Sex and the City (TV Program)

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    ‘And Just Like That …’ Season 3, Episode 8 Recap: Bringing Sexy Back

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    And just like that, a “Sex and the City” revival seemed to remember the first word in the franchise title.Season 3, Episode 8: ‘Happily Ever After’If anyone else had been wondering where the sex has been in this “Sex and the City” spinoff, it showed up in Episode 8.First, we have Carrie and Aidan, who were able to have sex this week because Aidan was actually able to come to New York. As he tells Carrie, once Wyatt returned from Outward Bound (which was confusing because didn’t Wyatt refuse to get on the plane?), he decided he wanted to live with only Kathy.While this is obviously sad for Papa Aidan, it’s clearly not that sad because it means he can visit with Carrie almost indefinitely. He shows up on her doorstep with tons of baggage (pun absolutely intended) in the hopes that she will clear her calendar for the day, or week, or lifetime.The two make love and then nap — a true dream — but Carrie wakes up just in time to make her meeting with her neighbor Duncan, with whom she’s swapping pages and notes. It’s strictly a working relationship, she fibs to Aidan, conveniently leaving out the Scotch-sipping and smiles they shared last week.But Aidan isn’t buying it. He is curious about Duncan, at the very least. Invite him to dinner with us! Aidan suggests, but Carrie knows better. Sharing a meal with your “boyfriend” and your “flirking” buddy kind of kills the magic on all sides.Some might cringe at the term “flirking” — a portmanteau of “work flirting” — but not me. If it becomes the Magnolia Bakery cupcakes of this franchise and trends all over the place, I’m OK with it. I think all of us have been unconsciously searching for a word to describe the way we behave with our work crushes, and we finally have it.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      ‘And Just Like That …’ Season 3, Episode 7 Recap: Double Standards

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      Guiseppe’s mother has opinions about her son’s new relationship with Anthony. Carrie gets defensive about seeming to flirt with her neighbor.Season 3, Episode 7: ‘They Wanna Have Fun’The woman wondered if she should have invited him to the party.In this scenario, that woman is me, and the man in question is Aidan. Why, pray tell, did Carrie not invite him to “their” house for Charlotte’s birthday party? Last we left our lovers, Carrie had agreed not to return to Virginia, but Aidan was still free to come to New York. (I can’t believe I just typed that sentence as if this were a normal relationship dynamic, but here we are.)Perhaps Carrie was more interested in inviting Duncan, her downstairs neighbor, to the soiree instead of her “boyfriend” (still using quotes!). If Aidan isn’t there, she is free to flirt with Duncan. And she does. But more on that in a bit.The big birthday party that is the center of this week’s episode is really just a ruse to get Charlotte to have a little fun and forget, at least for a night, about Harry’s prostate cancer — which, at this point, no one else knows about but Carrie. After a lunchtime chat in which Charlotte alludes to having a lot on her plate, and a subsequent near-slip of the secret by Carrie, Miranda gets suspicious. So Carrie tells Miranda she wants to throw a big shindig for Charlotte because her dog, Richard Burton, is terminally ill.Miranda — now a huge dog person, apparently, after the introduction of Sappho and Socrates into her life — is simply heartbroken for Charlotte, and goes wild with the party planning. Decked in a silver jumpsuit and toting pink confetti balloons and a karaoke machine no one asked for, Miranda shows up to Carrie’s house ready to party like it’s 1999. To borrow a phrase from O.G. Carrie, I couldn’t help but wonder, how much more over the top would Miranda’s party favors have been if she knew it was Harry who had cancer?By the end of the episode, though, she does. Rumors begin flying among party guests until Harry can’t take it, and he summons Carrie, Miranda and Lisa into a back room to confess his diagnosis. (Yes, Carrie already knows, Charlotte admits to Harry; but Harry told his personal shopper! He has no room to be mad!)Ultimately, Charlotte says, this is the best birthday gift Harry could have given her. That, and the public admission that asking her to keep the secret in the first place was wildly unfair. Because it was.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      The ‘Sex and the City’ Resurgence Has a Secret Ingredient: Contempt

