"And Just Like That" the sex is back in the city, midlife edition
"It's a lot like what people used to say about dating in Alaska: the odds are good, but the goods are odd. Except erase the first part." This is how a single friend described the challenges women in their 50s face in the modern dating scene. Never mind the horrendousness that apps and websites bring to the bedroom. Provided two people can find each other at all, there's the matter of navigating the other person's entrenched views about sex, politics, money, hygiene . . . everything.
This makes finding a genuine connection with another person vastly more difficult in what Sarita Choudhury's Seema Patel describes as a woman's "sophomore years" in "And Just Like That."
"Dating at this age – there's always something," she explains to Carrie (Sarah Jessica Parker) as she breaks down her latest one-night stand in the second season's fifth episode "Trick or Treat." Her guy's "something"? He uses a penis pump to deal with his erectile dysfunction – the bizarre intermission dividing 30 minutes of "great foreplay" and B+ sex.
"With most of these I have to get myself off anyway at the end," she says. "And at least with him, I had some laughs. And a sexy spoon after."
Thanks to Seema, "Trick or Treat" is the first "And Just Like That" episode that feels like a classic "Sex and the City" story, where the home team dives into the wilds of Manhattan to snare some stranger.
In "SATC" most of these encounters were disastrous, giving Carrie fresh fodder for her weekly column. There was the guy who licked Charlotte (Kristin Davis) on the cheek instead of kissing her goodnight at the end of the date. The man who picked up Miranda (Cynthia Nixon) by fake mourning his dead wife to seem vulnerable. And, pretty much everyone Samantha (Kim Cattrall) bumped uglies with before Smith Jerrod.
Carrie's wonderland of whoa and woe was equally impressive ranging from the politician who wanted her to pee on him to the French architect to leaves money on her nightstand after sex.
The romance game can't always be swings and misses or else the show would have been depressing. Each of the quartet eventually found nice guys to stick with, but with a few exceptions like Harry (Evan Handler) even these solid "goods" soured, establishing the show's Bad Boyfriend trope. The king of those may be Berger, the writer who authored a breakup note for the ages on a Post-It: "I'm sorry. I can't. Don't hate me." But Big and Steve (David Eigenberg) qualify too. Never forget: Steve cheated on Miranda before she stepped out on him.
"And Just Like That" signals that its relationship energy is moving into another borough early in the series by offing Big, spending most of the first season with Carrie's mourning process. This set her up to be single again while also retraining our focus on the commodity Charlotte and Miranda pursued, and the condition to which Carrie eventually succumbed: married life.
Nicole Ari Parker and Christopher Jackson in "And Just Like That" (Craig Blankenhorn/Max)
Depicting not one, but two good marriages refreshes the version of fantasy "And Just Like That" is peddling. Not only do Charlotte and Harry epitomize the ideal couple – one that has not only survived raising teenagers but where the spouses still hunger for each other – but so does the union shared by Herbert (Chris Jackson) and Lisa Todd Wexley (Nicole Ari Parker).
Both duos are wealthy, but the Wexleys are politically and socially connected. They're also imperfect. In a recent episode the pair plan a lavish anniversary dinner at a restaurant where they've expected 31 guests but end up hosting a fraction of that because Herbert forgot to hit send on the electronic invitations. LTW can't help forgiving him since she realizes she forgot to order their special dessert.
Currently LTW and Herbert are figuring out how to be a political couple, but until they hit those bumps, they make a wonderful pair – as marvelous as the Goldenblatts, who endure their oopsie of a feast with them.
But their relative bliss serves as a contrast to the deflated love lives of Miranda and her assigned non-white friend Nya (Karen Pittman), whose marriages have sunk. Miranda punched a hole in the hull of hers first, though; Nya realizes something is off in Season 1 before leaping off the ship in the second season.
So it's Seema to the rescue, in "Trick or Treat" and with "And Just Like That" generally. Seema is a major facilitator in helping Carrie to reconnect her electricity as she processes her grief by empowering her not to apologize for it.
Her refusal to compromise is how Choudhury and the series' writer quickly allayed the audience's fear that she was supposed to be Samantha's replacement. This episode establishes them as spiritual sisters while demarcating how they differ. Seema gets off on success and control above all else. She's also sexually liberated but has stringent standards. Usually.
In "Trick or Treat" she leads Carrie and the newly separated Nya to a five-star hotel bar to get laid, explaining the logic behind hitting this hunting ground: "Super-expensive rooms, so you know he has coin, and deadbeats aren't allowed to wander in off the street."
And that, at long last, is how the sex came back to the city.
Peter Hermann and Sarah Jessica Parker in "And Just Like That" (Craig Blankenhorn/Max)
Times have changed, and so have these women. On "SATC" the worst men playact at adulting and try to exploit stereotypically gendered vulnerabilities. Carrie, Miranda and Charlotte, especially, sorted their fair share of men who wanted mommies or living sex dolls, for example.
But the encounters in "Trick or Treat" prove the conventional assumption that the older we get, the more set in our ways we become. Carrie, having eased back into the single life via an interlude of no-strings-attached sex with her former producer Franklyn (Ivan Hernandez), falls into her next thing by way of a bike accident.
Her meet-cute crash with app designer/tech entrepreneur George Campbell (Peter Hermann) leads to them getting to know each other at urgent care. She follows up with a food delivery that leads to flirting and, maybe, something hotter than soup. But the thrill is iced down by constant interruptions from George's true other half, his business partner.
Carrie arrives at this conclusion after a few dates that don't get past heavy petting, but fellow singletons watching at home may have recognized the red flag flapping way back in the doctor's office when he tells Carrie he's never been married.
"When men are single at our age there's a reason," another wise woman recently shared with me, recalling her experiences with divorced men punishing her for their ex's sins or man-children expecting caretaking while offering little to no reciprocation. George is a good guy who can't separate his work life from his love life, which got him a very expensive condo touched by investment art and little to no humanity.
Still, Carrie makes out better than Seema, whose sex partner (Daniel Cosgrove) is so disposable that she doesn't even refer to him by his given name. To her, he's Pump Gin guy, named for his mechanical fluffer and his job as a brand rep for a small-batch gin company who picks her up by calling her ma'am — a real lady-boner killer, except he follows that with, "I was told that's how you address royalty."
Cosgrove, a soap opera veteran, slathers on the cheese in this scene and in the bedroom where true to Seema's description, he delivers an enthusiastic but unimpressive sprint to home base.
After their second encounter, she reaches for her vibrator, thinking he'd accept her technological assistant as easily as she does his. Of course he doesn't, so Pump Gin exits the scene mad. But Seema doesn't bother getting upset – she can get hers just fine.
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Overall "Sex and the City" viewers who came to "And Just Like That" expecting some version of the same thrill were disappointed at how messy the writers reintroduced these familiar characters and their dream of life in Manhattan. But as the second season progresses and the disarray begins to cohere, the corners where its improvements are most discernible are in its vision of midlife relationships and prioritizing pleasure, with Seema as a magnificent guide, and thank goodness for that.
The fact that neither she nor Carrie lands a connection lasting beyond a smash or two isn't a tragedy or an indictment; it's just life in the sophomore arena, whose players are done with freshman naivete. Instead of presenting settling as an option, however, their sexual adventures are about setting expectations and keeping them simple.
To that end, Nya understands the assignment better than Carrie or even Seema – she hooks a handsome fish, and a few scenes later we watch her walk out of the hotel the morning after, smiling with satisfaction. Nya's fling, whoever he was, is never seen again.
New episodes of "And Just Like That..." premiere Thursdays on HBO Max.
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