David Eigenberg introduced human acting into episode 6 (season 2) of And Just Like That. It was smelling salts under the nose of a corpse. It was the black-and-white door in Dorothy's house, opening onto the vivid color of Oz.
David plays Steve, the husband Miranda (Cynthia Nixon) has left for a life with Che (Sara Ramirez). Miranda comes back to their house in Brooklyn. She wants Steve to say when he's moving out, and he says he isn't moving out. He lied when he said he would. Why should he move? He built the house. He built the floor he's standing on. He built the walls he touches with the love he can't show Miranda, although he’d like to.
“It's my house,” he shouts. She says there is only one name on the mortgage, her name, and then he goes for her with the fury everyone who has lived an intimate life can feel. Feel with sadness and dread and excitement for the shared commonality of our desperate desires to connect and disconnect.
He tells her she never wanted him, and she didn't want their son Brady. He knows it's true, and he feels no impulse to protect her. There’s a way he’s been kicked around simply for being who who is, a person she has folded herself into without the passion she’s believed is out there, somewhere. She has lived with the understanding she settled for him, and he has accepted this as the price for having a life with a her and their son.
Eigenberg can act the scene because there is conflict and tenderness and contradiction that can't be resolved. This mix is in the history of these characters, and the writers finally have something to write about with stakes. In this scene—unlike the rest of the show—no one is careful. No one is exchanging messages of RightThink.
Nixon doesn't have as much to do here as Eigenberg does. She dissolves in the truth of what she’s hearing as well as in a sense of respect for Steve, who is standing up for himself. She’s crying as she puts on her coat to leave, and Eigenberg has another brilliant moment, when he begs her to stay. "This isn't who we are,” he says.
Of course it is who they are because they've just shown each other who they are. They are also all the other people they’ve been. That's what happens in a long relationship, trailing its history of love and strangeness. Miranda settled for Steve, but Miranda never found anyone more interested in her than Steve. Not even her women friends.
The scene places into the sharpest relief imaginable the failure of the show the rest of the time to care about the characters and like them. Other than this scene, the show might as well have been written by an AI, churning out notes on purity think and enforced etiquette. Why did a shard of light suddenly crash into the dim nothing? Maybe because the scene was written for a middle-aged man instead of a middle aged woman. The show runners and writers can just about see as still human a middle-aged man—a person with an inner life that attracts them.
How did the fuzzy green mold that is And Just Like That grow on the tasty baguette that was Sex and the City? SATC ran from 1998 to 2004, with 94 episodes, and was a love song to female friendship. The women did this thing or that thing with men, in order to return to their lunch table and talk about their experiences. Talk about their dates and tricks in such detail a general principle about how women lived and how they might be pulled over for speeding, a principle larger than the foursome could float up for viewers to recognize.
The show was gay and frothy in the way it concentrated on sex and on the kind of urban life, where you drink cosmos every night and eat free hors d’oeuvres. The women were middle class, regardless of where they had come from. We didn’t know where they had come from. The show wasn’t alive to itself in terms of origins and hardship, other than a bad break-up. It didn’t justify itself, or ask for your permission to exist, or ask for your approval of its values. No one can love a thing that begs for your approval. A thing that begs for your approval is sad and boring. (I know this for a fact, having done it enough times in my life.)
It’s for the awfulness of And Just Like That I can’t stop watching it. The way it hates its female characters, all of whom are seen to have passed their sell-by dates. You know what a woman’s sell-by date is on this show? It’s like 52 or 53. To the writers and show runners, the inner life and outer life of a woman this age is the nightmare where you can’t remember where you are supposed to show up, and the nightmare where you are naked and everyone else is wearing clothes, and the nightmare where the floors of the house you have bought are rotting and strangers are drifting in and out.
To its credit, the show has mixed up the white cast by adding two Black women characters, played by Nicole Ari Parker and Karen Pittman, and a character of Indian decent, played by Sarita Choudhury, but the show doesn’t like these women any more than the white characters. Sara Ramirez plays Che, the Latinx non-binary character involved with Miranda. Che is meant to be a bit younger than Miranda, but the character is written as a bar code of identity-marker clichés. The writers have no feel for Che as charming or surprising. Che’s blunt and brutal in their treatment of Miranda.
The show is a highway crash you watch from a distance safe enough to avoid flying metal and close enough to see blood. There, on the heap, is Sarah Jessica Parker, with a please kill me look on her face, cocking her head in an aw shucks way if anyone mentions sex. There is Cynthia Nixon in a three-way with Che and Che’s ex-husband, a three-way of such profound inertness it's the Emperor's New Orgy. There is Charlotte (Kristin Davis), ducking under the contempt of her daughters and asking her husband to come on her tits (he can’t, he has dry come, it’s a thing, apparently). There is Charlotte making a sexual request every woman on the planet has enjoyed never.
