"And Just Like That..." Miranda finds her bliss but has been careless with a delicate man
I know I said I wasn't watching this show, but I guess I am now. Fine.
Handsome man David Eigenberg, who plays a man who deserves better.
SPOILERS FOR PLOT LINES FOR THE CURRENT SEASON OF “AND JUST LIKE THAT,” AS WELL AS AN ALMOST 20-YEAR-OLD “ONE LIFE TO LIVE” STORY.
I first heard the word “retcon,” or retroactive continuity, several years ago when I was a huge soap opera fan, According to Oxford, it means “a piece of new information that imposes a different interpretation on previously described events, typically used to facilitate a dramatic plot shift or account for an inconsistency.” On soaps, retconning was usually used to, say, introduce the previously non-existent daughter or brother for an established character we’d been watching for 20 years so we’d care about them. (“One Life To Live” did this famously with Adriana Cramer, played by future “Brooklyn 99 actor Melissa Fumero,” who showed up as the long-lost daughter of sometimes shady matriarch Dorian Lord that no one had ever heard of. I still deny that Adriana existed. I’m a petty soap fan.)
Retconning, to me, always seemed like lazy writing, an attempt to make a character act the way you want them to in service of the story you want to currently tell, by just erasing or creating their history, rather than coming up with a way to justify a change that makes sense and honors that history. Which brings me to “And Just Like That…”
If you follow this newsletter, you may remember that I made a big deal about not watching HBO Max’s “Sex and The City” reboot because the (SPOILER) husband of main character Carrie Bradshaw died in the pilot in a way not dissimilar to the way my own husband died. (Yikes.) Then I went and started catching up, most significantly in last week’s episode about Carrie’s widow dating at the behest of her awful editor and Oprah. Now, it appears I’m gonna keep writing about it until it’s over, because I’m hooked. Parts of it are awful, parts of yummy but I’m still hooked, like the year-old Girl Scout cookies I just found in my freezer.
The most recent episode is the continuation of a story the reboot has apparently been telling about the crumbling marriage of former high-powered lawyer Miranda, and Steve, her former bartender husband. In the most recent episode, she told Steve that she was leaving him, and then jetted off to Cleveland to find Che, the very hot nonbinary comedian she has been sleeping with and has fallen in love with.
For the run of the original series and the two movies that followed, Miranda often acted as if Steve wasn’t good enough for her and was just a dude from Queens she was slumming it with for hot sex (and the sex, canonically, was super hot.)
But the story that the reboot is telling is of a marriage that has not only seen better days, but was never all that hot to begin with, even thought Miranda is on record in the series as saying Steve was the best sex of her life. (Yes, he cheated on her in the first “Sex and The City” movie, another dumb piece of writing that made no sense and was just a plot device to make Miranda doubt the concept of marriage and blurt that out to Carrie’s fiancee the night before their wedding so he that he’d temporarily bail. Bad writing.)
This story says that the two married because she was pregnant, when in the series their son Brady was already a year old and Steve was dating a woman named Debbie who telegraphed as lower class but who seemed real nice, when Miranda got jealous and jumped Steve and then they got married. That it was all a lie.
And it wasn’t. This thing, this sad “Never was a thing” thing? That’s the lie.
Here’s the issue. People change. Two-plus decades is a long time for a relationship, and in that time, it makes sense that one party might have different needs. And I applaud the show for recognizing that Miranda (played by very out lesbian Cynthia Nixon) might represent the many women who come to understand that their identity is different than they always thought, and that a new person and possibility awakens a truth they were unaware of.
This is the story that “And Just Like That” thinks it’s telling. But it’s too wimpy to tell that story. It’s not brave enough to have Miranda blow up a functioning marriage with a man she was happy or at least satisfied with because she realized that her truth was somewhere else, and back up that decision. Nope. It wants it both ways. It wants to tell the very important story of a middle-aged woman choosing her own mental, sexual and emotional happiness but it hedges its bets by making Steve a feeble old man with a hearing problem who can’t figure out how to sexually satisfy his wife, like he never knew how. (Actor David Eigenberg apparently has some hearing issues, but he’s still a hot man who plays a non-feeble silver fox firefighter on “Chicago Fire”.)
THE SEX, AGAIN, WAS TO HAVE BEEN SMOKING. Who y’all trying to fool?
Again, I am excited to see what these characters I feel I know so well are up to. Carrie is still self-centered, while clocking some growth and gravity in widowhood. Charlotte, the most inflexible, still manages to have a vibrant sex life with her husband Harry, who looks a little like my late husband, and whose vitality is a shock for her friends. (And..honestly, screw them. Jealous much?)
But to tell Miranda’s story, they have to make stuff up. They can’t figure out how to explore her burgeoning awakening without not only sullying Steve, but straight up lying about who he is. It’s not cute.
I wonder if Miranda is going to arrive in Cleveland and find that the “non-traditional” connection Che told her they could offer includes other lovers. I hope that if that happens, she decides it was all worth it to come to her truth.
And that she leaves Steve alone. He deserves some truth, too.
I do not have access yet the rest of "And Just Like That..." However, I was a follower of the Sex and the City series....and I was dating at the time...so I had a lot of conflicting opinions watching their lives play out on screen. However, I am a fan of your writing so I don't mind the spoilers about these new episodes. I do appreciate the insights you have about rewriting history. You are right; Amanda always was conflicted about who she was as a woman and her goals, etc. However she and Steve had a very loving close friendship and love relationship. I personally chose to end a marriage and went through a horrendous divorce. Yet, in the telling of that story I can never deny that people told me they thought we were "the beautiful couple". It is just part of the story.
I think a lot of the rub for me is that as women of a certain age, with worldly experience, access to money and diversity in their social and business lives in NYC - they are trying to sell this like they are Amish women escaping their hubby Jezabia And the heavy handed dump of every damn current social trend being jammed in these lives is a bit much. Lily, Rock, Widow, Infertility, Open Relationship, lesbian-ish, non-binary, estrangement from Samantha, young rich social influencer and her drama, the podcast, the book, the pressure to spin the book, the Boomers, the weed smoking, the kids living together while still in HS. I mean, the great irony is that I find it boring and exhausting because I do not have a chance to get into one story line before 10 more are competing for my attention. Years ago I wrote a "book" about widow and while she was navigating some heady stuff (he was a professor and had been having a few flings and one of the students showed up to the widow's door pregnant asking if she could raise the baby - it'd be the last thing she'd have of her husband's. Yeah, very obvious but it worked.) And believe me, I was able to sustain the story with only a handful of other 'going ons.' I just expect better from this franchise. Grrr.