Sex and the City fans might remember the fictional Vogue editor Enid Frick, played by the inimitable Candice Bergen, for both her icy demeanor and immortal words of advice. “The key to having it all,” she once told a young Carrie Bradshaw, is to “stop expecting it to look like what you thought it was going to look like.” By “it”, she meant both fall collections and the less-than-ideal realities of romantic partnership, but I couldn’t help but wonder, would she say the same of television reboots?
And Just Like That, the sequel to the beloved HBO series, decidedly failed to meet SATC fans’ expectations. The stellar ratings of season one, which debuted last year with an audience of 1.1m households, plummeted to less than half of that for the premiere of season two; for many viewers, Miranda’s Che Diaz-induced spiral had undoubtedly killed the desire to keep tuning in. Season one relied so heavily on cringe-inducing, hapless gags that when they thankfully stopped in the second season, the show lost all momentum; with no backup plan for what the characters might do instead, their worlds felt strangely inert. The highlight of Carrie’s lifeless affair with her producer, devoid of any personality, excitement or sexual tension, was learning to poach an egg. Amid Harry’s improbable desire to wear a top hat to the Met Ball, we were suddenly watching a show about nothing – not the comedic nothing of Seinfeld or Curb Your Enthusiasm, but the miserable nothing of characters with no ambitions or stakes.
But following this string of borderline unwatchable episodes, season two’s fourth episode signaled a subtle, albeit imperfect return to form, starting with Bergen reprising her role to once again shake Carrie out of her youthful idealism. Having recently been pushed out of Condé Nast attached to a proverbial golden parachute, Enid’s just created a new magazine, the morbidly titled Vivante. “That’s French for alive,” she says, and “it’s focused on women our age.” Carrie is both mortified and repulsed by the implication: “Do I look like a 75-year-old retiree?” But later at Enid’s home, the same Upper East Side townhouse home once occupied by fellow fictional Vogue editor Miranda Priestley, a riveting encounter with Gloria Steinem shows Carrie the error of her ways. “I’m afraid I’m still battling my own deep-seated ageism,” the former sex columnist says to the 89-year-old icon of second-wave feminism. That’s typical Carrie Bradshaw: taking any opportunity to steer a conversation toward oneself.
Carrie’s ego is rarely put in its place, and so her maudlin admission, exactly the kind of on-the-nose posturing we begged the show to stop doing last season, resounds as words of atonement sent directly from the writers’ room. What’s suddenly clear is how much the show’s myriad problems have been rooted in the fundamentally ageist premise that older women simply stop living interesting lives. Presumably it was easier for showrunners to depict these characters as fringe members of society rather than imagine what they’d look like as active participants. After all, “women our age are grossly underrepresented in the media,” says Enid. She’s admittedly an avatar for a certain white privileged brand of feminism, but as a woman who does things – rivaling Goop in terms of cultural influence and perennially besting Carrie at every turn – she assures us that there is in fact plenty to look forward to, on the show or otherwise.
From here, the show sets on its path towards recovery, occasionally restoring the defining features of the original season. Miranda returns from the meaningless void of LA, where her meager existence was obsessing over the slightest shifts in Che’s mood. She returns to New York to tackle the more substantive issue of reckoning with Steve, slowly returning to her former self along the way. And in forthcoming episodes, our gals rediscover the thrills of sexual tension and flirtation as they re-enter the dating pool; Charlotte reclaims her career ambitions amid her ascent into MILFdom; and Seema encounters her first penis pump. The thrill of later-in-life discoveries is still very much alive, setting the necessary foundation for worthwhile lunchtime conversation. During the most recent lunch we learn that while Miranda would be happy to never see a man ejaculate again, Charlotte thinks of it as a celebration, “like the finale of fireworks on the Fourth of July”. It’s dialogue of this caliber that illuminates the characters as we knew and loved them.
Carrie says the word “jizz” four times before concluding with a metaphor that equally applies to her character: “It’s like an old friend that gets on your nerves, you know? I think I would miss it if it were gone.”
