August 11, 2025
It’s been a cool week amid the dog days of summer in New York City. The source: Climate change? A cold front dragging cool Arctic air across the Eastern Seaboard? Perhaps… Or maybe it’s the fact that And Just Like That…, the worst television spin-off that no one asked for, is finally dead.
I came to Sex and the City in a time of need. A recent breakup, a life that became stagnant and boring — the series found me taking bong rips with a friend and imagining uprooting my safe and boring life in Boston for New York City. I was twenty-five years old, I’d seen everything that this phase of my life had to offer me, and my soul was craving a reinvention. From beneath an old, lumpy blanket in my bedroom that I never bothered to decorate, I began to reconceptualize myself as Samantha: sultry, slutty, adventurous, untethered.
Fashionable and chic yet unpretentious and always a good sport when it came to the variable prudes with which she kept company, Samantha was the embodiment of a high-brow/low-brow cultural icon, an icon of camp, my everything. But more than that, she reminded me that an unconventional life didn’t have to just be a happy accident; it could be an intentional choice. At the midpoint of my 20s, I found myself horrified by people getting married and having kids at my age. It felt like a proclamation that they had seen enough, ready to graduate into a life of cyclical chores while slowly becoming less and less interested in a fashionable life. Samantha showed me that the promise of marital dread didn’t have to be my future.
Like my disgust with heteronormativity, the character of Samantha was simply a projection – one that, in the proposed script for Sex and the City 3, departed from an embodied, confident, and realistic woman into a caricature, with one reported storyline revolving around Miranda’s teenage son Brady sending Samantha dick pics. Cattrall felt the storyline was undignified, turning Samantha into a character who existed solely for purposes of sexual shock value. As a result, Cattrall offered Sarah Jessica Parker a piece of advice: “I played her past the finish line and then some, and I loved it… Another actress should play it. Maybe they could make it an African-American Samantha Jones, or a Hispanic Samantha Jones.”
Instead of recasting Samantha or recognizing that the series could not function without a well-crafted Jones, Sarah Jessica Parker and Michael Patrick King relaunched the series under the And Just Like That… moniker with a set of bizarrely utilized diversity friends. Some came and went (Che Diaz, Nya Wallace) while others stuck around even though their dad died, was resurrected, and then died again over the course of the show (Lisa Todd Wexley). Of all the new additions, Seema Patel was the most likable but left much to be desired when grouped together with Carrie, Charlotte, and Miranda. I could go on and on about all the things that didn’t work (which, of course, is pretty much everything about the series), but the main point I want to make is knowing when to let things go.
I generally hate aphorisms, but I do firmly believe that expectations are future disappointments in different packaging. The first time I learned this lesson was when I held my birthday party at a movie theatre for the second year in a row. During the first year, we watched Finding Nemo and ran around the theatre that was ours for the runtime, laughing and jumping with joy. A year later, my friends had grown up and apart, and everyone silently watched whatever movie was screened. No one came over for an after-party sleepover and, through my tears of disappointment, my mom taught me this important lesson: If you try to recreate something with an expectation in mind, you may be disappointed.
I try my best to heed this warning whenever I find myself wanting to re-experience something that was once great, but I’m human and sometimes I fail. I’ve hooked up with exes and ordered the same meal over and over. I’ve tried to cultivate groups of friends reminiscent of the few, fleeting months when my high school friends felt like a family, only to realize that I took on the role of friendship tyrant. I’ve become really good at moving my life forward and letting bygones be bygones while recognizing little ways that I can ensure my life is different and changing all the time: walking down a different street than normal to get a different perspective of the neighborhood, rearranging the furniture in my bedroom, disrupting my daily routine in moments when my life begins to feel rote and dreadful. These are all elements of my life that bring into focus a general trend toward mindfulness, allowing me to notice the trees on my street from a different side, feel what it’s like to sleep with my body at a different angle, and get my workout done in the middle of the day so that I can spend the early afternoon reading a book like a kid after school. I haven’t got straight-up meditation down quite yet, but these things are a start.
They’re an essential part of my creative practice as well. Perspective breeds new ideas, and new ideas lead to new creative projects, which hopefully lead to new work, which leads to more conversations, which lead to better ideas, which continue to feed the process. I’m not against rehashing old things (one of my favorite artists is Phil Elverum of The Microphones and Mount Eerie, whose musical catalogue, though sonically varied, revisits several turns of phrase and key words over and over), but I enjoy it when it’s done with art in mind, not when it’s done simply to feed the content consumption machine.
Within the first few minutes of the pilot of And Just Like That…, it became clear that we were not dealing with something artful. Parker and King knew how lucrative a reboot could stand to be, with COVID lockdowns leading to a new, younger fanbase. So they propped up the remaining three and their DEI-hire friends and paraded them through an Amazonified New York City. Whereas Sex and the City felt gritty and real, And Just Like That… feels AI-generated and cheap. The sets are not believable, the fashion is off-kilter and vaudevillian, and the characters are deflated versions of their beloved selves. I found it too depressing to watch it through the intended framework, so I decided to think of the show as the result of decades of rampant consumerism.
Instead of wearing well-curated outfits, Carrie wears an expensive mess. Spending an afternoon in one of New York’s hyper-gentrified neighborhoods will connect the parallel; everyone is beautiful, yet everyone looks the same. A city that once thrived on digging and suffering for fashion comes to you on TikTok and arrives at the steps of your apartment. Catering to the denizens of these neighborhoods who, whether through personal preference or market manipulation, prefer buildings like Carrie’s short-lived Black Mirror condo from season 1: clean and soulless. Everyone is worried that they’ll look stupid in the back of someone’s Instagram story, so no one dances anymore. It’s a profoundly uninspired time, and, yes, Sarah Jessica Parker is to blame.
It’s not all bad, however, and I can’t end things on such a cynical note. Of course, I want people to enjoy what they enjoy, but I don’t want to continue to feed into the content creation slop machine. I want people to engage with art on a more local level, if possible, or at least try to find things that are created in response to new ideas. And if you’re craving the comfort of an old friend, find your way back to the warm embrace of the Carrie Bradshaw who still smokes cigarettes.
Sad Appetizers is a multimedia project showcasing fiction, music writing, memoir, and visual art. Born out of a DIY ethic, Sad Appetizers exists to create a space for art and artists outside of the institutions and attitudes that discourage and gate keep people out of centering art and creativity in their lives.
Sad Appetizers came into this world as a Substack, then a Zine, and now this web-based project. Playing with the concept of impermanence on the internet is central to the idea of Sad Appetizers, so you’ll see elements of this project appear, disappear, and change.
Centering impermanence is to rebel against the highly-curated, overly produced internet presence of our modern era. Rebelling against this self-curation is meant to create a more open and playful space for artists who long to try things out.
At the heart of it, Sad Appetizers believes that art is not about the fixed object or product but about the very real, moving, ever-changing energy of someone who flows through the institutions, rules, and systems of our world and comes out with something unique to say, showcase, or scream about.
To submit, please email me.