Sex and the City (TV Program)

Carrie used to be looking for true love. It’s safe to say that whatever she found in this week’s episode, it was something else.Season 2, Episode 5:In the final scenes of the original “Sex and the City” series, Carrie describes herself as someone who is looking for love. “Real love,” to be specific. “Ridiculous, inconvenient, consuming, can’t-live-without-each-other love.”Flash forward to this week, and it’s safe to say this wasn’t that.In this week’s episode of “And Just Like That …,” Carrie has what I wish I could call a meet-cute with George (Peter Hermann), an urban cyclist and tech entrepreneur, except that it isn’t cute at all. It’s pretty uncomfortable.On the phone with Seema, who is describing the logistics of her new boyfriend’s penis pump, Carrie pauses in shock right in the middle of a bike lane. George, riding at full speed and making no attempt to brake, crashes nearly into her and directly into the sidewalk.“You can’t stop in the middle of a bike lane!” George screams at Carrie, his yell rising to a jerky sounding roar.Understandable? Yes. He is lying broken on the ground because of her. But cute? Charming? Inducing of the romantic warm fuzzies? Not really.Carrie insists on taking George to at least one Olsen twin’s favorite urgent-care center, where she dutifully helps him fill out forms and waits while he is treated for a broken wrist. I would like to say it gets cute from there, but it never really hits that vibe.Apparently still guilt-ridden, and armed with his home address from the medical forms, Carrie pops by George’s place the next day with a stack of soups and her laptop, offering to help him with the “app deck” he so desperately needs to finish before his business partner, Paul (Armando Riesco), yells at him again. (A few clues — his partner’s desperation, his declined credit card at the clinic — misled her into believing he was hard-up for money. Boy, did that turn out to be wrong: Was that a Calder sculpture hanging from his ceiling?)There’s a brush of a wrist. Smiles are exchanged. They kiss — kind of for the heck of it? They seem to lean in not because they’re attracted to each other or feeling some sort of enchantment but because they are both in their mid-50s, single, in a similar tax bracket and might as well.Twice a dalliance like this occurs, and in both cases, Paul busts it up like a jealous frat bro. He can’t have Carrie messing with George’s head when they have decks to messenger! (When was the last time anyone in the tech world required a pitch to be printed instead of emailed? But OK!)When an impromptu FaceTime therapy session with Paul interrupts Tryst No. 2, it’s enough to send Carrie packing. She makes a lame, antiquated crack about George’s being “married” to Paul and leaves, never to return.So what is the point of this short-lived fauxmance? There is no point, which is the point of this episode. The classic Carrie we know was, in fact, always looking for real love. But in her quest for it — as in so many people’s — there are a lot of George-like nothingburgers along the way.Remember “Power Lad,” who lived with his parents? The “good on paper” Dr. Bradley Meego? The list goes on. This episode serves as a reminder that there are far more Georges out there than Bigs and Aidans.Conversely, Miranda and Che remain in a very committed place, though it is becoming more apparent that they are two different people from entirely different worlds. Miranda spent decades as a big shot attorney and mom while Che is riding a new wave of fame and fast money. Now that their honeymoon stage in Los Angeles is over, it’s no surprise that their lifestyles are clashing. Between Che’s after-hours parties and Miranda’s pre-dawn alarm bell, neither seems to be getting more than a couple of hours’ sleep each night, which leads Miranda to take up Nya on her offer of a place to stay.This spare room proves useful when a focus group rips Che’s show — and the authenticity of Che’s character, specifically — to shreds; it seems likely now that Che’s pilot won’t get picked up. Miranda attempts to comfort Che with over-the-top encouragement, but it has the opposite effect. Che wants only a hug and a few days of space. Miranda is out, indefinitely.Elsewhere, Seema decides that a penis pump isn’t a deal breaker and agrees to keep seeing her new beau, Edward (Daniel Cosgrove). When she breaks out a sex device of her own, though, he balks, taking offense that she would recruit anything battery operated for her own pleasure.His objections are overtly misogynistic, of course, and Seema calls that out immediately. Edward huffs and puffs and walks out, and as he shouts at her that it’s “not cool,” she simply turns up the speed, drowning him out.It’s something this franchise has always done well, which is to make insecure men the butt of the joke. If that makes these zeros “disposable,” as a fictional Michiko Kakutani review of Carrie’s book once described her boyfriends, so be it.Things still taking up space in my brain:I really, really don’t ever want to see Harry in that wig again.After the dust that has been kicked up over Jonah Hill’s alleged texts to his ex-girlfriend, which many have characterized as manipulative and controlling, the way in which Herbert criticizes Lisa’s dancing with Anthony hits different. More

