This essay comes with a companion piece by me, “The Style It Takes Or, The Difference between Style and Fashion.” This is part of a four-part collaboration with Sarah Miller, with whom I’ve been watching And Just Like That. Sarah has also written a couple of essays: the first is about our viewing experience, “And Just Like That: It Takes A Village,” and the second is a tremendous piece of fan fiction, “Big Problem.” To truly enjoy our quartet, you should read all of them (I recommend sandwiching my two essays in between Sarah’s works, for maximum effect).
Also, support us, please: Sarah’s support link is here, and mine is here. Writing is all we do, and if you’d like to see more of such work, we need financial support.
Most of what follows refers to AJLT, episode 6, season 2. Spoilers abound but, trust me, that won’t matter: this show is awful and makes very little sense.
It has always been about the clothes.
To be precise, it has always been about Carrie Bradshaw’s clothes. The most recent episode of And Just Like That features her in a striking blue “ballgown puffer coat” that’s utterly impractical but works to great visual effect on even the tiniest screen. In a show where everyone else seems to have to make do with lesser offerings, Bradshaw, played by producer and lead actor Sarah Jessica Parker, is clearly always given the best offerings from designers. As a Chicagoan, I can assure you this barely-a-coat would never work in an actual storm: just looking at the open neck froze the marrow in my bones and my legs shivered as I thought of the wind gusting up the coat’s bottom half. It’s a garment designed for very rich women like, well, Carrie Bradshaw, who are usually driven everywhere.
Which is…fine. And Just Like That is the sequel to Sex and the City, and outrageous fashion is part of its DNA, often the only thing that makes it worth watching—even if we’re only there to cringe or marvel at the choices. Recall if you will that spectacular Versace dress that Carrie wore in Paris in the last season of SATC, while waiting for her lover Aleksandr Petrovsky (Mikhail Baryshnikov) who, of course, never shows up. Recall how the dress (at $80,000, said to be the most expensive in the show) filled the screen and the scene, a character in its own right.
Which brings us to the newest accessories of the SATC/AJLT women: their black and brown friends.
As I’ve pointed out in my earlier essay on AJLK, Samantha’s racism (she once showed up in an Afro wig for a costume party) and her racialised objectification of Black men—with its roots in the discourse of enslavement—was only part of the problem with SATC, a show where Carrie, supposedly part of the literary world in NYC, declared herself unable to pronounce the name “Michiko Kakutani.” The movies were even worse, with the women launching themselves into foreign climes like Mexico and the Middle East while armed with such ferocious racism and Orientalism that you longed for them to return to their white enclaves and stay there. Criticised for the first show’s complete lack of people of colour in any consequential roles, AJLK tried to remedy matters and only made things worse.
Carrie was given, as if handed a pet, an Indian-American woman named Seema (Sarita Choudhury) but their relationship, even now, falls on the mistress-servant axis (Seema is Carrie’s real estate agent). And, really, there isn’t a single person of colour with whom Carrie has a relationship on an equal footing and whom she meets through her social circles: they’re all either working for her or happen to be her co-workers, briefly. The podcast on which she appears features a range of people of colour but when it ends, it becomes clear that her whole world is as white as the snow through which she must make her way in that puffer gown. Charlotte is friends with Lisa Todd Wexley (Nicole Ari Parker) whose wealth and connections may rival her own but who, along with her husband Herbert (Chris Jackson), is made to ventriloquise the most awkwardly written, hamfisted Discourse on Blackness in America (I share this view with Madeline Capou). In one scene, Herbert tries to get a cab and fails when one after the other sails by him. Finally, furious with the blatant racism, he pounds on one of their hoods, thus embarrassing his mother with this display of Angry Black Man-ness and igniting a brief conversation in the family about, oh, you know, Racism in America. On Twitter (old habits die hard, X, whatever) B. A. Parker wrote, “I still can’t get over each main character getting their own emotional support woman of color,” and this is a perfect description of how the show tries, badly, to make itself relevant in this day and age.
Mysteriously, Nya (Mia Jordan)—that’s Dr. Nya Wallace, mind you—has gone from being Miranda’s professor to her confidante and roommate. If there was a good reason for this, I must have missed it, but I refuse to rewatch any of the episodes to understand why. In AJLT, no person of colour can ever be in a technically superior position to any of these white women. And their inherent inferiority is not just implied but projected loud and clear through their godawful, eye-searingly hideous clothes and accessories.
Consider Seema. When the trailers and publicity shots for this second season first began to show up, I noticed an inordinate amount of gold and taupe silk on her and groaned aloud, even on my ownsome in my apartment, “Seriously? They’re just going to throw silks onto the Indian woman and leave it at that?” To envelop Seema in the fabric as much as AJLT does is to evoke the East, with a capital E, without using a thread of imagination. To make it worse, she’s more often than not dressed in washed-out shades of taupe that blend too much with her skin tones. On episode 1 of this season, she’s placed in a goldy-taupe confection for the Met Gala: it looks like an elaborately folded napkin, the pattern of which was, of course, no doubt chosen by Anna Wintour herself. All of it is topped by a strange hairstyle that’s mostly just a rolled up bang. Her white Ralph Lauren jumpsuit in season 1 was one of the few outfits that looked good on her because her brown skin wasn’t blended with the colour of her outfit but, come on, a jumpsuit? Enough, already, with this return to the worst of the Eighties! It is exceedingly hard to make Sarita Choudhury look anything other than luscious and divine, but a show that’s ultimately only about the experiences of white women—and Carrie Bradshaw in particular—won’t allow her to look better than any of them.
