‘And Just Like That…’ Season 3 series review: As the ‘Sex and the City’ reboot draws to a cringey finale, what will we hate-watch next?

With every episode of the third and final season of And Just Like That…, one hoped the sequel/spin off of Sex and the City would become at least slightly better. Every episode, however, was a disappointment, setting the bar progressively lower, till even the faintest glimmer of fun or flamboyance was greeted with disproportionate joy.

While the ‘90s show (and two movies) SATC, followed four New York women in their 30s, And Just Like That… followed the adventures of Carrie (Sarah Jessica Parker), Miranda (Cynthia Nixon), and Charlotte (Kristin Davis) in their 50s. The fourth woman, PR professional, Samantha (Kim Cattrall), very publicly declared she was done with the character.

Looking at the mess that is And Just Like That…, Cattrall was wise to move away from the reboot. And Just Like That… had so much potential which it squandered in messy writing, limp character development and sundry horrors.

Twenty years after SATC would have been a chance to comment on so many things, including dating, labels, love and life in the digital age. Every episode of And Just Like That…, is crushing for its refusal to engage with our rapidly changing landscape.

Instead all that made SATC so relatable and aspirational — fashion, sex and timely comments on the zeitgeist, is completely missing from And Just Like That…. Carrie lives in an unbelievable mansion, clacking around in heels (did she not have hip surgery last season?), Miranda has lost her smart sarcastic lawyer self to an incompetent alien while Charlotte is unbelievable shrieky.

The loves are uninteresting, from Miranda’s dog-obsessed Joy (Dolly Wells) to Carrie’s nth break-up with Aiden (John Corbett) and her relationship with her author neighbour Duncan Reeves (Jonathan Cake). The fact that Joy and Duncan are single-note characters, with tweeds and an accent to signify their Britishness is unforgivably lazy.

Seema (Sarita Choudhury), the savvy real estate agent who was supposed to be the Samantha in the quartet, like the rest of the characters, has an unbelievable arc, including how despite being the top real estate agent, she has no savings. Her relationship with the hippie gardener, Adam (Logan Marshall-Green), despite showing lots of skin, has zero chemistry. Ditto for Lisa (Nicole Ari Parker) and her editor Marion (Mehcad Brooks), or Anthony (Mario Cantone) and his beautiful Giuseppe (Sebastiano Pigazzi).

All the young people are shown to be entitled blobs and the side characters, who were an integral part of SATC, bring along dun-coloured side characters, all of whom are eternally boring. Honestly, no one cares about whether Lisa’s husband, Herbert, (Chris Jackson), wins the election or Miranda’s son, Brady (Niall Cunningham), goes to culinary school. The fashions are uniformly eye-stabbing from Carrie’s ridiculous hat to Lisa’s macramé Christmas ornament-style necklace.

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While creator, Michael Patrick King has said, the decision to end the show was a creative one, it might have been cancelled because of falling viewership numbers. Whatever the reason, the show did not deserve that horribly meta finale with the Thanksgiving dinner, and that lingering shot of the contents of a stopped-up toilet bowl.

Even if the book Carrie is writing sounded all-round terrible, the finale could have been a glittering party celebrating the success of the novel and the rebirth of Carrie as a novelist. Coulda, woulda, shoulda indeed.

And Just Like That… currently streams on JioCinema