It’s pretty common these days for a television show to hold its viewers in contempt. Most “big-hearted comedies” treat you like a child, most crime shows assume you are very stupid, most dramas take for granted that you are easily manipulated. It’s not unusual to feel like whoever wrote the show you’re watching hates you.
The Sex and the City sequel And Just Like That…, which HBO execs announced would be ending this Thursday after just three seasons, is different. It’s the rare show brave enough to hate the viewer a little bit, and its own characters so much more.
How else to explain killing Lisa Todd Wexley’s father twice? Or making traditionally sleek, demure Charlotte suddenly wear so many ruffles and prints? What, save profound loathing, could account for finally making Miranda gay and then having her fall for Che Diaz? Writers who loved or even liked Carrie Bradshaw might kill off Mr. Big, but they would not make her host a podcast.
And they certainly would not make Carrie’s writing ability a central conceit of what will, sadly, be the final season. She’s never been a particularly skilled prose stylist, but that was fine when she was dashing off her weekly column or getting $4/word to make puns about purses for Vogue. This season, Carrie was writing a historical novel, and the writers were cruel enough to give us little snippets of it. Beginning, in Episode 1, with the first line: “The woman wondered what she had gotten herself into.”
OK, it’s no, “It was a queer, sultry summer, the summer they electrocuted the Rosenbergs, and I didn’t know what I was doing in New York,” but there’s nothing to indicate she’s being set up by anyone with malicious intent, right? Wrong. This line will, a few episodes later, be heralded by her downstairs tenant, an award-winning biographer and, we are given to believe, expert of good writing as “brilliant” and a sentence that “stopped him in his tracks.” Again, that sentence is: “The woman wondered what she had gotten herself into.”
You may be asking, well if the writers hate Carrie so much wouldn’t they have Duncan say something cutting about her opening line? No. The deeper cruelty comes because I know it’s bad, and you know it’s bad, but nobody is going to tell Carrie. Instead, she will keep writing things like:
“Autumn was here, and as the leaves turned gold and the air turned crisp, the woman returned to herself. Her hours turned into days, her days turned into weeks, her pain turned into productivity. The family that would never inhabit her home, or her heart, faded from her life, the way the golden leaf faded to brown at her feet. She had done all she could. She had done all she could. She had done all she could.”
The minds behind And Just Like That… are diabolical and I am afraid to spend too much thinking about why I enjoyed watching them spend three seasons devising elaborate humiliation rituals for their central characters. It’s possible I have my own masochistic impulse when it comes to these women. In any case, I will miss them dearly.
