stop,” my birthday party friends and I agreed it had some major problems that could have lost it enough viewers to warrant its end. Its biggest, the writing, was notorious for obvious plot holes, a lack of meaningful character development, and numerous plotlines or side characters fans found irrelevant or annoying (sorry, Che Diaz, but you know it’s true). Its wardrobe choices, a defining characteristic of the show’s predecessor, also drew criticism and inspired much online debate. But And Just Like That… had another, sneakier issue that I think played a big role in its downfall, and that was its approach to beauty.
In a nutshell, its characters were polished to a nonsensical degree, even in situations where it didn’t make sense for them to be polished at all. That might not be a big deal to some, and, yes, I can point to plenty of TV series that are fun to watch despite taking the same approach. But the issue for And Just Like That… became so painfully obvious once I’d noticed it that it wound up being the straw that broke the camel’s back—the camel’s back being my interest in the characters I once adored.
