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From left: Miranda (Cynthia Nixon), Carrie (Sarah Jessica Parker) and Charlotte (Kristin Davis) in And Just Like That.HBO / Crave
Elizabeth Renzetti is a columnist and feature writer for The Globe and Mail.
For me, the most poignant moment in Sex and the City happened in the aftermath of Carrie Bradshaw’s disastrous 35th birthday party. Carrie, played by Sarah Jessica Parker, had been (accidentally) stood up by all her friends, and had to pay for her own overpriced birthday cake. Full of self-pity, she complains to her friends Charlotte, Miranda and Samantha that she doesn’t have a boyfriend, let alone a soulmate.
Because they’re friends, no one tells Carrie to suck it up, buttercup. Instead, Charlotte ventures, “Don’t laugh at me, but maybe we could be each other’s soulmates. And then we could let men be just these great nice guys to have fun with.”
Never mind the threesomes and Manolos, this is what the show always had at its heart: A complex, tender portrayal of female friendship. That’s also true of the new series, And Just Like That, which picks up some 20 years later, when the friends have more grey hair, but just as much love for each other. Or at least most of them do.
Yes, I admit it, I’m a Sex(and the City)aholic. I’ve always loved the show despite its deep flaws: The materialism, the lack of racialized people in the cast and the idea that a freelance columnist could afford anything more than a hot dog diet in Manhattan. It was the friendship between the four main characters that drew me in, their hijinks and dumb fights and tearful reconciliations, as my colleague Marsha Lederman concurs in her review of the first two episodes. And yes, I’m living in a magical world where the two execrable Sex and the City feature films don’t exist.
Judging by the first two episodes of And Just Like That, friendship is still the main theme. Can you be friends with a younger coworker, or a professor whom you admire? How do you stay amicable with your tetchy teens? How do you make new friends in midlife? And, crucially, how do you fill the hole when someone you’ve loved for decades slips away?
That last question is vital to the new series. If you’re a fan, you’ll know that Kim Cattrall, who played Samantha, has chosen not to return. (Spoilers follow, so you’ve been warned.) Samantha’s absence is explained as a falling-out with Carrie, who fired her as a book publicist. Samantha has swanned off to London to be fabulous there, and she’s ghosted her friends. No calls, no texts. Samantha never was one for long goodbyes.
Even the circumstances of Samantha’s estrangement are thoughtful. Female friendships are complex, and change over time. Ghosting and silence are key ways that women exit a friendship, as Deborah Tannen notes in her book You’re the Only One I Can Tell: Inside the Language of Female Friendships. The thing women dread most is what Tannen calls FOBLO, or fear of being left out.
Of course, the onscreen drama is accompanied by the bitterness of the offscreen relationship between Cattrall and the rest of the cast, which has descended to the level of social media mud-slinging. There were rumours of bad blood even in 2005, when I interviewed Kim Cattrall and asked her about it. She sighed and said, “Look, we had our time together. And the real truth of it is that we weren’t best friends. We were colleagues. We had a common ground and a common purpose.”
I remember being surprised by her remarks, perhaps foolishly. My own friends, at work and outside work, were so important to me. I’d spent an inordinate amount of time with them planning a future based on another beloved series, The Golden Girls. Rich in margaritas and sarcasm, we would live in a communal house, trade gossip in the kitchen and have each other’s backs when the world turned cold (this living arrangement for post-retirement buddies is becoming more common, I’m happy to see).
We know that women’s friendships are crucial for mental and physical health, and there’s evidence that close friendships in later life are helpful in staving off depression. Partners and children and jobs and pets come and go, but good friends are forever. And the ones who slink off to London? Well, the door is always open and a drink waiting at the bar when they return.
What else we’re thinking about:
I loved State of Terror, the new thriller written by real-life friends Hillary Clinton and Louise Penny. And as Johanna Schneller discovered during a Globe and Mail interview with the pair, the central relationship in the book – between a U.S. secretary of state and her best friend – is based on Ms. Clinton’s own relationship with her childhood pal, Betsy Johnson Ebeling. “We wanted to write a political thriller where women are the protagonists,” Clinton said. “With their lives, their friendship, their feelings at the centre of the story.”
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