And then there are the animal prints. During our viewing, Sarah and I were astounded—awoken from our slumberous state, even—when Seema emerged in not just one but two animal prints, one after the other: first zebra and then, we think, cheetah. The latter may well have been a tiger, but who can tell? Seema, for some reason, is placed in a lot of animal prints, like this leopard-print pantsuit and this other leopard-print suit with a matching scarf. In episode 6, the most recent one, she appears in this fluffy brown outfit that looks like she has a dead emu draped around her. It could have been fun except that, again, the colour matches her skin and, well, it’s all very animalistic. We shall glide over the overuse of one-sleeved concoctions on her, except to note that only actual statues of long-dead and usually mythical women with idealised proportions have ever looked good in such. As for animal prints: clothing women of colour in such has long been a way to render them sub-human. The argument could be made that many women of colour do wear animal prints, but the links between bestiality and animals are complicated enough that a show so centred on the experiences of white women has no business choosing these patterns for the few non-white characters who inhabit its world.
Nya and Lisa, also astoundingly attractive women, are similarly placed in outfits that seem designed, literally, to Hail their Blackness but only make them appear comically overblown. In episode 6, Nya appears in a lot of what the New York Times’s fashion critics call an “earthy” style: that’s white lady code for “she looks so authentic.” The outfit they’re referencing is hard to describe because words fail, but as with Seema, it’s all a bit too much everywhere all at once, and the colour washes her out. Lisa Todd Wexley’s black and white ensemble in which she trudges through the snow in an enormous hat and high-heeled boots (the show doesn’t even want you to pretend that any of it makes sense) is dramatic, but it’s instrumentalised so that she might end up delivering a didactic bit about Black Women and Their Strength. And the accessories are huge, massive, as in this outfit and several others, featuring large beads and baubles that threaten to swallow her up: it’s as if the show is trying to compensate for any realistic portrayal of strong Black women by thrusting them into outsize prints and jewellery and having them lecture the world on what it means to be Black. AJLT wants us to believe that it’s finally entering the first quarter of the twenty-first century with a more diverse cast, but what it’s really saying is, Look at these fabulous, adorable animals, all in their finery! Hear them speak! Look at this Wondrous Bestiary in Silks!
There is so much else that’s wrong with a show that’s only designed to sustain the careers of critics who need to keep writing about something, anything, especially as the Hollywood strikes continue. There’s Charlotte’s face—as Sarah points out, we’re not supposed to make note of the extensive plastic surgery that women actors in particular must endure to survive in the industry. But it’s clear that the extensive amount of work done on Kristin Davis is clearly affecting her acting because she overuses her eyes (which open and shut wide, a lot) and her voice (which has settled into a petulant squeal) in order to express the emotion that her features seem incapable of conveying when not in perpetual motion. There’s Miranda (Cynthia Nixon), once a brilliant, sarcastic, witty, tough lawyer who was somehow badgered into a horrible marriage and then motherhood, who now has to trudge, at night, across the entire city from her selfish lover’s apartment to her home in Brooklyn, to an even more selfish and whiny son who has never understood how to function as an adult. He has that in common with her always manipulative ex-husband who literally refuses to leave the apartment because, why not?
And there’s Che (Sara Ramirez). Oh, Dear Goddesses in Off-the-Shoulder Gowns, there’s Che. The only part of this season that gives hope is the possibility that Che, the world’s most obnoxious character, might finally be on the way out. In episode 5, Che was brutally critiqued by a focus group which declared that they are a “walking Boomer joke” and “a bullshit version of what the nonbinary experience is.” As Sarah and I agreed, this was a bizarrely meta and entirely accurate description. The Independent reports that all of this was intentional on the part of Michael Patrick King, the show’s creator. Which is…fine? But not particularly interesting? And adds nothing to a moribund show that should never have made it beyond an idea-swapping session between King and Parker.
And Just Like That is listless and poorly written, without any discernible plot lines (episode 6 was the best so far, but our standards for and expectations of this show are very low). It’s little more than a wardrobe reveal, but even its fashion choices reveal the racist narratives from which it can never, it seems, untie itself. Sex in the City was of its time, and it actually worked well enough then, when the mere idea of grown women having the sex and the lives they wanted and living it up in New York was still a collective fantasy barely realised on television. But it could never be made today, and it shouldn’t be. Racism is bound into its core, its very DNA, and that can’t be unbound, it seems. Parker and King can’t have it both ways: they can’t want the success of SATC when they also can’t conceive of the lives of its central characters as different in any way, as actually part of a city and a world that has changed drastically since 2004 when that older show ended. In trying to show how the women live in today’s world, they end up fossilising them in strange ways. In episode 6, Miranda is at a Thai restaurant with Che and complains about the too-spicy food: after decades in the most foodie city in the country, she has somehow still not figured out how to choose her dishes.
Of course, through all this, Carrie is the only one breezily making her way through life and the avenues of her beloved city. She’s looking for a summer house in the Hamptons with Seema, and even here it’s the latter whose professional expertise becomes a tool to serve her white friend. The plotline concerning Nya and her husband is too strange and bewildering to follow or understand, and Lisa appears to be permanently fixed as The Strong Black Woman and Documentarian (how she makes her films, with nary a crew or camera in sight, remains a mystery) whose life and family will be exploited for Various and Sundry Messages about Blackness and Its Woes.
All of Carrie’s professional and social networks are blindingly white and, in truth, it might just make sense to leave her and the show in that Circle of Whiteness. At least then, we won’t have to bear witness to the endless ways in which the women of colour are placed only to mouth comforting narratives about Race in America, packed into tawdry designer clothes like companion dolls for the white women at the centre.
See also a companion piece to this one, “On the Difference between Style and Fashion.” Also see Sarah Miller’s “And Just Like That: It Takes A Village,” and her fan fiction, “Big Problem.”
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Image: John Singer Sargent, Ena and Betty, Daughters of Asher and Mrs Wertheimer, 1901.