And Just Like That is back. And it’s bad. It’s bonkers. It’s bloomin’ bizarre. But is it also a little bit brilliant? It’s quite possible.
The first episode dives straight in with a sex montage – a pretty brazen rip-off of Sex Education’s season openers – and descends into a buffet of exposed flesh, peculiar conversations about salmon and eggs, and dialogue about the patriarchy that sounds like it was written by AI.
Let’s get into it…
Sex, sex, sex
Che devouring Miranda’s nipples while sploshing around in a swimming pool. Charlotte riding a constipated-looking Harry. Elton John and Britney wailing “Hold Me Closer” in the background. It’s all there in the opening montage, firmly inserting the Sex into Sex and the City. It’s pretty funny stuff – but unlike that famous masturbation medley in Sex Education, it’s not supposed to be.
The salmon chat
Just after that lovely montage, we join Carrie and her producer Franklyn in the bedroom. He’s watching a cooking show which is extremely cute and kooky because he doesn’t even cook! He asks Carrie if she ever cooks, then this unfathomable conversation takes place:
“I always think I’m going to but I never really do,” she says. “A piece of salmon here and there, that’s about it.”
“Salmon’s something,” comes his supportive reply.
“It is, thank you for that.”
“Salmon hard to cook?”
“Brutal.”
“Yeah, looks it.”
“Many years ago, I thought I would start poaching eggs…”
I’m just going to end it there so as not to waste any more of anyone’s time. But it does go on. Brutal.
Sarah Jessica Parker’s Carrie, who has cooked salmon a few times, in ‘And Just Like That’— (HBO)
‘Best me ever’
Cynthia Nixon must have signed the “f*** it” clause when it came to Miranda’s nude scenes in the new season. First, there’s that pool sequence. Then, there’s Miranda in a leather harness sampling a range of strap-ons with which to pleasure Che. But the most jaw-dropping moment has to be Miranda, naked from head to toe, slippin’ and a’slidin’ around in a sensory deprivation tank. It’s all seemingly in a bid to impress Che, and it’s not the real Miranda, making it all the more crushing when, with a slight break in her voice, she cries, “Best me ever!”
‘I won’t be party to upholding the patriarchy and the heteronormative standards of beauty’
This line from Charlotte’s gender-nonconforming kid Rock (Alexa Swinton) is a shudder-inducing example of And Just Like That’s excruciating obsession with presenting itself as Socially Aware. The more it shoehorns in reference to gender identity, misogyny and racial politics, the less convincing it is of its progressiveness. These Manhattan fashionistas doth protest too much, me thinks.
