Kristin Davis hasn’t yet made sense of the critical reaction to And Just Like That.
The Sex and the City sequel series recently signed off after three seasons (taking place after six seasons of the original series and the two movies) with Carrie Bradshaw (Sarah Jessica Parker) happy and single, and the rest of the cast left in somewhat open-ended but hopeful marriages or relationships.
“It’s been very, very weird, the whole trying to come back with this different, similar show, right? We were very clear about [how] it’s a different show [but] same characters — which I really think I was naive about how weird that was for people, for our fans,” Davis said on the most recent episode of her iHeartRadio podcast Are You a Charlotte? “It’s kind of asking a lot of fans. I guess I’m still trying to figure this out.”
While reflecting on the franchise with guest Dan Futterman, Davis said that her co-star Cynthia Nixon sent her the recent Times podcast where Taffy Brodesser-Akner shared her assessment of the series, which Davis said “really gave me hope. Like at this point, I’m looking for any understanding of what we were trying to do,” she said, quoting Brodesser-Akner as summing up And Just Like That as a “documentary of middle age.” Adding, “I feel so seen.”
Davis admitted, while getting choked up, that they knew people would have “a lot of thoughts and feelings” about Sex and the City coming back in the form of And Just Like That to catch up with the main cast a decade later, “but we didn’t really understand the depth of confusion and/or I guess struggle about us aging and trying to talk about the things that you talk about and deal with in your fifties. It’s like a lot of people have some super strong feelings about it.”
Davis is right in that season three became the talk of the town, as critics and viewers shared their hot takes (which included a “hate-watching” trend) throughout And Just Like That’s recent viral run.
Davis also shared that she didn’t know the series was ending ahead of time: “I think because I didn’t realize that we were going to end And Just Like That, so I’m still processing and, like so Pollyanna, that I thought we would just keep going.”
Writer/director/showrunner Michael Patrick King had officially announced the HBO Max hit series would be ending only two weeks before the finale aired, saying in a statement that “while I was writing the last episode of And Just Like That season three, it became clear to me that this might be a wonderful place to stop.”
He later explained to The Hollywood Reporter that he, star/executive producer Sarah Jessica Parker and HBO made the decision not to announce that it was the final season any earlier because “if you say the word ‘final’ at the beginning of a season… people wouldn’t have struggled with Carrie [Parker] and Aidan [John Corbett] the way they did. If you knew this was a final season, you wouldn’t think about fixing it. You would just say, ‘Well, that’s over,’” he said of splitting up Carrie and longtime love Aidan during season three. “So we made a decision with HBO and with everyone to not say ‘final’ because … you’re going to talk about how it ends before it even begins? This season was so active — as you see, it was very active. The word ‘final’ is like a funeral dirge on something that we wanted to be a party.”
Still, King told THR that he didn’t second guess the decision to wrap the franchise amid the buzzy response because “I believe that sometimes you take the candy away,” he said, “And I believe — in my perhaps delusion — that it will resonate correctly. Once everybody gets over the, ‘I want it to end a different way.’ Once everyone stops writing their show. Also, there’s a whole other unchatty world of the people who have watched and loved these characters for 27 years. And that’s really who we’re writing to. To make sure that Carrie’s taken care of and that they’re taking care of.”
Julie Rottenberg and Elisa Zuritsky, writers on both the original series and And Just Like That, also tried to make sense of the reaction when unpacking the end of the franchise with THR. “[Carrie] represents so much for so many people so, of course, we’re never going to please all the people all the time. I think that has been well documented!” said Rottenberg. “[But] why are people so angry? I think it comes back to the double-edged sword of these characters who have been around for decades, who are so deeply ingrained in people’s lives and imaginations and their feelings. So any choices we made, I think, become incredibly personal.”
During her podcast, Davis similarly shared her confusion when trying to understand how viewers felt and still feel about the sequel series. “People are projecting all kind of things of their own and their own expectations and or desires and or disappointments or whatever it is. They have such strong feelings. And so when I can be calm about it, I know that that’s a compliment, right,” she said, but “it can be really painful. My biggest thing is that it’s been very confusing. I’m still confused, and I do not like to be confused. I like to understand things.”
Davis said that she, Parker and Nixon will continue to be in each other’s lives, noting they went out to dinner last week. But she said it’s been challenging to follow the online conversation while she’s been “mourning” the series and in the public eye with her podcast. “Let me tell you, it was like suddenly walking into your own funeral when you didn’t know it was coming. I mean, it was like we died. At a certain point, I had to be like, ‘OK… I got to put my phone down. I cannot look at Instagram,’” she shared. “Young selves and the odes, you know, they’re lovely odes to the death of our characters, but they didn’t die. And I’m here and I’m fine, I’m good, you know what I mean.”
