As always, Sarah Jessica Parker is just about perfect. Her show, though…
COMEDY Let’s start with an imaginary exchange between two friends, Emma Glass Half Full and Cassandra Glass Half Empty, as they have Sunday brunch in SoHo.
EMMA I think And Just Like That… has just gotten better season by season. And this mimosa is divine.
CASS But it still isn’t terribly good. The show, I mean. Then again, neither is my salad. I haven’t seen this much dressing since the Met Gala.
EMMA I’m just saying, if you liked it at the start—
CASS The salad? I just said—
EMMA The show. If you liked it at the start, you’ll like it even better now. I may even love it—the way I do that handsome young waiter who’s been giving me the eye.
CASS If you didn’t like the show then, you may like it better now—but you won’t like like it. What waiter? Not the overgrown teenager with the man bun!
In other words, it remains hard to know what to make of Sarah Jessica Parker’s Sex and the City spinoff as it starts its third go-round. The show is much smoother, more polished than when it launched in 2021. You no longer even miss Kim Cattrall’s Samantha as you whirl in and out of the lives of these middle-aged Manhattanites, all accomplished, all stylish (although one of Carrie’s hats is a mistake—it sits on her head like a huge crushed pastry). And Parker remains an utterly bewitching romantic-comedy star, even if you wish Carrie would give up on Aidan (John Corbett). He’s not worthy of her playful humor, her touching, thoughtful silences, her caramelly blonde hair. She should be spun off—again.
If the show is often charming, it also can feel constrained, as if it’d been squeezed into Sex and the City Spanx. So much of the dialogue, a smart but not brilliant banter, sounds dated.
When real estate broker Seema (Sarita Choudhury) phones Carrie to complain about a date that’s taken her so far out of town she’ll miss getting back for lunch at Jean-Georges, Carrie says: “Hang up. I’m sending a chopper.” Seema, sensibly, calls for a car.
Then again, these thoughts are based on only the first six of 12 episodes. There are hints that more serious plot twists are coming. So we’ll see. Ellipses, please! (Premieres May 29)
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