‘And Just Like That’ Upcoming Finale Is the End of Carrie Bradshaw — That’s Heartbreaking, Even for Hate-Watchers

It’s hard to believe that the ending of “And Just Like That” means that we really will, once and for all, be saying goodbye to Carrie Bradshaw.

That’s in part because actor Sarah Jessica Parker and showrunner Michael Patrick King haven’t been able to say goodbye to her, either. After “Sex and the City” wrapped up with a bow in 2004 — with Carrie, New York’s perennial single girl, happily paired off and even more happily aware that her she’d had everything she needed within herself the whole time — it was only four years before her return, in a big-screen film. The 2010 “Sex and the City 2,” in which Carrie and friends visited the Middle East, ended things on a curious, ambivalent note, and we got a decade-plus breather before — surprise! — the show’s universe returned, sadder and wiser. 

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Making the show, which King announced Friday will be ending August 14, was an act of bravery, or seeming foolhardiness: The kind of thing, in other words, that one only does when one is madly in love. Carrie’s love affair with Big (Chris Noth) seemed, after two feature films, well and truly proven: In the first film, he leaves her at the altar, and in the second, she flirts with ex Aidan (John Corbett), and, both times, the couple is happily reunited, shaken but committed. Her friends, too, seemed to be burbling productively through middle age. Where else was there to go? 

It turns out, somewhere entirely unexpected. In interviewing various cast members and writers of “And Just Like That” for weekly coverage this year, I’ve been struck by how affected several were by the widespread fan criticism, especially in the show’s early going; no one in the audience at home, it seemed, knew how to metabolize a series that had (almost) all of the key players of the “Sex and the City” universe, but that struck an entirely new tone. Back in the “Sex and the City” days, the show was zeitgeist-defining, and its vision of defiant single women living their best lives legitimately moved the culture forward. There was little wonder that people felt quite so connected to the series. 

“And Just Like That” felt at first like a repudiation of that fan love. It effectively commences with the death of Big, sending Carrie into a grief far deeper than she’d ever experienced over a break-up. As it mapped out startling emotional terrain for her, it found pathos and comedy in the ever-upright Miranda (Cynthia Nixon) newly struggling with substances, ending her marriage, and taking up with nonbinary alt-comic Che Diaz (Sara Ramírez). Charlotte (Kristin Davis) was in a new alliance with Lisa (Nicole Ari Parker, one of several additions to the show’s core circle of friends). And Samantha (Kim Cattrall) was absent entirely, a contingency of production — Cattrall refused to be a part of the series due to an ambiguous but long-running dispute — that initially set the series off of its familiar balance.

Everything about the show felt topsy-turvy. Ebullient Carrie was miserable; role-model Miranda was anything but; new characters raced to make themselves heard while an old friend was lost in the wilderness. It was, far more than the escape-to-fantasyland feature films, something like real life. This is what it can, sometimes, feel like to check in with figures from one’s past — the update one receives will be ambiguous, or painful to receive. The challenge in hearing it is to find the joy despite it all. Carrie, eventually, made her way out, and got tied up in a new affair with Aidan that, protracted though it was, reminded us of her winsome tendency to lose herself in the idea of romance. Charlotte showed hidden depths (and Davis revealed herself once more to be the show’s secret comic weapon). The show’s new additions — which also notably included Sarita Choudhury’s Seema, a Samantha successor of sorts with a style and verve all her own — distinguished themselves. And as Miranda came into herself, we saw depth and dimensionality within the breakdown. (It was also incredibly important for audiences to meet Che Diaz.) 

The show was all sensibility — and, though key creative voices returned from “Sex and the City,” it was a different sensibility from the one that had reigned some 20 years before. Yes, the show was sad at times. It was also deeply attuned to weirdness in a way that “Sex and the City” wasn’t. Bringing Samantha back for a long-awaited cameo, the series had her talk for a strangely long portion of her screen time about flight delays at Heathrow Airport — just the kind of humanizing, frustrating thing a real person might complain about, even as it didn’t move her relationship with Carrie forward much. Shopkeepers and servers Carrie and friends encountered tended to come bundled with neuroses; parenting conundrums that arose, from drug-muling Ritalin across state lines to competition over college counselors, were so specific that they seemed to have been transcribed directly from Manhattan-mommy message boards. And, again, Che Diaz performed a sort of anti-comedy so alienating as to be genuinely brave.

It wasn’t “Sex and the City,” but it existed laterally — or maybe the right way to put it is that it existed forward in time. With the wisdom of age comes, if one is lucky, a tendency to notice more carefully. And this show was a sort of oddball love letter to its characters and to the “Sex and the City” legacy, difficult to pin down but rewarding in the moments it generated some unexpected insight into just how Carrie was living now. 

And the way she lived now was necessarily different than her days of stomping around New York in a tutu. She, too, is an observer — a writer — who is relentless about noting others’ foibles but fairly lenient with herself. She is a good friend, when she wants to be, and a theatrical dresser. In other ways, life has softened Carrie; her final breakup with Aidan, for instance, was, in the end, sorrowfully mutual and landed delicately. She’s past the point in her life when emotional explosions will happen. Maybe, after losing Big, some new perspective remained.

Which makes it sad that we won’t continue to see the journey — sad for the audience, and sad for the TV landscape, which ought to be able to support a character and a franchise this beloved. Ending her story now feels like a particularly sad moment for an indelible character, one whom Parker has played, off and on, since 1998. While we’ll see how the show’s writers bring Carrie in for a landing, losing her as a show churns off a streaming service feels like an ignominious end. But if we know the people who’ve made Carrie the character that she is — one drawn with endless love, the kind that allows you to see one’s partner clear-eyed and accept them for all they are — they’re only done with her for now. Maybe, if we’re very lucky, another glimpse lies in our future.