Blow Her, Don’t Shrink Her

And Just Like That season two owes Sarita Choudhury an apology. Photo: Craig Blankenhorn/Max

The luminous Sarita Choudhury walks into a hair salon and makes a beeline toward her character Seema’s stylist. A silk leopard-print scarf frames her sunglasses-clad face. A cheetah-print Sergio Hudson power suit comes together around her waist with a chunky camel-shaded belt that matches her strappy heels. A Fendi First Medium bag is slung over her shoulder. “Are you ready to be blown?” her stylist asks with amusement, crudely foreshadowing the cut-rate romantic narrative drama that’s about to unfold. He’ll become a mouthpiece for the story’s shoddiest impulses, arguing that Seema, a longtime client and single woman — who has just left her recent paramour after discovering he was still living with his ex-wife — has become the worst thing a woman can be: picky. Forget the rigors of modern dating she faces as a woman of Indian descent in a world primed to favor whiteness, or the apps that treat people like meat on a conveyor belt. She’s picky. “Listen to your standards,” he tells her. “You’ve sat in my chair for ten years with your red flags and standards. No wonder you’re still alone!” Music and conversation cuts to a hush. Seema is embarrassed. She moves to sever all ties with him, but she turns back to deliver the line that has gathered us here today.

Eyes welling with fury, lips tight with venom about to spill, she says, “I pay you to blow me, not shrink me.”

It is surely only thanks to Choudhury’s skill and rich presence that this line even somewhat works. But as she stalks off, whatever sparkling wit Choudhury imbues into Seema’s delivery grows leaden. What’s glaring here is that Choudhury has been asked to wear Samantha Jones drag — from the animal-print power suit, a kind of look that rests entirely on the confidence of the woman inhabiting it, to this silly-ass line aiming for a sharp wittiness. And Just Like That … knows it can’t exist without the forceful sexiness and humor of Kim Cattrall, so its creators wrote a character who functions as her proxy. It’s of course a disservice to Choudhury, a performer who seems lit from within by a fire no rude hairstylist could dampen. But it’s also a disservice to a reboot that seems ashamed of its own existence, turning a story that once revolved around prickly anti-heroines into one starring soft-edged caricatures of women in middle age.

It starts and ends with the laborious humor that misunderstands what made Sex and the City so enthralling. Consider Seema’s line again: “I pay you to blow me, not shrink me.” Choudhury communicates the line with heated frustration, her broad posture aiming to take up space, refusing to be made a punch line in the performance. Cattrall similarly understood the silliness of the words her character was asked to utter and refused to look down on Samantha for saying them. She would take scraps of dialogue and draw them out into a full meal, infusing lines with a deliciously constructed sense of feminine excess and confidence. “I will not be judged by you or society,” she declared in season four, in the kind of lush cadence that flies around moneyed worlds. “I will wear whatever and blow whomever I want as long as I can breathe and kneel!” Choudhury aims for something similar, but not even her skills can make cohesive what the writers haven’t thought through — the impulse to inject a touch of titillation into the blandness of middle age. If Samantha’s lines twinkled like a new Tiffany bracelet, the lines of And Just Like That … drag along your skin like cheap fake gold that leaves your wrist the color of mildew.

It’s hard to be fully convinced by Choudhury’s line reading when I don’t buy Seema’s existence in the AJLT universe to begin with. The show’s writers grafted women of color and queer folks onto the lives of the three primary white characters — ensconced in a world of privilege, wealth, and glamour that is either wildly disinterested in or outright hostile to those on the outside — without any barbed complications. It’s a superficial evolution for audiences that have come to expect more diverse worldviews than Sex and the City ever offered. The addition of Seema and Che, along with Black characters Lisa Todd Wexley (Nicole Ari Parker) and Dr. Nya Wallace (Karen Pittman), feels disingenuous — like our protagonists aren’t interacting with niggas out of any real desire to broaden their social circle, they’ve just been forced to by circumstance.

Sex and the City was never interested in feigning realism, and so the dialogue — piercing, unnatural, extravagant — felt appropriately a piece of the fantasy world we lapped up each week. And Just Like That … is desperate to reflect more of reality than it ever should, yet it maintains a death grip on its predecessor’s unreal manner of speaking. Consider the ways the writers handle the idea of Black respectability and its claustrophobic politics through Lisa’s scenes. She is stressed by the presence of her mother-in-law, who is visiting the family’s palatial home. After Lisa’s husband is refused service by a cab driver who’s clearly racially profiling, he gets rightfully pissed and hits the hood of the car — only to be seen by his mother, Eunice, and some of her rich-as-hell friends. Later, Eunice lectures her son, “We never surrender our dignity.” He is blamed for the very racism he experienced.

And the clunkers don’t stop there. When Eunice sees Lisa in a headscarf before bed, she proclaims, “Didn’t the Emancipation Proclamation free us of head wraps?” Lisa doesn’t admonish her. Moments later, she reaches for her husband instead, confessing that her mother-in-law is right: “When we go off, they win.” Where do I begin with this shit? The series wields Blackness as a cudgel against criticism of the show’s blind spots, but it doesn’t get the potent complications and pleasures of Black identity to pull off such narrative explorations. Wealthy Black folks like Lisa believe smooth propriety and classiness is a part of the social contract they’ve signed to be able to enter the rich spaces someone like Charlotte inhabits. But the writers aren’t interested in the deficiencies of characters like Seema or Lisa, save for what they can provide the actual leads of the series.

Seema’s line reading speaks to an essential problem with her characterization: She is presented as a levelheaded adult, searching for a partner who brings as much to the table as she does. Why would she flip out upon learning that her French lover lives in the same building as his ex-wife? He has his own floor in a three-story private residence. Wouldn’t a woman like Seema find his ability to balance his past and his present admirable? This is where showrunner Michael Patrick King and his writers tip their hand. They do not understand the particulars of dating as a woman of color in middle age, nor what an ambitious, independent woman of color looks like outside of a picky caricature. Sex and the City was a series dictated by the frothy pleasures of its archetypal, dangerously self-involved main characters, fascinatingly dynamic in their faults. In failing to write the AJLT characters as the flawed humans the original series so brilliantly captured, the show becomes an ouroboros, the very encapsulation of the ungenerous critiques lobbed at the original series: that it’s white women’s fluff with nothing novel to say and no lasting pleasures to provide.