It will never live up to Sex and the City, but it’s intensely quotable, brilliantly watchable and packed with hilarious high jinks. Isn’t that enough?
The second season of And Just Like That, HBO’s controversial, heavily criticised Sex and the City revival, manages to do the unthinkable: it is even more lavish and unreservedly ridiculous than its first go-around. Here is just a small sample of some of the more daft things that happen in its first seven episodes: Charlotte (Kristin Davis) and Lisa (Nicole Ari Parker) lust after a student at their children’s school; Carrie (Sarah Jessica Parker) spends a scene mulling over the word “jizz”; Seema (Sarita Choudhury) dates a guy who uses a penis pump; Who’s The Boss? star Tony Danza has an extended cameo as himself, in which he worries he will get cancelled for appearing in Che Diaz’s (Sara Ramirez) sitcom pilot. And that barely scratches the surface of all the ludicrous high jinks Carrie and co get up to this season. It would seem that the showrunner, Michael Patrick King, having seen all the memes about its (often unintentionally) hilarious first season, has decided to plunge head-first into unfettered bonkersness. And the show is all the better for it.
Much of the criticism of And Just Like That’s first season centred on the ungainliness of it all: early episodes groaned under the weight of 10 years’ worth of exposition, plot points were introduced and abandoned with impunity, and the show’s discussion of gender and racism was deemed clunky and out of character. I don’t necessarily agree with the last gripe – the well-meaning but out-of-touch way Carrie, Charlotte and Miranda (Cynthia Nixon) discussed, say, transgender issues or Black Lives Matter, reminded me of the way my extended family would discuss these subjects – but both criticisms have largely been dealt with this time. Che is no longer a walking, talking infographic, and Miranda no longer sounds as if she is reciting sections of the book White Fragility from memory.
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