The ladies attempt to lighten up as relationships evolve and the series draws nearer to a close. Will it end in happy endings or broken hearts?Season 1, Episode 9“If they make Charlotte pregnant at 55 …,” I winced to myself as she gabbed to Carrie and Miranda that she hadn’t gotten her period in four months. But as soon as I saw her arrive to paint the women’s shelter in a stark white limo and a stark white get-up, I knew what was coming.This week’s episode spent a headscratch-inducing amount of time on menstrual drama. First there was Charlotte, teetering on the edge of menopause and ending up with a giant red stain on her pants. And then there was her daughter Lily, and all the brouhaha surrounding her first use of a tampon. Charlotte runs a clinic in their bathroom, showing Lily a multitude of insertion methods, only to have all that training go to pieces when Lily determines that she can’t get it out on her own, yelling to her mother for help from inside a Port-o-Potty.It was a lot. It seemed like an attempt, though, to lighten an episode focused almost entirely on our heroines’ various attempts to lighten up themselves.If anyone needs to take a giant chill, it’s Miranda — and that’s according to Miranda. She and Che are now dating (or as Che defines it, “getting to know each other”), but Miranda is all in. She’s deep in the honeymoon phase, but she’s on her own there, casually dropping the “girlfriend” label in front of strangers, eliciting a chilly reaction from Che, and showing up unexpectedly with cookies and kisses at Che’s door, only to be rebuffed.Miranda suddenly feels like a fool, or as she puts it, like a dopey Meg Ryan. She is doing all the whimsical, romantic, fluffy stuff she used to scold her friends for — Carrie especially.The ‘Sex and the City’ UniverseThe sprawling franchise revolutionized how women were portrayed on the screen. And the show isn’t over yet. A New Series: Carrie, Miranda and Charlotte return for another strut down the premium cable runway in “And Just Like That,” streaming on HBO. Off Broadway: Candace Bushnell, whose writing gave birth to the “Sex and the City” universe, stars in her one-woman show based on her life. In Carrie’s Footsteps: “Sex and the City” painted a seductive vision of Manhattan, inspiring many young women to move to the city. The Origins: For the show’s 20th anniversary in 2018, Bushnell shared how a collection of essays turned into a pathbreaking series.Remember in Season 3 of “Sex and the City” when Miranda chastised Carrie for turning into “this pathetic, needy, insecure victim” anytime she got near Big? Or in Season 6 when she yelled at Carrie in the middle of the street that Carrie was “living in a fantasy” when she decided to abscond to Paris with the Russian? Carrie wasn’t smart when it came to love, and now, neither is Miranda. And she doesn’t like it.So she tries to play coy, not answering when Che calls her phone, only to become frazzled when Che doesn’t leave a voice mail message. “Oh so you’re doing ‘The Rules’ now?” Carrie chides.And yes, all of this is ill-fitted to no-nonsense Miranda, and to some viewers, that seems like a betrayal of her character. But I disagree. Miranda always had the luxury of pragmatism when it came to love because, looking back, it doesn’t seem as if she ever really felt it. Neither the cutie Skipper Johnston (Ben Weber) nor the sexy Dr. Robert Leeds (Blair Underwood) nor our beloved, steadfast Steve ever got under her skin the way Che has. This is Miranda in love, and it turns out she’s no better at it than the rest of us.So now, for the first time ever, Miranda is leading with her heart instead of her head, and it’s making her a completely different person. Che has awaked something in her that she never knew existed, and if that doesn’t shift something inside, what does? The only sad thing about it is that while Miranda’s heart is suddenly opening up, Steve’s heart is being demolished.As Steve and Carrie dutifully pitch in at Nya’s shelter-painting event — a scene during which I wanted to jump through the screen and give Steve a big hug — Steve asks the uncomfortable questions he has every right to ask: Did Carrie know about Miranda and Che? Did she introduce them? How long did their affair go on?Carrie stumbles, over her words and over her paint tray, and ends up in the bathroom washing off her completely-inappropriate-for-painting (but completely-appropriate-for-Carrie-painting) shoes. In the process, Big’s wedding ring — which Carrie has been wearing since she canceled date No. 2 with Peter earlier in the episode — slips off her finger and goes down the drain.Steve comes to the rescue, employing some rudimentary plumbing skills to help Carrie get the ring back. When it falls out of the pipe, she is overwhelmed with relief. She can hold on at least to that little scrap of her marriage.It turns out Steve is doing the same thing. He points to his own wedding ring and announces to Carrie that it’s never coming off. “You are such a wonderful, wonderful person,” Carrie sighs. “Don’t you maybe want to find someone, at some point?”