Warner Bros. Discovery
From the moment that Carrie Bradshaw’s (Sarah Jessica Parker) “Big” love keeled over from a heart attack in the series premiere, it was clear that And Just Like That, Max’s continuation of Sex and the City, was going to be a very different animal than its predecessor. After all, the HBO show’s six seasons and two feature film follow-ups were essentially spent toying with the “will-they-won’t-they” of Carrie and Big’s perennially on-again, off-again relationship. Big’s death shook the story in such a way that would forever change the dynamic of the Sex and the City universe.
The result was an incredibly shaky first season, which navigated unnecessary COVID subplots, awkward time jumps, copious green-and-blue screens, and one very suspect, triangular gray wig plopped on top of Cynthia Nixon’s head. Looking back, that dubious chignon was the harbinger of And Just Like That’s darkness. Co-creators Darren Star and Michael Patrick King tried every trick in the book to distract us from their flailing efforts to replicate the show’s magic in a drastically different city.
It turns out that—like Carrie herself, as she mourned the death of her husband—all And Just Like That… really needed was time. In its second season, which premieres June 22 on Max, And Just Like That… skips down the list of everything that was off, underwritten, or just plain inconceivably bad about the first season, correcting them one by one. The characters are no longer hyper-focused on losing their fourth best friend, Kim Cattrall’s Samantha Jones. Carrie, Miranda (Nixon), and Charlotte (Kristin Davis) spend far less time languishing in their own subplots and more of the season finding their strength together. And perhaps the most shocking change of all: Those new tertiary characters are now downright lovable—yes, even Che Diaz (Sara Ramirez)!