A criticism—and there have been many—of And Just Like That… was that Charlotte York-Goldenblatt, the traditional gallerist turned Upper East Side stay at home wife and mom played by Kristin Davis, didn’t have any character development. The Sex and the City reboot that premiered on Max in late 2021 and whose second season is currently airing on the platform has been struggling to accurately situate its female leads in the 2020s and no one has felt more out of place than Charlotte.
Carrie’s (Sarah Jessica Parker) husband Big (Chris Noth) died in the pilot, and Miranda (Cynthia Nixon) blew up her marriage by having an affair with non-binary stand up comedian (and I use the term “comedian” loosely) Che Diaz, played by Sara Ramirez. Even Samantha (Kim Cattrall, who didn’t return for the reboot) decamped to London after a falling out with Carrie. The extent of Charlotte’s plot is more about her child Rock (Alexa Swinton) coming out as non-binary than it is about her.
In And Just Like That, every out of touch white woman gets a new friend of color to replace those we’ve lost (Samantha, Big, Stanford, played by Willie Garson who died from pancreatic cancer during filming of the first season): Carrie envelopes luxury real estate broker Seema Patel (Sarita Choudhury) into her fold, Miranda somehow captured the affection of her law professor Nya Wallace (Karen Pittman), and Charlotte has Lisa Todd-Wexley (Nicole Ari Parker).
Lisa is a fellow Upper East Side mom, and the two bond over their kids going to the same elite Manhattan prep school and gossip about the students and their parents. But where Charlotte seemed content with homemaking, Lisa has a fulfilling career as a documentary filmmaker.
Charlotte and Lisa’s professional goals and personal roadblocks converge this season. In the season opener, the two are getting ready for the Met Gala and Charlotte laments that her husband Harry (Evan Handler) says he supports her if she wants to do everything: “until he wants his everything bagel.” Lisa, too, is struggling with her rich, ambitious banker-turned-politician husband Herbert (Chris Jackson) taking her seriously. When she mentions she’s busy trying to find funding for her latest doco, he makes an off-hand comment about how he’ll write her a check if it means she’ll slow down and spend more time at home.
While Charlotte’s storyline is more of a slow-burn—it’s not until more than halfway through the season in this week’s episode that she finally articulates her desire to go back to work after more than twenty years out of the workforce—Lisa and Herbert discuss how his run for comptroller (in a throwback to the original series with Carrie’s piss play enthusiast love interest) would unfairly place the burden of childrearing and household maintenance on her. Lisa’s determined trek to an event honoring her work in a blizzard, wig box in hand, in last week’s episode is an enduring image of the season. And Herbert shows up at the eleventh hour to support her.
But back to Charlotte: while her return to work will no doubt be heralded as an empowering decision in the insular world of And Just Like That…, many regular women would be faced with barriers of reentry to the workforce at the level at which they departed for caregiving responsibilities, which overwhelmingly falls on women, especially in the wake of the pandemic. That’s if they’re able to take maternity leave at all, with 46% of workers without access to paid medical or family leave, let alone a two-decade plus family leave!
To borrow a line from Carrie, I couldn’t help but wonder about Charlotte’s original opting out of work to be a full-time wife to her first husband Trey MacDougal (Kyle MacLachlan) in season 4 of Sex and the City. Her famous monologue about “choosing my choice!” rang out from third-wave feminist debates everywhere: was Charlotte’s choice empowering or did it set women back?
“The show’s sly critique of the market-feminist notion that every choice can be a feminist one so long as a feminist (even a momentary one) is doing the choosing has become a meme,” writes B-tch co-founder Andi Zeisler in her 2016 book We Were Feminists Once: From Riot Grrrl to Covergirl, the Buying and Selling of a Political Movement.
Sex and the City was a clarion call to women everywhere: to talk openly about sex, to show different lifestyle choices as equally valid, and to answer the age-old question of whether one was a Carrie, Miranda, Samantha or Charlotte. Charlotte was always the uncool one, obsessed with dating rules in order to find “The One.” In trying to rectify some of the wrongs of the original series and be “woke,” And Just Like That… almost goes in the opposite direction and it’s a hard task to find any redeeming cool qualities about any of the enduring women. However out of touch Charlotte remains, she is a touchstone for women of her generation and younger who watched the show and made the same choice as her and Miranda, to get married and have kids. Ultimately, they both arrived at the same precipice: a loss of identity leading to an overhaul of their lives. The detritus left in the wake of Hurricane Miranda might be an example of what not to do when you’re feeling unfulfilled, so if Charlotte has the means to have her everything bagel and eat it too, why wouldn’t you make the same choice? After finding contentment in other facets of her life, Charlotte now has the support—of her family, her community and her bank account—to reconsider her choice. We should all be so lucky.
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