I feel so lonely, I said to myself, after the first episode of And Just Like That. I feel like my friends have died and they’ve been replaced by these robots, and I’m trying to love the robots, and I don’t know if I can. Like many over the last four years, I did learn to love the robots, but the show that is widely considered to be one of the worst remakes in television history has been cancelled and people are upset. A table of women next to me yesterday, descendants of Samantha, Carrie, Charlotte and Miranda, asked each other, over cocktails, why they’d killed it just when it was getting good. The woman who has played Carrie Bradshaw for half her life is rumoured to be searching for another outlet for her character. The problem is, young people hate Carrie Bradshaw. But ask Carrie’s haters which of the girls in Sex And The City they like best and they’ll say, “Well, Carrie, obviously…”
Bradshaw is still the closest thing television has come up with to a universal self. She was deep and superficial, flawed and eternally upbeat. It was never quite clear whether her internal narration (“I got to thinking…”) was honest reflection or a self-serving performance, but isn’t that true for all of us? Bad with money, she was goofy and confessional, like an early blogger. She was afraid of her own inner cynic – so she lived as though she was in a movie, and it gave her actions a touch of class. Her emotional life was chaotic, but she always hit her mark and found her light, like a catwalk model. There was mystery: she wore her bra in bed.
At the heart of the debate about Sex And The City’s reboot – why some people hated it, and some were desperate to love the robots – are intergenerational culture wars, some of which the writers back-pedalled furiously to accommodate in its first season, introducing non-binary characters and two very rich ones of colour in an attempt to counter the original show’s terminal whiteness. Those who didn’t watch Sex And the City the first time round would be thoroughly justified in finding the reboot shallow and strange – it is! Mammon has long bestridden the women’s lives, in a preoccupation with all things material, and ghastly product placement was epitomised, for me, in the second feature-length film when Charlotte holds up a tube of Pringles on a plane to Abu Dhabi. By the time the reboot came along, Carrie, whose late husband Big is described in the pilot as “a better-looking Donald Trump”, has no need to work at all.
Yet Sex And The City did change everything. People won’t remember this, but a certain kind of straight man was deeply irritated, when it started, by the fact that Carrie Bradshaw was considered “attractive”. Suddenly women in university halls were talking about masturbation, and being sexually unsatisfied. Sex And The City showed that friendships are the primary relationships of life, and that some people are happier out of love than in it. It suggested that many women feel sick and panicky when they see a detached house in the suburbs: only Charlotte is a mother by choice, and she’s infertile. Carrie Bradshaw’s only successful relationship is with New York itself: she’s a 1990s Dorothy Parker, fearless in the city. Falling in and out of love is almost tidal for her: it’s not a means to an end. Underneath the play acting is a free spirit, and from the outside it often looks like loneliness.
The younger generation, who work so hard to be thoughtful, boundaried people, are told that Carrie Bradshaw changed things for women, so you can imagine their affrontery watching her actual behaviour, the chaos she creates: they analyse her hypocrisies and self-centredness in Youtube edits. The girls’ strategy, like women of the seventies and eighties, was to learn to be self-centred, and their feminism – this is what I want! – looks brash and unnuanced today. Written by Gen-Xers, the show was completely free from therapy speak: Carrie only seems crazy in 2025. There are no howls of anguish, no what the fuck is wrong with me, as they move from dating disaster to dating disaster. Instead, they look outward and blame everyone else: Mr Pussy, the man who pooed with the door open. Well, we are still innately self-centred, still just as likely to drop our friends if we get a date, but these days we’re required to perform empathy. Carrie annoys us because she unapologetically does what we’re all desperately trying to avoid doing. Everyone identifies with her, but people want to be seen as more.
The original Sex And The City columns, by Candace Bushnell, were written from a place of nihilism (she got $100k for the screen rights and has never made any significant money from the shows). They are brilliant, and dark. Long before internet dating she wrote about the death of love, about toxic bachelors and ghosting by another name. The book seethes with 1990s misogyny: a male character talks about the thirties “power flip”, when men get their pick of women in the same black cocktail dress, with the same blonde bob, swarming around them at parties, trying to outrun their biological clocks. New York is a throbbing hive of emotional abuse and empty aspiration, the friendships cool and undefined.
The writers of the TV show added hope; Carrie is determined to love New York where Bushnell was starting to struggle. But the generation that hates Carrie Bradshaw is in the grip of a dating crisis far worse than anything she ever faced, desperate to get off the apps but unsure where love exists if not there. And Just Like That kept Carrie Bradshaw off social media and away from modern journalism (she didn’t get on very well with podcasts either). Her column was the kind of unilateral platform that no longer really exists. You can’t be light and whimsical, talk in assumptions and generalisations, in a world of multiple voices. That’s the biggest change in feminism, and probably the biggest change for Carrie Bradshaw too.
In the penultimate episode of And Just Like That, Carrie goes to a house party at the beloved apartment she inhabited for the entirety of the original show, then passed on to a millennial jewellery designer called Lisette, with a big dose of “I see a lot of myself in you”. The flat, like the city, was her longest relationship: she is genuinely afraid she will want to live there again. But she finds it full of new partitions and small rooms – young people crammed in to share the rent. Lisette only has flatmates, she confides, because she can’t stand living alone. What if someone crawls through the window and murders her? This woman is not fearless in the city, and you can see Carrie retreating into herself like a whelk. She gives one of her down-home quips to cover their differences: “I guess whoever said you should never go home was right!” Lisette’s phone flashes: “That would-be novelist Thomas Wolfe.” I thought she would visit her old apartment and find she’d changed, but it’s everything around that her that has.
For me, the thing that really stands out watching Carrie Bradshaw old and new is the untapped potential of her character. A witty, educated star writer who never talks about art, literature, culture or politics? Does she know who the mayor is? Yes, but she’s more interested in who he’s dating. Oh, to hear her talking about Giuliani – or Trump – rather than shoes. Her smartness has outgrown her subjects, and the strange historical romance novel she’s writing seems beneath her. Until the end, that is. She keeps her protagonist single, and her editor complains that she’s written a romantic tragedy. “What’s tragic about a woman alone in a garden?” she asks. And Just Like That, for all its flaws, reveals something real and sad, which we didn’t know was there all along: something about getting older, which was actually where Sex And The City began, because getting older starts in your thirties. As the other characters disappeared into cartoons, it became clear that Carrie Bradshaw didn’t really want to be in a relationship at all. I’d have watched her ten years from now, elderly in Manhattan, lunching with widowed friends. That would have been revolutionary too – but quietly, this time.
[See more: Dua Lipa, the people’s critic]
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