Cynthia Nixon has admitted that the maligned Sex and the City sequel series And Just Like That left fans of the original show “horrified” – but that she loved it anyway.
The show, which ran from 2021 to 2025, picked up the stories of three of Sex and the City’s four leads: Sarah Jessica Parker’s Carrie, Kristin Davis’s Charlotte and Cynthia Nixon’s Miranda, with Kim Cattrall’s Samantha notoriously being written out of the series off-screen after Cattrall declined to reprise her role amid a very public feud with Parker.
While Cattrall’s absence initially sparked the bulk of chatter around the series, And Just Like That eventually became notorious for its bizarre plotting and the increasingly surreal evolutions of its principal leads, which left many fans alienated. Miranda, in particular, was reimagined as an erratic, alcoholic scatterbrain who enrols in university to study human rights, leaves her marriage to David Eigenberg’s Steve to date a non-binary comedian named Che Diaz, and then finally comes out as a lesbian.
In a new interview, Nixon defended the show and its original goals.
“I became convinced that we could really do interesting, dangerous things,” Nixon told The New York Times. “And that we could make up for some of our past mistakes, the chief one being that it was such an overwhelmingly white show.”
She then admitted that many fans reacted badly to the show.
“They were so horrified by [Miranda’s] sadness and alcoholism and awkwardness at trying to become a woke person at this advanced age. But I loved that.”
And Just Like That came to an end in August 2025, with an episode which culminated in Miranda unclogging a toilet, which had been blocked by a lactose intolerant Gen-Z person named Epcot, who invited themselves to Miranda’s Thanksgiving dinner celebrations.
The end of And Just Like That was announced somewhat shockingly a week before the airing of what turned out to be its finale. The show’s executive producer and showrunner Michael Patrick King, who later denied that the show was ended due to spiralling costs and declining viewership, wrote in a statement the decision was made alongside Sarah Jessica Parker and executives from HBO Max to “end the popular series” but that they had “held off announcing the news until now because we didn’t want the world ‘final’ to overshadow the fun of watching the season”.
Nixon admitted that she was taken aback by the show’s ending, telling The New York Times: “I was not at all ready. Not at all.”
Earlier this year, King said in an interview that he believed And Just Like That “will potentially age well”, adding: “It has the same DNA as the original Sex and the City, which was society telling 35-year-old women they should be married. In And Just Like That, society was telling 55-year-old women they shouldn’t be wearing tulle. I’ve always tried to be excited about writing the individual versus society.”
Last year, Parker said that she was unbothered by reports that audiences were “hate-watching” And Just Like That.
“I don’t think I have the constitution to have spent a lot of time thinking about that,” she said. “We always worked incredibly hard to tell stories that were interesting or real. I guess I don’t really care. And the reason I don’t care is because it has been so enormously successful, and the connections it has made with audiences have been very meaningful.”
Read MoreMacklemore concludes Free Palestine tour with sold-out show in London
John Oliver delivers two-word verdict on Elizabeth Holmes in You Can See Everything
Strictly star fires back at viewer over Graeme Hall criticism after dodging dance off
BBC names Naga Munchetty’s new co-host in Radio 5 Live Breakfast shake-up
James Acaster reveals his other Celebrity Traitors confession was cut from the edit
Richard Osman suggests how Celebrity Traitors will change after James Acaster moment
