Yes, I do still have marks on my temples from how often I held my head in my hands during this episode of And Just Like That. A mortifying clown car of an instalment that could only be the product of a gas leak in the writers’ room, this was 45 minutes of near-constant horror: Harry ejaculating dust! Candice Bergen gawping at an elderly man’s dick pic! An aborted three-way between Miranda, Che and Goldie Hawn’s son! Between the Billy Dee Williams guest spot and the extended cameo from Gloria Steinem (playing herself), I’m still not sure I didn’t hallucinate the whole thing.
First, though, a question: is the absence of Carrie’s Sex and the Cityvoiceover the reason this show is so erratic? Back in 2022, showrunner Michael Patrick King explained that taking it away was a deliberate choice to “[throw] the audience into the middle of the unknown”. And, admittedly, it’s not like it made the original series any less haphazard when it came to guiding us between the themes of each episode (remember “from Jewish to poo-ish”?). But it did add a certain narrative spine to each instalment, or a sense that the writers were at least trying to follow a map of some kind.
