An episode late in “And Just Like That . . .” ’s 2nd period introduced a earlier unthinkable state of affairs: that Carrie could market her Higher East Side brownstone apartment, a person of the number of constants in the quarter-century-previous “Sex and the City” franchise. Following the dying of her longtime love interest, Mr. Big, in the pilot of the sequel series, Carrie still left their marital residence and moved back into her cozy if lavishly reupholstered one particular-bedroom suite, her willpower to get started more than in widowhood echoing the defiantly not-unfortunate singledom of her thirties. The initial demonstrate bought its city romance by way of that third-floor walkup: Carrie kissed plenty of gentlemen on its stoop, looked out its avenue-dealing with window although typing her weekly column, and (somewhat implausibly) stored a warehouse’s worthy of of designer duds in its enormous-for-New-York closet. The setting was so crucial to the series’ attraction that admirers manufactured its front steps a tourist place. But, in “And Just Like That . . .,” when Carrie rekindles her romance with yet another “Sex and the City”-era paramour, Aidan, two many years soon after their broken engagement, he refuses to established foot in the device exactly where she confessed to her affair with Large. And so she calls up her mate and genuine-estate agent, Seema, to acquire a 4-bed room mansion in Gramercy Park—the form of household that could accommodate a lifestyle with Aidan and his sons, ought to the boys pay a visit to one particular working day. The condominium is poised to go to Lisette, an artsy, lovelorn neighbor who’s going through some housing drama of her very own, and in whom Carrie sees her younger self.
Real estate is the yardstick by which “Sex and the City” calculated some of its greatest developments. Soon after Carrie and Aidan’s engagement finished, she practically dropped her apartment—he’d purchased the place when her constructing went co-op, with the intention of going in—until Charlotte arrived to her economic rescue in one particular of the show’s most explicit endorsements of feminine friendship around heterosexual compromise. Charlotte secured her very own abode after the dissolution of her impulsive initially relationship, and Miranda marked her motivation to her rising family by transferring from her prewar in Manhattan to a larger sized town property in Brooklyn. “And Just Like That . . .” has continued to use residence-hopping as an indicator of the characters’ states of brain on an even grander scale, aided by the reality that the main trio has, since the “Sex and the City” days, occur into near-fantastical prosperity. Early on, in the midst of her grief above Large, Carrie moves into an all-white, oppressively modern day downtown eyesore. She buys and sells it in the span of a single episode—congrats to Seema on that fee, I guess—then settles back again on the U.E.S.
For a franchise (and nostalgic viewers) struggling to recapture a precise combine of product fantasy and psychological relatability, Carrie’s condominium has been an oasis. It is arguably the only aspect of the collection which is been up-to-date with no losing its former magic, the large teal bouquets in her residing-room wallpaper and the matching jewel-toned bookshelves as exuberant and unpredicted as the best of her style. The first season received criticism for portraying center age as dreary—the protagonists grappled with dying, decay, and a doddering cluelessness with regards to social improve. For all their affluence, no a single experienced a job or a partner really worth envying any longer, and, with out the return of the “Sex and the City” costumer Patricia Area, even the outfits fell flat. The characters’ adventures, much too, have turned insular and domestic. Carrie and Aidan commit much of their time together in the blank box of an Airbnb that the pair rented as a like nest. For most of the sequence, Charlotte could reliably be discovered in her kitchen or in her children’s bedroom, and her pal Lisa is for good being interrupted by her partner or offspring in the walk-in closet wherever she apparently edits her documentaries.
Carrie was the early two-thousands’ most influential flâneuse, and real estate should be the natural compensatory satisfaction of adhering to around the kind of girls that she and her coterie have become—style-minded spenders who take pride in their know-how of the metropolis and are pretty, pretty prosperous. That would make clear why the most developed member of the new ensemble is Seema, a superior-close broker with a constructed-in purpose to showcase Manhattan’s most eye-popping residences, and why lots of a lot more scenes get location at dwelling. Absent other resources of aspirational allure, the collection dangles the possibility of property porn early and generally.
And nonetheless the huge bulk of those people would-be indulgences are as underwhelming as the story lines. The sophomore season has taken viewers to numerous a grandiose domicile, but it struggles to convey luxurious with personality, and hence luxury well worth coveting. In contrast to the storybook Manhattan of the first sequence, “And Just Like That . . .” appears to be to emphasize the profound sterility of so quite a few New York attributes. In which Carrie’s apartment is a beautiful reflection of her design and style, Charlotte’s Park Avenue flat showcases only her stuffy side, and Lisa’s workplace-closet is uncharacteristically beige. (This, lest we forget, is a woman who attended the Achieved Gala in a crimson Valentino robe with a educate that could upstage a peacock and a headpiece that transformed her into an otherworldly dandelion.) The glorified loft inhabited by a tech founder who briefly dates Carrie, the 30-7-thousand-greenback-a-thirty day period apartment that Seema demonstrates a Marvel director, and even Seema’s possess spot all really feel depressingly nondescript. Law professor Nya’s heat-toned, brick-lined, academia-main bachelorette pad could be the closest issue that the new demonstrate has to an enviable, individualized space—but, as soon as Miranda results in being Nya’s reluctant roommate, it is addressed mostly as a web site of irritation.
Sometimes, we get flashes of the aesthetic eclecticism that was so integral to the previous series’ charm. In “And Just Like That . . .” ’s initially season, Carrie fortunately ended a night time feeding on popcorn in her apartment in a dove-grey Versace robe with a prodigious mille-feuille skirt. She describes the costume as her “pride and pleasure,” and it was apt that she would somewhat chance finding Jiffy Pop grease on it than enable it remain in the closet, pristine and unappreciated. Maybe that is why her Gramercy Park digs are so disappointing. Fairly than attesting that new beginnings await in one’s silver many years, the plot level lands as nonetheless one more miscalculation of which aspects of “Sex and the City” to jettison, and which types to cherish. That the acquisition was enthusiastic by her wan, rushed, retconned romance with Aidan is disenchanting enough the blandly opulent, distinctly un-Carrie appear of the place is an included blow. There’s a lot to criticize about her taste, but she’s in no way tried out so hard to disguise it. ♦