Reasons to love her
And Just Like That... It's been renewed for a third season, so let's not go now that we don't see it. The sequel to Sex and the City has been one of the most analyzed, commented and hated series of recent years. And since viewers' viewings that only use it as a basis for their witty and cruel comments (you don't see me, but I'm raising my hand and nodding my head), count the same when it comes to counting the total audience, And Just Like That... 1, we 0. What's more: And Just Like That... 3.
Now, let's be fair and give Darren Star and Sarah Jessica Parker's artifact some credit. The creator of Sex and the City and its protagonist, promoted first to producer and then to television demi-deity, have done some things right with its sequel. Apart from getting millions of people to see it. Sorry: let's see it.
In a fairly predictable turn of events, a new current of opinion, favorable to And Just Like That... It has become strong in recent months. And their arguments are, at the very least, worthy of consideration. What if the series wasn't so bad?
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Faced with the majority hatred-contempt for Che (Sara Ramírez), admiration for his inclusion, as orthopedic as (perhaps because of that) bravely stubborn, in a series in which he could not hit less. Che, non-binary and pansexual (I've stopped nodding and I'm putting on a scared face in case I haven't used the right terms), is one of the many windows that And Just Like That... opens to air its environment. Both she and the three non-white women who complete the female panorama of the series are the perfect excuse for those who immediately speak of "forced inclusion" in fiction. That the original quartet of Sex and the City is extended transversally is a narrative disaster, we give that to those who shout "woke dictatorship!". However... wouldn't it be worse to have continued to populate the series of rich white women? Since in And Just Like That... Carrie, Miranda and Charlotte do not have any kind of, as Chanel Terrero would say, monetary problem, seeing Che with a normal job and fragile finances builds a small bridge not so much to the viewer but above all to the previous series, a frivolous and aspirational fiction, but also, if only timidly, a portrait of the wild economic-labor panorama.of a New York that had not yet completed its transformation into a city only for millionaires.
The protagonists of And Just Like That... They have happily accompanied the city on that journey and along the way they have lost almost all grace. Fortunately there is still something left: Seema (Sarita Choudhury), the woman who was desperately looking for her Hermés; George (Peter Hermann), Carrie's flirt who didn't know he was married to his partner or Charlotte coming home drunk, something that, like a good fall into a silly comedy, never fails. We settle for little, yes.
Reasons to hate her
"I hate her" is a harsh expression I hear too often in conversations about And Just Like That... We see it to detest it and we also do it (detest it, not see it) with compelling reasons. Just listing them could exhaust the space of this text. That if Miranda is dumb now, that if Charlotte is a parody of herself, that if the series ignores Carrie's pettiness, that if she (the series, the character, the star, all three, what do I know) raves when she recovers one of the most hateful characters of her past, that if she dispatches another in an undignified way. And so on until filling the 3000 characters planned.
Maybe in the third season they show us a flashback to the day when Miranda (Cynthia Nixon) received a blow to the head that made her stupid. Or they consider addressing the issue of Charlotte's (Kristin Davis) facial touch-ups, as compatible with the character as absurd when they respond above all to Davis' fondness for the most extreme aesthetic medicine. The once perfect mix of Lina Morgan and Katie Holmes is now an actress who turns Jim Carrey into a master of containment. Just as the writers of And Just Like That are masters of amnesia ... when they forget how well and how hard pop culture has analyzed Aidan (John Corbett), that boyfriend who wanted to change Carrie until she, when everything was so obvious that it hurt, had ovaries to leave him behind. Turned into a kind of retro-fantasy of Stockholm syndrome, Aidan reappeared in the universe of Sex and the City in the second of his monstrous films. His third advent in And Just Like That... it is much less harmless and suggests that in addition to Miranda Carrie also hit her head. When she wonders if Mr. Big (Chris Noth), her dead husband was "a mistake", the series cheats the solitaire again. In one of its riskiest (and most winning!) bets, Sex and the City bet on Carrie's Great True Love. Much more questionable than having supported that outdated romantic fantasy at the time is to deny it now. The first we can consider it stale or hackneyed; The second is narratively insulting. When And Just Like That..., under the pretext of the personal evolution of its protagonists and social of the world in which it takes place, pitorrea of what made Sex and the City great, its viewers are almost obliged to do the same with it. To say "This is not my Sex and the City" is ridiculous. It would only be missing that a series can not evolve as its creators decide. Or that such a late sequel cannot be raised on a premise as attractive as the relentless passage of time. The years make us wise, but they also sharpen our shortcomings. And, in the most extreme cases, our inability to even recognize them. And Just Like That... She is not an interesting madurita but an old glory to whom we call beautiful all the time in order not to argue.
- Series
- HBO