In one episode, Candace Bergen plays a mean, former magazine editor, who wants a hefty donation from Carrie, not to give her the writing assignment Carrie expected. Gloria Steinem makes a guest appearance at a party of women inching toward the same ice floe for appointment death. She has the confused look of a person who stepped out of a taxi too soon to find herself stranded at a Greyhound Bus terminal. You don't always know you're dead when you're dead is the message of the episode and of the series as a whole with regard to its stars. Get off the stage. Shut up, it keeps saying to them. It thinks women become stupider, more fearful, and more emotionally enfeebled as they get older. They need to be helped across the street of life.
When I first started watching the current season, I thought virtue signaling was the rat poison that had killed any potential creativity. As I kept watching, I saw it was the other way around. To the writers, having to imagine the inner lives and outer lives of middle-aged women was the rat poison that stopped them dead. They couldn’t do it with any curiosity or pleasure, and so, in a panic, they reduced the characters to whatever else was lying around . . . oh, yeah, a set of abstract values about identity they had no real feeling for either.
Instead of characters, there are propositions about who a person is—based on the color of someone’s skin and the pronouns they use, not what they love, or dream about, or take risks to feel. (If you want to laugh, imagine the women in Absolutely Fabulous in a RightThink revision. That’s right, you can't.) Since there are no characters, there are no conversations (other than the one described above between Miranda and Steve). The people exchange information about life in their identity boxes—did you know Jews eat lox?—proving their worthiness with sanctimony that insults the notion that a person’s origins do actually map aspects of a life.
Plenty of other shows have done brilliant jobs with characters whose lives are radically alternative to traditional values. And by brilliant, I mean the characters just live their lives—as if they were actual, ambivalent and contradictory people—rather than deliver sermons on how to understand them. Quickly coming to mind are Sort of, Bilal Baig’s gorgeously tender poem of a show, centering on a Canadian trans woman of South Asian background—and the people who love and frustrate her. And Pamela Adlon’s Better Things, a show that thrillingly fractures what a narrative segment can be. Adlon, as writer, director, and actor, works with the proposition that a story has no beginning or end and only works if it makes you feel you could live differently—generally with more kindness, because we are all going to be dead soon.
What marks this work is compassion for the characters. These shows are in love with their characters, no matter what they wind up hurting in their drives to get whatever they want. What draws you into any work of art is the love the maker feels for the thing they are setting before you. In the way And Just Like That finds its middle aged women repulsive, it’s maybe the most misogynist thing I’ve seen in a long time. Everyone knows when they are loathed, and everyone knows when they are loathed for a projection attached to them. It used to be that masses of women knew what they were smelling as soon as they got a whiff of that loathing. They could smell it ten blocks away. I think you’ll smell it rising off the screen of this show.
This is my introduction to you, Laurie Stone. What a wonderfully skilled writer you are, who clearly practices what you so passionately plead for---creators' love for their creations---as every line of your essay comes alive with that love. And with a fierce defense of women growing older, a process of mystery and ordinariness which you describe so well. No wonder you are outraged by the ineptness and the contempt and lack of empathy shown by the writers of this show. Not so dissimilar from the attitudes of society toward the woman growing older. Thank you for making us share your outrage and increasing our desire to see truthful, compassionate treatments of women growing older.
I loved this post! Thank you for writing it.
If AJLT were a delightful bit of froth about postmenopausal life in NYC, most of us would be happy to suspend our disbelief and allow for occasional lapses in logic. SATC asked its audience to do just that, and we did, because it was smart and funny, and the clothes and the apartments were fabulous.
But while AJLT may be froth, it isn’t delightful, and it isn’t delightful because it’s badly written. It sacrifices its characters to sitcom plots. Charlotte’s charm has soured into ludicrousness; she has no substance. Miranda used to be hard-headed and clear-sighted; now she’s like your best friend in high school’s sad mom, the one who floated around the house in a moth-eaten sweater, a used kleenex tucked into the band of her wristwatch. Carrie seems frozen in time; she hasn’t changed in any meaningful way in the last twenty years, other than she used to be fresh and charming. Now she’s neither.
The laziness of the writing makes me crazy. The Valentine’s Day ep where a significant plot point was that there were no dinner reservations available, and yet Carrie walks into a near-empty restaurant to wait for Aidan—this is typical of the entire series. Every episode feels like a first draft badly in need of an editor. Do the writers not see this? Or are they just too indifferent to care? Check gets deposited either way.
I recently watched The Detectorists movie (it’s on Acorn), in which the writers undid the beautiful resolution of the final episode of the final season. They took it all back—all the lovely, magical things that gave the characters a well-deserved happy ending. I don’t think I’ll ever forgive them. I’m not as emotionally invested in the SATC characters, but it still makes me mad on principal that the writers stripped them of their essential selves and made them boring and nonsensical.