How the Carrie Bradshaw we adored ended up betraying everything we loved about her

Like many women, Terri White saw Sex and the City reveal deep truths about female friendship and how women really talk. So, how on earth did we end up with And Just Like That..., a humiliating next chapter that neither Carrie nor the rest of us deserved

After 93 years (or so), the series that followed the original Sex and the City show, two movies and a teen Carrie Bradshaw spin-off (The Carrie Diaries), the show that should never ever – for the love of all that’s holy – have been made, And Just Like That..., is dead. Thank God for that.

Its permanent ending was announced with an unconvincing “um, surprise!” by showrunner Michael Patrick King just two weeks ago, amidst reports disputing who finally chose the humane path and dropped the axe. Given the way it ultimately ended (did you see it yet? Did you turn the telly off feeling as dead inside as the show now is? Me too!), I was going to go with not the people who made it, but as of this morning, MPK is adamant it was their choice.

I know what you’re thinking – it’s just a show! Who cares! Aren’t you massively overly invested? And in the words of Mr Big (RIP), allow me to reply: absof**kinglutely.

It was the summer of 1998, and I was just finishing my first year of university when Sex and the City, HBO’s hottest new show about the lives of four New York women – Carrie, Samantha, Miranda and Charlotte – first arrived in the UK with a foul mouth, few boundaries and fabulous clothes.

Like Carrie, I was vintage-obsessed (mainly polyester in my case) and wanted to be a magazine writer – landing my first editing job in 2008, the year the first film was released. The sequel (the less said about that tear-out-your-own-eyeballs cinematic abomination, the better) was released the year I left that job for a bigger one. In 2012, at 32, the exact age of Carrie at the start of SATC, I moved to New York and a year later became editor-in-chief of Time Out New York (a magazine read and referenced in the show. Be still my beating heart!).

Today, it’s hard to overstate the impact of Sex and the City. It set fire to expectations of shows for (and about) women; off-screen, it put a match to the expectations of the lives we were all meant to live. Through story, not statement, it showed us that we weren’t all destined to be wives, or even girlfriends (Samantha); that we didn’t all want to be mothers, or even need to be sure either way (Carrie), while some of us sadly couldn’t be (Charlotte).

We understood that work could come first through active choice (Miranda) and yes, that our choices were sometimes ones we regretted, even when it was too late and too shameful to say so (pregnant Laney flashing her milk-filled boobs in grief at the imminent new life demolishing her fun one of old).

And the sex – oh, the sex! We could do it easily and casually; we could prioritise our pleasure without being inwardly damaged. We could happily talk and joke about anal sex and abortions, premature ejaculation and golden showers, HIV and crabs, infertility and miscarriage, too-small penises and funky-tasting spunk.

This Carrie isn’t the one we know. This Carrie is bored, unmoored and lonely (HBO)

It wasn’t perfect. The show was rightly torn apart over its narrow social politics and diversity blindness (never has Nineties and Noughties NYC given so much… Connecticut). It was called shallow and anti-feminist for worshipping consumption, consumerism and the self above all else. (Gen-Zers really hate OG Carrie.) But while I’d argue it’s these things that land it face-first in the mud of third-wave feminism (while pretending to strut about in the second), I’m not convinced every show must reach the ultimate feminist standard and gut any frivolity and excess to be judged worthy.

Now, I can take flaws. I welcome them. But almost three decades on, the travesty that was SATC’s sequel, And Just Like That...? Flaws don’t cut it. We’re talking about crimes. Crimes against character, against story, against world-building and, the most heinous, crimes against us, the audience.

There were minor crimes, let’s call them misdemeanours. You know, Lisa Todd Wexley’s dad dying twice, Harry’s mum apparently now dead a decade when she was already long in the ground when he met Charlotte twenty-odd years ago. The fact that a show about fiftysomething women had very little to say about fiftysomething women.

Terri White saw herself in Carrie Bradshaw, whose own career mirrored her fictional counterpart’s (Alamy/PA)

The random storylines that meandered, fizzled out, sank without a trace; tedious and/or pointless new characters (hey Lisette, hey Giuseppe!). Characters new and old who were forgotten entirely or dropped off the face of the earth never to be mentioned again (hey, Nya, Magda, Che, Jackie, Stanford!).

Now, to the felonies: having loyal-to-the-death Samantha abandon the city and her chosen family because Carrie *checks notes* dropped her as a publicist; the fact that Carrie was no longer funny. Miranda’s entire personality being sucked out of her body and replaced by someone we were forced to call Rambo (Series 1); someone who fixed their alcoholism overnight by just deciding to, who said things like, “I wasn’t sure if that was a white saviour moment!” (encapsulating the show’s crass attempts at fixing their diversity issue).

Then there’s the absolute, burning injustice of what they did to husband Steve; you know, the sexy bartender who always gave Miranda “great sex” – now a cartoon grandpa with the inability to find a clitoris in a packed gynaecologist’s office.

