'And Just Like That...' is still shallow (and just plain silly) in Season 3: Review
Once, Carrie Bradshaw dated a man, but something was a bit off.
That could describe nearly any episode of HBO's "Sex and the City," an Emmy-winning, pop culture-revolutionizing comedy that ran from 1998 to 2004. Sarah Jessica Parker's well-dressed heroine was always on the hunt for sex, love or both, but finding Mr. Right was antithetical to the continuation of the series. You can't tell a story about dating in Manhattan if the dating is all done and dusted.
"Sex" spawned one good movie, a terrible one and a revival TV show, "And Just Like That...," which returns for a third season following three of four original cast members, now in their 50s. And after a terribly tragic start to the series, we are now back to the world of Carrie dating and hesitating, this time with her ex-fiancé Aidan Shaw (John Corbett), who reentered her life in Season 2.
If you enjoyed the first two seasons of Max's "That," well, you'll be happy to hear that Season 3 (streaming Thursdays, 9 ET/6 PT, ★½ out of four) does not materially change, other than further nudging aside the three main characters for stories involving newcomers Seema (Sarita Choudhury) and Lisa (Nicole Ari Parker). There are bold outfits, romantic flings, gimmicky guest stars (Rosie O'Donnell! Patti LuPone!) and ostentatious peeks at obscenely expensive New York real estate.
Regretfully, the series is still as lightweight and shallow as a knockoff pair of Manolo Blahniks, unimaginative and dull, this year with a side of ATVs and "Little House on the Prairie" jokes as Carrie makes a trip down to Aidan's farm in Virginia. Three seasons in, "That" has not lost its penchant for unrealistic dialogue and making its characters unlikable and inconsistent. The scenes are exasperatingly stilted and awkward, as if they were scripted by aliens with only a vague idea of how humans behave and interact. It makes the deeply unnecessary series feel all the more inconsequential and flimsy.
But we're stuck in the Hollywood reboot machine matrix, and the popular series isn't leaving Max (soon to be HBO Max). And so for a third year we meet Carrie in her well-financed widowhood, Charlotte (Kristin Davis), a prep-school mom trying to get back into the workforce, and Miranda (Cynthia Nixon) exploring her queer identity. Seema still tries to fill the Samantha-sized hole in the series, and Lisa mirrors Charlotte but with marginally more interesting plots. Aidan, in his tantalizing and tight-jeans-wearing glory, is teasing Carrie from his Southern comfort, holding off a real relationship for the sake of his sons, dangling the prospect of romance in front of her without consideration for her needs.
It's maddening to watch Carrie make the same mistakes with Aidan she once made with Big (Chris Noth) and half a dozen men before. The most frustrating aspect of this revival is that, in spite of all the decades that have passed in these women's lives, the characters haven't learned.
I keep waiting for the series to wake up and become "Sex and the City," but perhaps it's a project as pointless as Carrie wearing flats. "That" has been so annoyingly bland and PG-13 since its 2021 debut that the few moments that recapture its heat are jarring and uncomfortable: A phone-sex flop between Carrie and Aidan takes the cringe sex scene trophy away from Miranda and Che's (Sara Ramirez) forbidden tryst in Carrie's kitchen in Season 1.
These characters (and actresses) deserve more than this featherweight fluff. To see Davis forced to waste Charlotte's huffy outrage on a boring and plainly stupid plot about a case of mistaken dog identity (I kid you not) is just so wasteful. The spectrum of what creator Michael Patrick King imagines life for these women in their 50s could be remains offensively narrow. The lives of these accomplished, seemingly independent women revolve around men, petty antics and low-stakes squabbles. Even their romantic partners aren't immune from the indignities of the cartoonish plots: Charlotte's eternal mensch of a husband, Harry (Evan Handler), ends up peeing his pants in one episode. That's the level of sophisticated storytelling we're dealing with here.
The disconnect between what "That" is and "Sex" was is profound, and more glaring with each season. "Sex" was inextricable from its 1990s and early 2000s setting, a commentary on that time in our culture as sexual morals shifted and the series pushed back against stereotypes about single women. The 2025 of "That" is a fantasy land where references to modern concerns and topics are boiled down to Carrie reminiscing about using maps instead of phone GPS. The ever-stylish, eminently with-it Carrie Bradshaw is reduced to making "back in my day" jokes.
Back in my day, we didn't settle for lackluster slop from Carrie, Miranda, Charlotte and Samantha. Only sparkle and sheen.