Spoilers ahead. “How is a woman alone a tragedy?” asks Carrie Bradshaw in last week’s penultimate episode of And Just Like That…, which is the Sex and the City reboot that ran on HBO Max for three seasons. She’s talking about the unnamed protagonist in her first foray into fiction, a historical novel set in 1846, but the parallels to her own life are clear.
AJLT began with a shocker: the death of John “Big” Preston (Chris Noth, who was accused of sexual assault shortly after the premiere of AJLT – though he claimed in 2021 the allegations “are categorically false”), the man she pined after for six seasons and a movie, the first of which he married Carrie in (but not before leaving her at the altar). Apparently he was supposed to die if there was ever a third movie, freeing Carrie up to be single in the city again. We got a glimpse of that in the early stages of season two, however Carrie quickly coupled up with Aidan Shaw (John Corbett), a spectre over the better part of two seasons before their union mercifully imploded a few episodes ago.
Carrie had a short dalliance with her downstairs neighbour, British writer Duncan Reeves (Jonathan Cake) in the following episode, but he returned to London leaving our heroine, played by Sarah Jessica Parker, without a feasible romantic prospect to close out the series. Shock horror!
“Not today it’s not,” replied Carrie’s publisher when she received Carrie’s manuscript. “But in 1846? A woman alone at the end would be a tragedy.”
What about 2004? When the original series ended in the mid-aughts, fans would have rioted if Carrie and Big weren’t endgame, despite Big’s emotionally withholding toxicity that Gen Z viewers have been appalled by as they discover the series almost three decades after it initially aired.
Though 200 years removed from Jane Austen’s marriage plot, pop cultural representations of women almost always presented a romantic partnership with a man as the ultimate goal as to how a woman should “end up.” And don’t even get me started on the lack of queer rom-coms at the time.
Since then, TV shows such as Girls, Fleabag and Crazy Ex-Girlfriend have modelled alternate endings for women, paving the way for AJLT to let Carrie be single this time around.
The show has been rife with problems, most of which I won’t get into here (but I have here and here), but the hard lean into Aidan didn’t leave audiences with much hope for this final season. After forcing Carrie to buy a ridiculously opulent Gramercy Park townhouse because he childishly wouldn’t set foot back in the apartment where they broke up the first (and second) time, he made her wait for him for five years while he raised his troubled teenage son, an ultimatum even he couldn’t keep when he cheated on her about six months in. Is this really what passes for romantic comedy in the year of our lord 2025?
If Carrie had laughed in Aidan’s face when he asked her to wait for him knowing how short life is following Big’s death in the season two finale, AJLT would have had a whole season to unpack the question Carrie poses at the top of this piece. Instead, it’s hastily split over the two-part finale, the latter of which takes place against a backdrop of a bridal fashion show.
“Do I have to get married? Or do I just think I do? It’s something I’ve been groomed for, [but] at this age, do I really want it or am I just programmed for it?” Seema (Sarita Choudhury) ponders, despite never having expressed such a desire before, to my memory, oscillating wildly between being the single Samantha Jones (Kim Cattrall, who didn’t return to the reboot) successor and a desperate hag, which is apparently the only two options these two single, 50-something women are faced with. Remember when they were sipping cocktails in the Greek Islands in the season two finale? Someone needs to tell the AJLT writers that that is what two rich single ladies should be doing with their post-menopausal years instead of wallowing over marriage or bust. After all, the Census Bureau and Morgan Stanley predicted in 2019 that 45% of women aged 25-44 (you know, SATC and AJLT’s core audience) will be single by 2030, while 49% of women in Carrie’s age group are single.
In the end, Carrie decides to publish her novel sans an epilogue that “makes the reader feel good at the end”. Instead she writes, “the woman realised she was not alone—she was on her own.”
As a fierce proponent of women choosing themselves instead of unsatisfying relationships, I am pleased that AJLT had the courage to let Carrie be single.
Scarlett Harris is a culture critic and author of A Diva Was a Female Version of a Wrestler: An Abbreviated Herstory of World Wrestling Entertainment. You can follow her on Bluesky and read her previously published work at her website and Substack, The Scarlett Woman.
Top photo – Pictured: Sarah Jessica Parker in And Just Like That, Source: HBO