And Just Like That...

Sarah Jessica Parker (Carrie), Cynthia Nixon (Miranda) and Kristin Davis (Charlotte) gamely tried to fill the Samantha-shaped hole with lame stuff about masturbation, gender-neutral toilets and teenagers leaving used condoms on bedroom floors, but it felt as though they were going through the motions, as if their hearts weren’t really in.

And Just Like That… addresses these issues [death, alcoholism, racism, sexual identity] with a lot more respect bringing a deserved weightiness to the matters, which are explored over the course of the 10 episodes and not resolved in under half an hour—love. The overarching cringing “wokeness” of it all—hate.

A ponderous, melancholic muddle whose primary motivation seems to be making amends for sins of the past. I watched it all without stopping, occasionally hiding my head in my hands.

There’s a lot to admire here, actually, such as a real push towards inclusion which isn’t just limited to the wonderful Sara Ramirez, getting a true breakout role as comedian and podcast host Che Diaz. There’s a greater feel of community to this show, as the ensemble feels richer and more developed.

"And Just Like That" affirms that Carrie, Charlotte and Miranda failed to mature into women any sane person would want to spend time with, let alone to grow up to be. ... It follows the wreck that was 2010's "Sex and the City 2," and comes before us with a major part of its formula missing. And while I can appreciate the need to maintain the core of what the audience knows and loves about these women, the world has changed enough since we first met them as to make their lack of evolution stunning.

Lacking sharp characterisation, believability and bite, this is a too-often cringey attempt to drag the women of Sex And The City into 2021.

That, to me, is the most striking thing about And Just Like That. By getting away from the sex and the city of it all, in 2021, it actually feels a bit more real. ... And Just Like That marries the optimism and breathless wonder of a 1998 Carrie Bradshaw with the weariness that accompanies, as Samantha once said, decades of “lies and mutually accepted delusions.” And just like that…evolution.

Viewers who can make it past this bumpy beginning, this new chapter starts to settle into its changes in the second episode.

There are occasional flashes of the insight and humor that helped make Sex and the City such a phenomenon in its day. ... But And Just Like That … comes across as desperate to seem cool and relevant in a very different TV landscape. Watching it made me feel old, and not because I, like these ladies, have aged since the original series. Nothing about the show feels organic; so much about it is painfully forced.

The new series makes a real, if often awkward and occasionally disingenuous, attempt at modernizing Carrie and the show around her. It just doesn’t work, for the most part.

Its first four episodes (of 10) feel like two shows. One, which tries to grow with the women as they navigate their 50s and mortality, is a downer, but it takes risks and in moments is very good. The other, which tries to update its sassy turn-of-the-century sensibility for an era of diversity, is painful.

The name surely carries plenty of equity, but like the movies, this HBO Max show yields diminishing returns.

Despite its faults, there's nothing quite like seeing our old friends back in the concrete jungle. ... Miranda, Charlotte and Carrie are just as sharp, vibrant and chaotic as they ever were, and it's impossible not to get invested in their sky-high emotional stakes this go-around.

I’ve seen four episodes of the series so far. The latter two give me some hope that the series will, as it goes, strike a stiletto balance and conjure up some of the original show’s airy moxie. But the first two installments are doozies, bumming us out as if to prove that not even the bright and lucky lives of these fictional people could escape the gloom and loss of the past two years.

In different manners, Carrie, Charlotte, and Miranda seem not just to be stripped of their defenses but of their senses of self; the laughs, when they come, aren’t just rueful and hard-won but strained. We recognize these characters, but it’s not just someone at the table who’s missing — it’s an energy.

This year has been a bummer, and so is the sequel series. The zippy, intimate, charmingly featherlight landmark HBO series of yore has been replaced by yet another bloated streaming-service grief-com, the latest piece of intellectual property back in zombie form to generate headlines, pique nostalgia and ultimately disappoint us. ... Less like urgent storytelling than panicked legacy-salvaging. In apologizing for its past wrongs, the show forgets to do what it did best.

A more diverse cast, not just of stars but also, hopefully, of storylines, is a long overdue change, but the main three’s newfound social and cultural awareness is shoe-horned in to such a degree the whole endeavour feels often cloying, at times inauthentic and occasionally downright uncomfortable. And this is really something it needed to get right. ... What’s promising about the Sex and the City revival is where it has the potential to go.

The two episodes premiering Thursday do not just diminish a fan favorite in absentia, but saddle Miranda and Charlotte with plenty of out-of-character moments. Despite these issues, the reboot improves greatly on our gals’ last outing, the 2010 big-screen abomination “Sex and the City 2.”

The “wokeness” feels tacked on, as do the non-white characters. ... The show is now trying to be something else, a drama examining grief and middle age. When Samantha left, she took the jokes with her.

This revival may not be great – especially with our outspoken minx missing – but it’s watchable, even when it feels like a trainwreck. I can’t wholeheartedly recommend And Just Like That… to the casual viewer based on this strange mess of a pilot, but for those who still harbor a soft spot for Carrie Bradshaw and her crew, there’s something worth indulging in here.

The series has to update to 2021, or try to anyway. To that end, there are prominent Black characters here for pretty much the first time in series history — better late than never but about as awkward an attempt to redress its unbearable whiteness of being as you might imagine.

It captures a lot of the heart and charm that the original did, alongside some hard emotional truths. And despite a lot of doubt on the part of viewers when this project was announced (especially sans Samantha), as of the first two episodes the show has genuinely made a case for its return.

No, this is not the classic Sex and the City we first fell in love with… but what it is now isn’t bad, either.

AJLT is not particularly funny or horny but it’s also not striving to be. It would rather ask the larger existential questions.

A sometimes awkward, sometimes touching, and always soapy effort to usher the characters into their 50s and the IP into the era of Black Lives Matter and gender awareness.

The onslaught of “woke” teachings lends the show a smugly self-congratulatory rather than ironically self-aware air. This does nothing to make it sing like the original. ... All that said – there are reasons to hope that these are teething troubles only. There is a handful of good lines, there are flashes of the old spirit and there is one sex scene – centred round Big (“I’m getting some lube. I’m not 30”) – that recalls the genuinely pioneering original, and what fun it used to be.

Just because And Just Like That isn’t what we wanted or expected doesn’t mean it’s not good television. As shown by episode two, as Carrie and co deal with the aftermath of the life-changing event, the smart quips and on-the-nose jokes we love still work alongside darkness.

And Just Like That… gets Sex and the City back to basics. There are still guffaws and glamour – Parker, in particular, looks unsurprisingly spectacular – but it also has emotional heft. Elements here are certainly missed, from Carrie’s near-absent voiceover to the retired theme music, but these first two episodes are otherwise a return to form.

For all its heavy-handed flaws and self-indulgent tendencies, the new series shows an earnest devotion to grow along with its audience, whether that’s by inviting fresh faces to their dinner tables or acknowledging that no one (not even Carrie) stays the same forever.

It’s easy, if weirdly unconvincing, viewing, but without the puckish humor that used to animate the original. There’s no real form or shape to the episodes, which stretch beyond the 40-minute mark.

And Just Like That tries too hard to bring its cultural brand into a new era, but it reclaims a core humanity lacking in the previous franchise extensions.