When Sex and the City premiered on HBO in 1998, it was like nothing on TV. A metatextual pastiche of the newspaper advice column, it followed four friends – Carrie (Sarah Jessica Parker), Miranda (Cynthia Nixon), Charlotte (Kristin Davis) and Samantha (Kim Cattrall) – through the trials and tribulations of being rich, successful, and beautiful in turn-of-the-millennium New York. Whether the show’s candour was an exposé of its characters’ lack of self-awareness, or whether the show’s lack of self-awareness imbued its characters with a strange candour, was immaterial: it was a hit. It’s striking, then, that its reboot, And Just Like That… (Sky Comedy), seems entirely ambivalent about all the things that made its forebear great, event TV.
Returning now for the second series, Carrie is still dealing with the death of her husband and Miranda has transplanted to California and given up her corporate lifestyle. Charlotte, as ever, is given a few taffeta-thin plotlines, and Samantha remains, conspicuously, offscreen. The gang, no longer in their thirties, are dealing with problems from the fag-end of mid-life: truculent teenagers, devious divorcees, marital malaise. “Many years ago I thought I’d start poaching eggs,” Carrie tells her hunky podcast producer, from the rumpled sheets of their bed. “But I was 30: too busy to slow my roll for a three-minute egg.”