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      The show’s sequel, now in its third season, subjects beloved characters to a parade of humiliations. It’s oddly captivating.When I think of my childhood, and the moments that would have made it difficult for my parents to imagine I was anything other than a latent homosexual, I see myself sitting pretzel-style at the foot of an almond-colored couch while my mother and her three best friends drink martinis and watch “Sex and the City.” I was too taken with the show’s glamour and prurience to register the uncanny dynamic: Here were four cosmopolitan 30-something women, mostly single or divorced, convening to watch television’s foremost avatars of 30-something cosmopolitanism discuss the vagaries of sex and dating. I could not possibly have felt as “seen” by Carrie, Samantha, Miranda and Charlotte as my mother and her girlfriends probably did — but I did think of these ladies as fairy godmothers of a sort, telegraphing a future where I too might gather over frothy cocktails at trendy Manhattan establishments to debate the merits of bisexuality or golden showers.More than two decades later, we are experiencing a “Sex and the City” resurgence. First came the premiere, late in 2021, of a limp postscript of a show called “And Just Like That …,” which is currently trudging through its third season. Then, last year, the original series arrived on Netflix, introducing the show to younger viewers, who took more to its screwball cadence than its bygone sense of glamour. “Sex and the City,” they found, was bizarrely suitable to the tongue-in-cheek conventions of internetspeak, and so the show has lately birthed a whole litany of memes. In almost all of them, the characters are treated as objects of amusement, not aspiration.One clever joke poked fun at Carrie’s tendency to listen to her friends’ predicaments and then respond with exasperating recapitulations of her own. Charlotte remarks on, say, the earthquake that hit New York City last year. Miranda, always smug, insists that the Richter scale is obsolete, while Samantha, always horny, wisecracks about a man who made her walls shake. And of course Carrie, whose pick-me solipsism has become a point of fascination for newcomers, declares that “Big is moving to Paris!” — wrenching the conversation back to the emotionally unavailable tycoon who would torture her for years before dying, unceremoniously, of a Peloton-induced heart attack.This is how we’ve all come to regard the ladies of “Sex and the City,” even those of us for whom they once represented some pinnacle of refinement: They now read like parodies of themselves, characters we regard with a sort of loving derision. It’s a testament not only to the comforting rhythms of the sitcom format but also to this show’s genuine achievements in characterization: No matter how much these women annoy or exasperate us, we know them so intimately that we can always imagine, with a reasonable degree of both accuracy and scorn, how each might react to any given topic.And this is what makes “And Just Like That …” such a strange and fascinating product: It is a reboot that feels, at times, openly hostile to its own source material and even to the characters themselves. It cannot seem to resist subjecting them to mounting humiliations, either in a clumsy effort to atone for the minor sin of the original’s tone-deafness or, perhaps, because viewers actually want to see beloved characters tormented this way.The characters register as lab rats in a sadistic experiment with camp and caricature.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      ‘And Just Like That …’ Season 3, Episode 6 Recap: The Dams Break

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      Charlotte decides she can no longer keep a secret. Tensions between Aidan and his ex erupt, just not the way Carrie would have wanted.Season 3, Episode 6: ‘Silent Mode’I didn’t think it was possible for the relationship between Carrie and Aidan to become any more disconcerting. But wow, in this regard, the writers have succeeded.Toward the end of this week’s episode, Aidan drops a bomb: He slept with Kathy. He and his ex-wife were both upset after a failed attempt to send their troubled son Wyatt off on a wilderness trip, and somewhere in between sobs, they fell into bed.Carrie is stunned at this confession for all of about 45 seconds. I know because I counted while watching this scene for the fourth or fifth time. In less than a minute, she bypasses any pain and skips completely ahead to grace and empathy. “I understand how that could happen,” she says.I’ve written before that I think Aidan has become, or maybe always was, a covert narcissist. His behavior is, unfortunately, not very surprising. But is Carrie really so far under his thumb that she doesn’t even spare a second for her own hurt?Or, perchance, is she feeling a sense of karmic relief? After all, in another life known as the original “Sex and the City” series, Carrie cheated on Aidan with Mr. Big (Chris Noth) — whom she subsequently married. She also cheated on Big with Aidan when they shared a kiss in Abu Dhabi in the movie “Sex and the City 2” — all of which is to say, maybe Carrie really can see how that could happen.A few things about this plot point, though, are a little tough to square. First, nothing we have seen this season would suggest that there is any compassion, let alone physical passion, left between Aidan and Kathy. They’re not just exes, they’re at odds. They disagree, to the point of contempt, on how to handle Wyatt, as we saw in the blowup just two episodes back. It’s difficult to imagine them finding comfort in each other over yet another Wyatt debacle.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      ‘And Just Like That …’ Season 3, Episode 5 Recap: Heels

