Sex and the City’s Carrie, Miranda, and Charlotte are unequivocally headed in new directions in And Just Like That…, the HBO Max spin-off that premiered last week by killing off Big with a fatal Peloton ride.
“They’re cooking salmon, they’re slow dancing, they have a whole ritual with the record albums, and they’re in love after all these years together.” By bringing back Natasha, though, Rottenberg explains, “We’re trying to show that Carrie’s probably repressed a lot of the ugliness from the early seasons of their relationship, which was such a roller-coaster ride.
“Natasha is almost the perfect lightning rod to bring Carrie back to their painful past,” adds Zuritsky.
“We could not spend the entire season with her in a state of paralysis, the way many people are after a sudden tragic death,” explains Zuritsky.
“We felt that, given that Mr. Big was gone—Natasha, who has been her nemesis for so many years—was in some ways her last best hope of maybe answering annoying questions,” says Zuritsky.
Miranda does her best to support Carrie through her social-media spiraling—gently trying to talk Carrie down when it becomes clear Carrie is obsessed with a Big-related bogeyman.
“I love Miranda as a friend for trying to talk some sense into Carrie by saying, ‘You’re really wired,” says Rottenberg.
After Natasha does her best to avoid Carrie, Carrie ends up walking in on Natasha in the bathroom of a coffee shop.
“Then we realized, for a number of reasons, after all these years later, we’re finally back , and it became much more fun.
“I think one of the biggest goals and assignments in bringing the show back is to show that these characters still have lives to lead,” says Zuritsky.
In AJLT’s first three episodes, Miranda leans increasingly on alcohol—a story line that King told Vanity Fair was inspired by real-life alcohol consumption during the pandemic.
To have the safe space that we had originally in the writers room, where we were just talking about, when is something a problem? Is it a problem if you think it’s a problem? Is it a problem if your friends think it’s a problem? And what a sticky, touchy, awkward topic this can be, even if it touches most people these days.
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