The end of the AJLT series following SATC
The show ended tonight over Thanksgiving pie. I don’t know how I feel about the finale of AJLT concentrating so much on food, but I think it worked as a connector for all the girls. More on that later.
27 years. I was wrapping up middle school watching this show. In hindsight, maybe not the best show to be watching at that age, but it’s done. The braces came off and I wanted to be Samantha Jones in Manhattan. I wanted Carrie’s job and apartment, Samantha’s style, Miranda’s common sense, and I was a teenager so I already had Charlotte’s optimism.
Candace Bushnell based all the guys on the show on high profile NYC men in the spotlight. I didn’t know any of this when the show started, but I had a grasp on what I thought about them. Harry was a nice guy that was a lawyer, Steve was the nice guy that owned a bar, Samantha only dated models, and then there was Big.
SATC was Carrie’s happily ever after and they came back with AJLT to show us how they’re doing. People weren’t happy. They think it was sad. They are completely wrong.
Charlotte got her family and she still works at the gallery. Samantha is in the UK still living her 20’s. Miranda is settled and she’s about to be a grandma.
I don’t think Carrie’s life is sad, but there’s no way to explain it without looking at the rest of the country. News flash - we’re in the middle of a recession. Carrie? She landed the Kennedy. He died, they didn’t have kids and she got everything. She’s not boring, it’s just that we aren’t used to seeing them past happily ever after.
We have to remember the real world a bit to appreciate where she is. She doesn’t have to work. She’s toiling away at a novel and has no other obligations. There’s no elderly parents, no kids, no fiscal or familial obligations. She’s just sitting in NYC rich with no current story. It’s not someone with nothing, it’s someone that can wake up in the morning and do absolutely anything. If there was any reason for the lackluster way this may have come across, it was due to a combination of production budget, and the current climate. They showed enough without being too tacky and some people took that to mean her life was boring. You can’t win them all.
What I appreciate about AJLT is they tried. Were there missteps? Sure, but how many shows out there were showcasing women pushing 60 living their lives that weren’t running a cartel or secret government agencies? We have to remember the elder gen-x’ers. We’re so consumed by hustle culture that we are forgetting about our older cousins and coworkers that made it the old-fashioned way - through inheritance and marriage. Netflix has us so jaded that anytime a woman is living her best life, if she isn’t overseeing poppy fields or trying to get out of a time loop on an AI island, we’re suspicious as to how they got there. I love watching Nicole Kidman in her myriad of wigs as an experimental therapist and a government spy, but seriously, sometimes a thirty-minute show where it’s just lunch and gossip is fine.
The pies. Carrie cooks like me. She finds a winning dish that someone else makes for her and she passes it out to everyone. SATC ended with them in a diner hanging out and laughing. AJLT ended with each of them in their own home continuing. That’s a win.
Have you had a Carrie moment? I have. In NYC. Completely enthralled with someone not nearby, I was set up on a blind movie date. I get to the Angelika Film Center and out walks Chris Noth from a screening. I start laughing. Your first blind date in NYC while you’re thinking of someone else should not begin with Mr. Big walking out of the movie theatre. It’s a sign that the years of conditioning were not wrong, SATC was the right guidebook. That’s how I found myself sitting through Woody Allen’s “Cafe Society” pining for someone else. All you want to do is text and laugh about it with him; but it would involve possibly mentioning the awkward fact that you’re sitting at a blind date. Definitely a Sabrina story, but that was so heavily influenced by Carrie.
What I take away from this series is that there’s no right roadmap. I think what Michael Patrick King wanted to instill in young girls is that there is no right way to do life. Traditional, non-traditional, it’s all the right way… as long as you end up rich. If you find yourself without that golden nugget as a foundation, please try your hardest to be happy with what you look like on the outside and luckily there are plenty of award-winning shows on HBO that deal with all that other stuff out in the world that his show never touched.
Carrie will always be fun. It’s fine to act like Carrie. No matter the age, time, etc. just do you and have fun. It should always be a good time.
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