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      The Goldenblatts and the Wexleys go glamping on Governors Island, but all is not well. Carrie meets her moody new neighbor.Season 3, Episode 5: ‘Under the Table’I’m sorry, there’s a crappy apartment below Carrie’s lavish Gramercy Park palace? With a tenant — her tenant — she has never met or heard of? This is an unexpected (and, like many things on this show) somewhat unbelievable twist.Sure, garden apartments are common, but Carrie is a rich person who bought this house from another rich person. Would either owner really leave the bottom floor in such shambles? Maybe so if it doesn’t bother the sexy biographer Duncan Reeves (Jonathan Cake) who lives there only six months of the year solely to write — and smoke a pipe, apparently, which is a detail that took the brooding London author thing a step too far.The only thing that does bother Duncan is the clickity clack of little Carrie heels, which keeps him up all day long as he is trying to sleep. (Brooding London authors can write only at night, see.)It’s this complaint that kicks Carrie into her petty era.Duncan requests that Carrie please remove her shoes when she is home, which offends her to her core. He even gifts her a pair of slippers, which she impolitely declines. “It’s New York. There’s noise,” she tells him, and continues to click-clack away, albeit with a bit more tiptoe.From there, Carrie’s pettiness only grows. When Miranda’s Airbnb neighbor comes at her half-naked with a meat cleaver, Carrie insists that her friend come stay in the safe harbor that is Gramercy. Miranda obliges, and then Carrie immediately begins to pick at her for consuming the last yogurt, the last banana and the last Mexican Coke. Again, Carrie is a rich person. And they are best friends. Why is Carrie acting as if Miranda should put down a credit card for incidentals?However, Miranda is rich, too, and she has been divorced from Steve for what, three years now? (Season 1 was a long time ago!) Why she still hasn’t found a permanent place to live is perplexing to say the least. Remember the first time Miranda left Steve in the first “Sex and the City” movie? All she had to do was walk through a gentrifying neighborhood and say the incredibly regrettable line “White guy with a baby. Wherever he’s going, that’s where we need to be, and boom, she had a new apartment. (Where was Woke Charlotte when we needed her?)We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      ‘And Just Like That …’ Season 3, Episode 4 Recap: Guilty

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      Aidan says he invited Carrie to stay with him longer in Virginia because he felt guilty. But is that really true?Season 3, Episode 4: ‘Apples to Apples’Is it time for all of us to face the very real possibility that Aidan is a narcissist?For the second time in their yearslong love affair, Aidan has lured Carrie to the countryside. In “Sex and the City” Season 4, Aidan finds a backwoods cabin in the unfortunately named Suffern, N.Y., and all but forces Carrie to spend weekends up there with him and a domestic terrorist squirrel.This time, though, Carrie is in Virginia with Aidan, not so much against her will. In last week’s episode, Carrie eagerly showed up down south to deliver Aidan a key to “their” (insert eye-roll emoji) Gramercy palace, and then Aidan asked her to stay.Why, exactly, does he do that? Carrie asks Aidan that very question toward the end of this episode. There is only one correct answer, and it goes something like: “Because you’re the love of my life. I miss you, and I wish we could be together all the time, and I just wanted to feel that for at least a few days.”But Aidan tells Carrie nothing of the sort. He says simply, “I felt guilty because you came all the way down here, and if I couldn’t ask you to stay, what does that say about us?”Here is what I think: I think that response solidifies for viewers that Aidan is a deeply selfish, stubborn, manipulative jerk who is dead-set on making everyone close to him bend to his will.For starters, Aidan has successfully maneuvered his way into getting what he wants out of Carrie in this most recent iteration of their relationship. In “And Just Like That …” Season 2, he refused to set foot in Carrie’s house — a melodramatic boundary rooted in old cheating wounds Carrie had apologized for time and again. But then Carrie went and sold it and bought the Gramercy townhouse that he all but refuses, essentially, to set foot in today.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      HBO Brings Hot Fellas Bakery From ‘And Just Like That’ to Life