I buy that people can change, and they do, all the time, but I don’t buy characters who are little more than an arse-print in a settee left by the human being who once sat there.

The capital case, though, the real reason that And Just Like That... deserved to die was the erasure of Sex and the City’s – and Carrie Bradshaw’s – three great loves: Mr Big, her friends, and New York City.

A Big mistake to write out Carrie’s love for Mr Big from her persona (HBO)

I didn’t especially mind them killing off Big. This would at least give Carrie a whole new emotional landscape to mine. Unfortunately, it was decided that this new landscape should resemble the Arctic Circle.

Within the space of three short episodes (three weeks in AJLT land), Carrie was entirely over the husband she was still passionately in love with when the show began (chirping “life’s too short not to try new things!” like she now writes copy for the company that makes gin o’clock signs). This, remember, was the guy who died in her actual arms while she was wearing her actual wedding shoes.

Sure, a girl’s gotta move on – and no, there’s no set text for grief – but characterisation matters. And for the love of god-slash-melodrama, this is Carrie Bradshaw we’re talking about! The woman who grieved like Mr Big had, well, died, when he didn’t turn up on their original wedding day. The woman who sighed, “Will I ever laugh again?”, dyed her hair brown and mooched around her apartment like a Forever 21 Miss Havisham.

Carrie Bradshaw’s not free. She’s a ghost, trapped on the island of Manhattan, condemned to wander that soulless Gramercy Park townhouse for several more lifetimes

But worse was to come. Because in season two of And Just Like That..., Carrie decided that Mr Big – the man she’d obsessed over for two decades, stalked around Manhattan, dumped the first time because he wouldn’t say she was “the one” after six months of dating – wasn’t actually the one.

It was this wild change of heart that broke ours. Not so much undoing decades of storytelling as taking it out the back to be shot. This was all prompted by a reunion with Aidan Shaw, the ex-boyfriend she’d cheated on with Mr Big and then refused to marry because he “wasn’t quite Big enough”. But, here she was saying letting him go was her “Big mistake”. Just spit on his grave, why don’t you! Spit in our face!

And since then? Not a mention of her dead husband, bar one “joke” with Anthony about not mentioning previous marriages (I’m sure Mr Big would want to die if he wasn’t already dead and buried).

Carrie and co – when friendships were not hollowed out (Productions/Kobal/Shutterstock)

In fact, much of the show’s run has pretended he never existed. “I was with Aidan for 22 years,” Carrie sighed in this last series, terming it her “longest relationship”. Now, how is that maths when he has a 21-year-old son with his wife of a decade and a half, and you spent those years with Mr Big?

It's OK though, the girls are her constant, right? Wrong! Where was the true friendship, the love from Miranda and Charlotte that always sustained Carrie (and vice versa)? Every time Miranda spoke or smiled or breathed in and out, Carrie looked like she wanted to glass her. Our core three didn’t even seem to like each other much until the penultimate episode, and didn’t so much as share a scene in the finale.

And perhaps, most unforgivably – where the hell is New York? Carrie’s actual longest relationship. Her greatest love. In And Just Like That..., she could be anywhere, when she was always specifically there. And where oh where is the sex? Oh, that’s right, instead of liberating us, they ruined all sex for everyone forever! Vaginas the world over sealing up after Aidan spat on his hand and masturbated while having phone sex with Carrie from his truck on a cheap three beer buzz. A scene SJP reportedly didn’t want to do – to which I have to wail, why did no one listen to the queen?

This final version of Carrie Bradshaw has undone decades of masterful storytelling (HBO)

Ultimately: what was it all for? Aidan was eventually dispatched back to Virginia – in a wildly quick and brief breakup – while Carrie’s friendships were hollowed out. Sex and the City made me feel many things, but it never made me feel empty. And that, I cannot forgive.

Which meant the ending when it came – Carrie by herself and single – had not a hell’s chance of sticking. “I may be alone for the rest of my life,” she said to Charlotte. “I have to quit thinking, ‘Maybe a man,’ and start accepting, maybe just me.” And by the time she was typing the final words on her laptop, we were meant to all believe she’d arrived at a seismic realisation: “The woman realised she was not alone, she was on her own.”

This isn’t remotely as radical as it thinks, or true to Carrie either now or then. That Carrie would be back on her sh**-and-stalk business in six weeks. This Carrie is bored, unmoored and lonely. And not a drop of fun, not nearly content. It actually plays into every trope of childless, single, cat-owning women past midlife. Which is hugely depressing, and absolutely not an inevitability (can I please point you to this essay by the original Carrie, writer Candace Bushnell. Now that’s a show and a Carrie I can get on board with).

So, no, Carrie Bradshaw’s not – as the finale suggests – now free. She’s a ghost, trapped on the island of Manhattan, condemned to wander that soulless Gramercy Park townhouse for several more lifetimes. And you know what they say about ghosts: you’ve got to confront them, release them and set them free. And so, we have.

The final episode of ‘And Just Like That...’ is available to stream now on NOW/Sky