When Candace Bushnell penned the first of her Sex and the City columns for the New York Observer in 1994, she had no idea the cultural impact that her quartet of love-and-sex enthusiasts would make, nor could she have predicted that her weekly column would spawn six series and two hit feature films. The blueprint that Carrie Bradshaw, Miranda Hobbes, Charlotte York and Samantha Jones created for future cultural depictions of 30-something women rerouted the zeitgeist. ‘Sex and the City struck a chord because it’s about women taking charge,’ Bushnell told The Guardian in 2024. ‘In the 1980s, women were going to do and have it all. By the 1990s, a lot of those women had careers and money, but they still hadn’t found a guy. What I realised was that when you take the “I need to depend on a man for my finances” out of the equation, women’s sex lives start to look very different. There’s more control, more freedom and more partners.’
Bushnell was 34 when she started writing her column; Carrie, who Bushnell has admitted is her alter ego, was 32 when the first season of Sex and the City premiered. By the sixth — and final — season, Carrie was 38. When the final episode aired in 2004, an estimated 10.6 million people tuned in, which was the biggest audience that pay-TV station had had since 13.4 million watched the premiere of the fourth series of The Sopranos 18 months prior. The show redefined the contours of modern femininity. It became a fertile ground for women to project their own lives and stories onto: Carrie, Samantha, Miranda and Charlotte’s journeys through fertility, friendship and love reminded swathes of the female population that the invisible finish line that exists in popular culture for women-of-a-certain-age was nothing more than a fallacy.
Except age seems to be the thorn in Sex and the City sequel And Just Like That’s side. Now in its third season, And Just Like That has trudged around the issue of ageing. Miranda has embraced her grey hair, Carrie has had a hip replacement and Mr. Big is dead. Yet for me, it’s not the fact that these now 50-something characters have existed beyond the age of 38 that has aided the demise of And Just Like That, but rather that it's been written as though the Holy Trinity — Carrie, Miranda and Charlotte — have been asleep for the last 20 years. Where are those strong, independent, fierce women that we left at the end of the disastrously-fated second film? Have they forgotten how to quite literally exist in the world? And what does that say about midlife?
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Is it the case that while Sex and the City was cool with Samantha samantha-ing and Carrie carrie-ing, And Just Like That, by virtue of the fact that its cast are no longer the bright and bouncy 30-somethings they once were, has lost its magic? While yes, many of the viewers of And Just Like That have aged with their heroes, many have come to the show themselves now in their 20s and 30s and now our characters' lives are largely unrelatable for the swathes of young women who mirrored their own existences on Sex and the City - its storylines are less resonant. Why does it feel as though we only liked Sex and the City when the cast were young? When And Just Like That debuted in December 2021, 1.1 million households were reported to have tuned in during the live-plus-three-day viewership window. For the third season's premiere on May 29, that number stood at just 429,000.
So where to does And Just Like That go now? What can the fate of the show be now that our favourite Big Apple residents feel so unlike the characters we first fell in love with? Is it that we need to learn to give female characters grace, ironically like the time Sex and the City launched? Carrie et al are 50-somethings now, and perhaps the reality for both these characters and us as their viewers is to accept that they are older now, and with midlife just comes different problems. Perhaps the onus ought to be on us to welcome the reality that while once they discussed blow jobs, now they discuss Botox. And perhaps those of us who really can't grow up with them can simply tune into old seasons of Sex and the City and out of current seasons of And Just Like That.
Ultimately though, as all Sex And The City fans know, it usually always pays to listen to Samantha. In an interview this week, the actress who played her, Kim Cattrall, said she didn't immediately take the role of Samantha all those years ago because of 'self-inflicted ageism'. She felt, at 41, she was too old to take on such a confidently sexual character. Of course, happily, she got over it and the rest is TV history. Maybe, when it comes to And Just Like That we need to address our own self-inflicted ageism, and ask whether there's something about our internalised perceptions of ageing that has us judging the show and its characters. And whether, in actual fact, AJLT is part of the good fight against that kind of thinking.
And Just Like That... season three streams weekly on HBO/NOW TV.
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Naomi May is a seasoned culture journalist and editor with over ten years’ worth of experience in shaping stories and building digital communities. After graduating with a First Class Honours from City University's prestigious Journalism course, Naomi joined the Evening Standard, where she worked across both the newspaper and website. She is now the Digital Editor at ELLE Magazine and has written features for the likes of The Guardian, Vogue, Vice and Refinery29, among many others. Naomi is also the host of the ELLE Collective book club.