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      “Who wants a hot croissant?” asked the actor Mario Cantone, reprising his character Anthony Marentino from the HBO show “Sex and the City.”Mr. Cantone, brandishing an apron and a cake server, added an emphasis on the word “hot” and wagged his eyebrows, turning the otherwise ordinary tray of freshly baked pastries into an innuendo.A group of fans in front of him — most of whom were women with their phones at the ready — giggled and took photos.When “Sex and the City” was brought back to life in 2021 as “And Just Like That …,” Mr. Cantone’s character pivoted from a career in wedding planning to starting up a bread delivery business, called Hot Fellas. As the name suggests, his business is staffed by sexy men in short denim rompers so tight that every arm flex or squat teases a wardrobe malfunction.The fictional business became “a fan favorite story line from the moment it first appeared,” Dana Flax, a marketing vice president at HBO Max said in an emailed statement, citing the engagement and enthusiasm for the Hot Fellas on social media.In the most recent episode of Season 3, which was released last week, Anthony opened a Hot Fellas brick-and-mortar cafe (using a pun for male genitalia to alter that phrase) and his current lover, Giuseppe, an aspiring poet played by Sebastiano Pigazzi, temporarily became a Hot Fella to help with its launch — thanks largely to his ability to fill out the skin-tight uniform.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      ‘And Just Like That …’ Season 3, Episode 3 Recap: An Expensive Date

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      Carrie flies to Virginia for a lunch with her “boyfriend,” Aidan. Seema tags along. It is unclear why either is really going.Season 3, Episode 3: ‘Carrie Golightly’They say Virginia is for lovers. They do not say Virginia is for casual lunches and sleeping alone in a guesthouse.In Episode 3, it is Carrie who visits Aidan at his home, but not because her “boyfriend” (I’m still using quotes around that word and you can’t stop me) did something crazy like invite her. It is because Virginia is on a list of locations Carrie could go to promote her work, along with sexier options like Google’s Palo Alto office and Austin’s South by Southwest festival.First of all, why does Carrie even have to choose? She is a childless cat lady with no looming deadlines. What is stopping her from hitting up all three to boost her clout in preparation for an upcoming foray into historical fiction?But Williamsburg, Va. is the only place our gal wants to go because it’s vaguely near Aidan, and she thinks that if she pops down south, cool as a cucumber, “easy breezy,” with no expectations, Aidan might be willing to meet her for a quick meal. Because the bar for this relationship is in the basement.The saddest part about all this is that Carrie feels she needs a cover story in the first place. She can say, “I love you,” to Aidan, but apparently, she can’t simply say, “I want to see you.” And that’s really Aidan’s fault; she is just playing by his rules. But this game sucks.Thankfully, Miranda is in touch with her judgy side, as she can’t stop cracking jokes about Carrie venturing over the river and through the woods for merely a bite to eat with her beau. Yet, Miranda is concocting a cover story of her own. After some bad luck in the romance department this season that included a tryst with a nun and a snub from a straight “guacamole girl,” Miranda is finally sweet on someone she would make sense with: Joy (Dolly Wells) the BBC producer.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      ‘And Just Like That …’ Season 3, Episode 2 Recap: Textual Relations

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      Carrie’s long-distance “situationship” with Aidan becomes frustrating in ways she didn’t anticipate.Season 3, Episode 2: ‘The Rat Race’Here in the real world, it’s a common refrain from single people that dating apps are as tired as the tiramisu Seema’s date orders for her without asking. Everyone is sick of the swiping, the ghosting and the serial situationships. The virtual-first connections that seem essential to dating in 2025 have never played a major role in the “Sex and the City” franchise, mostly because the majority of this decades-spanning story has predated all that.But Carrie’s former neighbor Lisette (Katerina Tannenbaum) shows up at the beginning of Episode 2 to reflect that cultural shift, lamenting to Carrie that, as a single woman of today, she is mostly in a relationship with her phone. Turns out, throwing it across a room may be a more effective way of it helping you meet someone.Some of the characters, though, regardless of age, are no better than Lisette when it comes to phone addiction.Starting with our star, Carrie is in something of a love-hate relationship with texting Aidan. Now that Aidan has cracked the communication door ajar, Carrie feels slightly more empowered to reach out to her “boyfriend.” (I insist on putting that in quotes because while Carrie may use that word to refer to Aidan, at this point, I simply refuse.)First, Carrie drafts a long, meandering voice text to Aidan about a newly-discovered rat infestation in her garden, but she deletes it before sending. Considering Aidan’s request for no contact (or at least very limited contact), she determines it is best to leave him alone.But without any such regard for the rules he set himself, Aidan lights his no-contact contract on fire with a surprise appearance at Carrie’s Gramercy townhouse, to her delight.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More