The season finale of Sex & the City revival And Just Like That dropped on HBO Max at the beginning of February. While the series has received some criticism and complaints, the nostalgia for the beloved characters has been trumping it. However, conservative columnist Meghan McCain wrote an editorial about the revival, and now the stars are responding.
Following the release of And Just Like That, Meghan McCain wrote a pretty harshly-worded article for The Daily Mail. As someone who watched the original series while going to college in New York City when it was airing, McCain was not so thrilled about the new series. She brought up that And Just Like That is clumsily trying to attempt to turn a beloved show into “the woke and puritanical times” we’re currently living in.
The cast of And Just Like That were recently guests on the SiriusXM show Radio Andy with Andy Cohen, where the host eventually brought up McCain’s article. Cynthia Nixon, who portrays Miranda Hobbes, gave her input on McCain’s story, noting that a lot has changed since the show first aired, but it’s still the show people know and love. In her words:
What’s my reaction? I mean, I disagree. I feel like the show became so beloved and now we have reruns for all of these years. I think that the show, because people know it so well, they’ve sort of enshrined it in nostalgia but this is a show that has always pushed every kind of boundary and I think that that’s what so magnificent about the new show, about how many directions we’re going and pushing boundaries and shaking people up. I think most importantly shaking the characters up because we don’t want to see these characters, either the familiar ones or the newly introduced ones, we don’t want to see them comfortable. We want to see something out of their comfort zone.
Nixon also said that Sex & the City was revolutionary for women having a lot of sex with a lot different partners, and how marriage wasn’t necessarily a thing everyone was pursuing. The show was also unique in the way that they approached topics involving sex and the conversations that came along, i.e. the frankness of it all.
Meanwhile, Kristin Davis, who plays Charlotte York, also put in her two cents. She mentioned how everyone on And Just Like That, and the fans that watch, care so much about the show and the characters. However, she hadn’t really thought about how different it is until it was over and it had all aired. They took these beloved characters and put them in a different show with new faces and a different title, and even switched them up a bit.
Some revivals have the same layout as the original series or are completely fresh. Davis didn’t realized just how different And Just Like That was compared to other revivals until recently. The show airing in a time completely different than when Sex & the City was airing is partly to blame, but it just means that the show and characters are evolving as a society, which includes a pretty diverse cast.
There have definitely been some mixed reactions to And Just Like That, especially when it came to killing off Big and involving Peloton as the cause for it. However, while a second season has yet to be announced, it seems like it’s only just a matter of time before HBO Max renews it. In the meantime, all 10 episodes of the series are streaming, along with the entirety of Sex & the City.