“Never coming off,” he reiterates.Although the circumstances surrounding the ends of their marriages are completely different, both Carrie and Steve are hanging on to spouses who are never coming back.But by the time Carrie returns home, she realizes she doesn’t actually want to be like Steve. She takes off Big’s wedding ring and her own, and she tucks them away in a drawer. Perhaps she, too, could lighten up a bit. At the episode’s end, she texts Peter to see if he’s up for giving a date one more go.And just like that … it’s almost over. Will this chapter wrap up in happy endings or broken hearts? Or maybe something else entirely? We’ll all find out next week.Things I Can’t Stop Thinking About:There is precisely one thing living rent free in my head, which I actually want to evict: The moment when Anthony’s new beau casually states that the Holocaust is a hoax within seconds of entering the Goldenblatt home. It’s hard to imagine that fringe conspiracy theory would be 1) embraced by and 2) brought up by any member of a marginalized community in a Jewish home in the middle of Manhattan in 2022.Still, I will be making a GIF of Anthony screaming, “Get out!” and using it routinely on Twitter going forward. (Just kidding, I don’t know how to make GIFs. But if any of you readers do, please share.) More

This week’s episode was a treat for anyone who’s been waiting for the “Sex and the City” revival to feel more like “Sex and the City.”Episode 7Maybe it was just a matter of waiting for a series to hit its stride, or maybe it was the magic of the Carrie necklace, but for anyone who’s been hoping that “And Just Like That …” would feel more like “Sex and the City,” this was your week.In the opening scene of this week’s episode, we find our leading lady, as we’ve seen her so many times before, perched in the window of her walk-up apartment, writing in the glow of her MacBook, a flicker of Y2K Carrie. Days and nights pass, and seasons change, letting us know that a chunk of time has gone by. That fast-forward proves vital because it needs to feel appropriate for Carrie to start dating again — so she can both sell her new book and liven up this show.All that typing has led to “Loved & Lost,” Carrie’s latest memoir, which delves into the death of Big. If that sounds dark and sad, it is, which is the exact issue her editor, Amanda (Ashlie Atkinson), has with the story.“You’re known for writing ‘Sex and the City!’” Amanda tells Carrie, “If we publish this as is, I’m worried your readers are going to pitch themselves out the window clutching their tubs of Häagen-Dazs.” What the story needs, Amanda says, is a “glimmer of hope” that joy is still out there for Carrie.Maybe it’s a coincidence, but it’s a direct parallel to what has been happening with the series. Carrie Bradshaw the writer has an audience, a legacy to uphold. So does Carrie Bradshaw the TV character. Both have longtime fans who expect a certain thing: a fun, pun-filled gal about town whom we can live and love vicariously through.The ‘Sex and the City’ UniverseThe sprawling franchise revolutionized how women were portrayed on the screen. And the show isn’t over yet. A New Series: Carrie, Miranda and Charlotte return for another strut down the premium cable runway in “And Just Like That,” streaming on HBO. Off Broadway: Candace Bushnell, whose writing gave birth to the “Sex and the City” universe, stars in her one-woman show based on her life. In Carrie’s Footsteps: “Sex and the City” painted a seductive vision of Manhattan, inspiring many young women to move to the city. The Origins: For the show’s 20th anniversary in 2018, Bushnell shared how a collection of essays turned into a pathbreaking series.Reasonable people could argue that we, the viewing public, just like they, the fictional reading public, need to let Carrie move on and stop demanding that she show up exactly how she used to. But we haven’t been very good at that. The internet has let out a collective sigh that “And Just Like That …” doesn’t have quite the same magic as “Sex and the City,” in part because all of the formerly charismatic single characters are either married off, mourning or masturbating their way through sexual frustration.The antidote to that — for the book and for the series — is some good old-fashioned dating. Amanda tells Carrie to go out with at least one guy so she can whip up an epilogue that gives the whole story a little lift. So she does, and in doing so, we get that lift on our TV screens as well.Seema, who is now occupying Samantha’s chair at the