RIP Carrie Bradshaw (she’s gone, and she’s not coming back)

‘And Just Like That...’ was meant to be an empowering TV experience where the lives of fiftysomething women were explored in their full, complex glory. By series three, it has clearly run out of ideas, and any sense of dignity for all involved, writes Jessica Barrett

The character of Carrie seems to have had a personality transplant (Sky)

Who can forget the time Carrie Bradshaw walked away from the love of her life, Mr Big, as he stood outside his engagement party to Natasha Naginsky. Carrie’s monologue as she strutted away from The Plaza inspired a generation of single women who saw themselves reflected in this quite rare thing: a single, stylish, independent, thirtysomething woman on the screen in the Nineties.

“Maybe some women are not meant to be tamed,” Bradshaw, played by Sarah Jessica Parker, said back in October 1999. “Maybe they are supposed to run wild until they find someone just as wild to run with.” That will also be the same Carrie who said in the final scene of Sex and the City in 2004, “The most exciting, challenging, and significant relationship of all is the one you have with yourself. And, if you find someone to love the you that you love, well, that’s just fabulous.”

Sadly, that particular Carrie Bradshaw, the headstrong, funny, unpredictable woman who uttered those empowering words, is in 2025 nowhere to be found. As And Just Like That..., HBO Max’s reboot of Sex and the City, gets ready to end its third underwhelming season, the fabulously sharp, albeit often unbearably self-absorbed and sometimes cringey – but always witty – Carrie-isms are nowhere to be seen.

OK, the old Carrie may have gone viral among Gen-Zers recently for the scene where she showed up at Big’s apartment dressed in a top hat, but that feels like the least of our worries right now. THAT Carrie is nothing to the one we have been presented with in the last few months. This new Carrie, the one supposedly who is meant to show fiftysomething women in all their complex and powerful glory, is one who gets acid reflux when she eats a mutton stew, a woman who retracts her offer for her homeless divorcée best friend Miranda to stay in her vast Gramercy townhouse because she eats the last yoghurt in the fridge, and is a woman who merely shrugs when she finds out that her supposed soul mate, Aidan Shaw, has slept with his ex-wife Kathy!

Sarah Jessica Parker and John Corbett as Carrie and Aidan in ‘And Just Like That...’ (HBO Max)

In episode five, Carrie even agrees to take her high-heeled shoes off to appease downstairs neighbour, grumpy Brit biographer Duncan Reeves, to walk around… barefoot. A barefoot Carrie Bradshaw? Call the police.

How on earth did we get here? News of the revival of the original SATC series (seven Emmys and eight Golden Globes), based on Candace Bushnell’s 1996 book, and created by Darren Star and writer Michael Patrick King, was met with utter enthusiasm from its original fans.

We were even willing to overlook the somewhat mixed bags we’d been offered in Sex and the City movies one and two (even the infamous “Abu Dhabi doo” line from Miranda). Here was a chance to revisit the characters we have absorbed into the cultural pantheon so deeply that women still debate now which of them they are most like: Carrie (Sarah Jessica Parker), Miranda Hobbes (Cynthia Nixon), Charlotte York (Kristin Davis) or Samantha Jones (Kim Cattrall). And we would revisit them in their midlife years as they navigated their complicated second chapters. Women of this age are usually erased from our TV screens, but here was our big shot at seeing the multi-layered and interesting storylines of this time of life explored in full technicolour glory.

Until it wasn’t.

Now masterminded by King rather than Star, the reboot got off to a shaky start. A feud between SJP and Cattrall put paid to the hope that peerless sweary PR Samantha would return (although Cattrall did make a 71-second cameo at the end of season 2, charmed by the offer of a rumoured $1m).

By the end of the first episode of season one, Mr Big, played by Chris Noth, had been killed off, having a Peloton-induced heart attack while Carrie watched Charlotte’s daughter Lily at a school piano recital. The first red flag began to wave in the wind: Carrie’s infatuation with Big dominated the entirety of Sex and the City, yet after his death, Carrie seemed to forget all about him within two episodes. By season three, he’s barely mentioned. We all know that Sex and the City Carrie would have made Big’s death her entire personality.

In And Just Like That..., we had the opportunity to watch a deep dive into the realities of dating again in your fifties, of lost friendship and grief. Just as SATC broke the single women taboo and smashed tired tropes into a thousand pieces, this was a new opportunity to upend tired narratives about middle-aged women being boring at best, harpy Karens at worst.

The character of Carrie seems to have had a personality transplant (HBO)

Where else could we find women this age living life after divorce, or becoming widowed, all while dressed in the kind of looks you’d see in Vogue? How disappointing it has been to have been served something depressingly two-dimensional, its characters muted and making choices that make no sense in the context of what’s come before.

Besides the fabulous outfits, Carrie Bradshaw is now so unrecognisable that some viewers have begun to separate her from the SATC universe altogether. One friend told me, “It’s just easier to pretend this is a separate show entirely… it’s less depressing that way.” Another had to google if Darren Star and Michael Patrick King had died to see if that would explain the gear change.

Many admit to still “hate-watching” the show this season, as the story arcs become more and more nonsensical or just plain boring – almost one entire episode was devoted to the “bad behaviour” of Charlotte’s dog, Richard Burton. And watching Seema struggle as a pound-shop Samantha has just been embarrassing for us both.

There are clunky mistakes too: HBO was forced to issue a statement after we saw Lisa Todd Wexley’s (Nicole Ari Parker) father die twice, in both season one AND season three. Even Parker has admitted she understands there are issues that the viewers have taken with what they’re doing.

SJP told one interviewer that she didn’t want to film a cringeworthy phone-sex scene between Carrie and Aidan, but she ultimately felt she didn’t have a strong enough defence to refuse. Parker has also confessed she doesn’t actually watch the show, despite being an executive producer (she said on talk show Watch What Happens Live this month that she never watches her work as she can’t bear to see herself on screen).

It’s sad to think that this could all spell the end for our beloved Carrie and co. Viewing figures are down, the third season premiere averaged a lacklustre 429,000 households during the live-plus-three-day viewership window, down on both the first and second season premieres.

A fourth season has yet to be announced, but the episode where Charlotte’s dog gets cancelled suggests they are seriously running out of ideas. Might it be kinder to let these iconic characters be laid to rest, instead of flogging these proverbial dead horses?

Carrie, in her icon era, once said, “Maybe the past is like an anchor holding us back. Maybe, you have to let go of who you were to become who you will be.” I couldn’t help but wonder if it might simply be time for us to let go of Carrie Bradshaw, for good.