Carrie, Miranda, and Charlotte are back! The Sex and the City sequel, And Just Like That… has returned to Max, and Slate’s podcast The Waves is covering it every week—exclusively for Slate Plus members. Below is a bit of this week’s recap, covering Episode 10 with senior producer Cheyna Roth and Waves host Scaachi Koul.
To get the full episode, and lots more Slate Plus bonus content, go to slate.com/thewavesplus to become a Slate Plus member today.
Cheyna Roth: We’ve got to talk about Lisa Todd, and honestly, I need to get something off my chest. This is a show that is primarily for women, especially women aged, let’s say, 30 and above. I think that would be a fair guesstimate. People who have been with the show for a really long time since it started. And according to the Mayo Clinic, about 10 to 20 percent of known pregnancies end in miscarriage. It is fucking irresponsible of this show to introduce a pregnancy and then have Lisa have a miscarriage like she did. If you want to reckon with unexpected, late-in-life pregnancy, by all means, please do that. That’s a great conversation to have. As someone who has dealt with infertility issues for more than a decade, I did balk a little bit when she said she was pregnant. I hated it, but I’m used to that sort of thing happening.
But then to have her quickly lose the baby after one conversation about it—I mean, what are we doing? What does this show want to be? You can’t just have that happen and then move on. And maybe they’ll talk about it next episode, but this show has a history of just dropping these things. And from a pure storytelling perspective, what was even the point? Why have her be pregnant, only to take that away within one episode? If you want to have a conversation about women in marriages contemplating abortion, hey, let’s do that. That would be very topical, that would be a great conversation to have, but that was barely part of the conversation she had with her husband.
I mean, was this whole thing just so she could be like, “It’s my time for my career?” Because we knew that this is her time for her career. You didn’t have to have her get pregnant and then have a miscarriage. You can’t hit people with things like this.
And the thing that really frustrates me is that this show did a really great job when Charlotte was struggling with infertility, and that was many years ago. That is a cultural point that I’ve come back to often as I’ve struggled with my own infertility: remembering when Charlotte was going through all of the injections with Trey, and then telling Harry that she might not be able to have kids, and then how she felt when Miranda was pregnant when she couldn’t get pregnant. I mean, there was some really rich and thoughtful storytelling there, and I just really felt like they understood how delicate of a subject matter it was. And they took it through multiple episodes across seasons, and that was just part of her character. And to do this now? Fuck off.
Scaachi Koul: Yeah. I mean, they should have just let her get an abortion. That would’ve been so interesting. That would’ve been so much more interesting, if she had gotten pregnant—this surprise pregnancy—and if she were looking at her life and felt, “I have a full house, I have a full family, and I have a very full career, and it’s my time.” That conversation when she was in bed getting upset about it, I felt it so viscerally. I have no children and no plans, and I still was like, damn, that sucks. And I was so disappointed when she said, “I’m glad I have that option, but I could never.” I fucking hate that.
That felt really judgmental.
I really resented it. It was trying to have both; it was trying to say, “That’s a fine option for you guys, but as a rich aspirational figure in this show who speaks to a certain kind of woman and a certain kind of class and a certain kind of New York class, I could never. I’m just going to suffer. I’m going to have this kid. This kid will have less of me. It will, because I will either be resentful because I had to put my career away for you, or I’m working. This kid will have less of my husband because he’s running for office”—which we didn’t even get to because it doesn’t make any sense.
Who cares? It’s comptroller. Again, who cares?
This is a show that could be political in a way like this: Instead of saying, “I’m going to give up all these things,” it’s like, “I can take this. This is a gift. I can take this. It’s medicine. And I can do something about it and I can have the life that I wanted.” And her yelling at her husband because he wouldn’t get a vasectomy? Like damn, leave him. It was odd and it was weaponizing so many things. It was weaponizing a pregnancy, a fertility issue–related pregnancy. It was weaponizing a later-in-life pregnancy. It was weaponizing even the looming threat of an abortion. The hopefulness, the positivity of having an abortion—gone. I didn’t like it. When she got pregnant, I was like damn, are they going to get her an abortion? That would be dope.
That would’ve been a really interesting way to go, because that’s something we don’t see very often, especially now, especially when we are post-Roe and we are having a ton of conversations about female bodies and agency, about who gets to have an abortion and who should be allowed to have an abortion and who should be allowed to do what with their bodies. It would’ve been really powerful and meaningful to see a woman who says, “Hey, this is what my family’s supposed to look like, and this happened and I didn’t want it to, and I’m going to get an abortion and that’s going to be fine and that’s normal, and it’s OK.” Why not do that? They came right up to it and then they just completely backed out of it. And then you sprung a miscarriage on us, which is not fair and not OK to do like that because then the whole question becomes: Why did we even have this? What was the point of any of this?