four-top, took it upon herself to sign Carrie up for some dating apps, and late at night, Carrie finds herself swiping. Eventually, she settles on a widower, Peter (Jon Tenney), and later, as they sit down to dinner, they figure out that this is the first date for each of them since their spouses passed. Carrie and Peter order drinks, and the next thing we know, they’re spilling out of the restaurant in a fit of giggles, almost stumbling over each other until they both puke their guts out at the curb.It’s absurd, and not really believable, but it’s fun, and it’s fodder for cocktail talk at Charlotte’s school fund-raiser, where the whole gang (except Steve — we’ll get to him in a minute) gathers to support their friend. Among the items up for grabs at a high-priced auction: a date with a beloved sex columnist, Carrie.The event is M.C.’ed by Herbert and Lisa, whom Charlotte is trying endlessly to impress. Earlier in the episode, she and Harry played tennis with them, and it got so competitive that Charlotte knocked Harry onto the ground in an attempt to win the game, leading to an utterly ridiculous but entirely realistic argument afterward. (Charlotte and Harry win the match, for what it’s worth, but they also kind of lose it when Herbert and Lisa catch them fighting.) As any good marriage counselor will tell you, fights among longtime couples are rarely about the things that initiated them — this one seems to be more about mansplaining, insecurity and society’s expectation that women always apologize.It is also the exact scene we needed to ground Charlotte and Harry’s relationship in anything like reality — we’ve barely seen them look at each other sideways since they walked down the aisle, let alone have an actual spat. Charlotte got so hot, she even dropped an F bomb, something we rarely (if ever?) see her do. I feel more connected to her character now than I have in years.But there is other behind-the-scenes drama at the fund-raiser. Months have gone by since Miranda’s tryst with Che, and her DM to Che has gone unanswered. Inexplicably, Carrie forgot to mention that Che would be performing at the event, so when Che bounds onstage, Miranda is caught off guard. She had tried in an early scene to revive her physical chemistry with Steve, but it collapsed into anxieties over lube and leftovers. (She apparently has a thing for sex in kitchens.) As she later told Carrie, she feels doomed to live like a sexual zombie for the rest of her life.That is, until she runs into Che again. She had all but given up on Che, but now she can’t resist the urge to reconnect. She is at the party stag, so there’s opportunity. Steve’s absence goes unaddressed — it seems as if the two simply don’t hang out often.Miranda tries to be stoic, feigning apathy that Che didn’t return her message — or, apparently, her feelings — but all that falls apart when Che proposes that they spend the night together. The two fall right into bed, and Miranda seems not to give Steve a second thought.“I’m in love with you,” Miranda tells Che as she bathes in the afterglow. “You’re in love with you, with me,” Che replies.That might be true. It also might be an incredibly kind way for Che to let Miranda know that she shouldn’t walk away from her marriage to pursue some happily ever after with Che — because Che doesn’t really do that whole scene.We’ll see. In any case, it’s hard to imagine seeing Miranda resign herself once again to her living-dead marriage.As for Carrie, there’s a sign of life. Peter shows up to the school benefit as well (apparently this party is the place to be in New York!) and ends up placing the winning bid on another date with Carrie.To be honest, I don’t really see it with Carrie and Peter — at least not yet. He reminds me of the “good on paper” guy Carrie dated years ago in the Hamptons, whom she wasn’t really into. Don’t get me wrong, I’m all for Carrie’s finding love again, but before she moves on for good, I would first like to know whether Aidan is still married. I’m guessing many of you do, too.Things I Can’t Stop Thinking About:Are we even rooting for Nya to have a baby? Because it doesn’t seem like that’s what she really wants. Which is fine! Neither did Samantha or Carrie or even Miranda, at first. At this point, she seems to be pursuing a pregnancy mostly to make her kind and devoted husband happy, but it’s 2022, and we all know that’s simply not a good enough reason.Seeing Steve kindly and considerately wash his hands in the kitchen before the act touched my heart and made me preemptively sad for him that he’s probably about to lose it all.Of course no one is going to bid on a date (even a lunch date) with anybody (let alone a “sex writer”) at a private-school fund-raiser attended by a slew of Gen X parents. Why did Carrie agree to this?OK Che, we get it, you smoke a lot of weed. You smoke so much weed you can’t keep your DMs straight. You smoke so much weed that it’s step one in your sex routine. We hear you. You smoke a lot of weed. More