And Just Like That… Season 3 Review: The Time Has Come to Say Goodbye to Sex and the City!

Nupur Sharma KaulMay 31, 2025Last Updated: May 31, 2025

0 9 minutes read

In the narrative heart of And Just Like That Season 3, there is still her, Carrie Bradshaw, who never stops starting over. After Big’s death and Aidan’s stormy return, the third season finds her more alone than ever in her new penthouse in Gramercy Park, while waiting (in vain?) for Aidan keep his promise to return to her in five years. The problem? It is not clear whether the series really wants us to care about this relationship. The dialogues between the two are embarrassing, the telephone sex is cringe, and the alchemy of Latita. It is a déjà-vu that does not add anything new to a character who would need much more than a postcard love story to evolve. The third season will also be shown simultaneously in the United States. The Max Original series of Michael Patrick King, is preparing not only to welcome back the historical protagonists of this sequel of Sex and the city, Carrie, Miranda, Charlotte, played by Sarah Jessica Parker, Cynthia Nixon, Kristin Davis but also to consolidate the rest of the cast with fixed and now tested presences: Seema and Lisa, brought to the screen by Sarita Choudhury and Nicole Ari Parker.

And Just Like That... Season 3 Review — And Just Like That… Season 3 Review (Image Credit: HBO)

When you love something, you have to know how to let it go, especially when you realize that it does us more harm than good. It happens in love but also in the TV series and that’s exactly what is happening with And Just Like That, the revival series of Sex and the City which after returning with his third season – from May 30 on HBO Max with a new episode every Friday – he reminded us once again that perhaps, the time has come to say goodbye to one of our favorite series of all time, before it is too late. After seeing the first six episodes of this new chapter of And Just Like That we could not help but think that it would be more respectful for the public and for the same characters in the story to conclude instead of dragging a story that today does not make more sense to exist, at least in this way.

Table of Contents

And Just Like That… Season 3 Review: The Story Plot

And Just Like That Season 3 comes out two years after the debut of the second series chapter and after four years from the release of its first season, which took over Sex and the City almost 20 years after his series’ final aired in June 2004. We find Carrie in a new apartment and a long-distance relationship with Aidan (and we still wonder what sense her return made and why Carrie is still so immature). There is Miranda, who is now homosexual and looking for a new love after the failure of her relationship with (the bad) Che Diaz, but her character seems as regressed as Carrie’s. There are the new characters of Seema and Lisa who, it must be said, have never managed to make a difference and then there is Charlotte, the only one able to give us something this season and, perhaps, in all the revival for the beautiful relationship she has with her husband, as she relates to her daughters, for her strength, her choices, her enormous change since the beginning of the series.

And Just Like That... Season 3 Analysis — And Just Like That… Season 3 Analysis (Image Credit: HBO)

But this is not enough. So we find ourselves in front of a story that lacks brilliance, audacity, emotion, and above all, evolution, all characteristics that had made, Sex and the City great. It is as if one no longer knew where to direct a story that, by now, has already said everything and tries to find some gimmick to continue to be present in contemporary seriality, but without being able to say or give anything to the public. Season 3 takes a few steps forward thanks to a healthy “thinning” of the cast. Goodbye (no regrets) to Che Diaz and Nya Wallace, while Seema and Lisa Todd Wexley gain space and substance. The first is a Samantha in a businesswoman version, the second fight between artistic ambitions and support for her husband in the election campaign. Yet despite the solid performances of Sarita Choudhury and Nicole Ari Parker, their storylines seem to live in parallel series, often disconnected from Carrie, Miranda, and Charlotte. It is a structural problem: the series does not know how to make its protagonists interact well.

And Just Like That… Season 3 Review and Analysis

As much as we (millennial) love the world of Sex and the City, we love listening to Carrie Bradshaw’s effect phrases on love, having brunch with her and her historical friends, witnessing the dramas of their love lives and their indissoluble friendship, after all this getting by without a real natural evolution of the characters, reluctantly we must admit that it would be more correct to say goodbye. And we should do it before our selfish attachment to Carrie Bradshaw, Samantha Jones, Miranda Habbes, and Charlotte Yorke comes to destroy an iconic story that has revolutionized the way of telling women, love and sex on TV. After six seasons of the original series, two films, a prequel series, and a sequel of three seasons, the time has come to greet our beloved New York friends and allow them to be encouraged as they deserve, and with that perfect ending with which we had already greeted in 2004.

And Just Like That will not be never Sex & The City. And that’s a fact. Revivals don’t they can measure with their original versions: they are new stories, not simple extensions. In this case, the starting idea was strong: if Sex & The City brought a wave of empowerment to females in an era, that between the years ’90 and 2000, that was hungry, with a provocative and irreverent tone towards patriarchal society, And Just Like That tried to update to modern times. He wanted to tell like a woman over 50 can freely live their sexuality today, without shame or masks. But what no longer holds – and that emerges with even more force in the first episode of the new season – are the storylines of the protagonists. At first, it was intriguing to see them struggling with the contemporary world, between social networks and children and teenagers, who brought with them an inevitable generational confrontation. But over time, this dynamic has weakened. In the following seasons, rather than adding, they have emptied the story.

The three historical friends are embedded in now stale dynamics. Carrie lives a long distance love with a man who seems to have returned to his life more to fill a void than to light a new flame narrative. Miranda, on the other hand, is desperately looking for a new partner after embracing his new sexual identity. A ben look, it’s Charlotte who remains the only one with a thread of consistency with its original version, immersed in family duties, divided between daughters and his beloved Mr. Burton. Nor are new entries enough to revive the plot: Seema, unfortunately, continues to look like the copy faded by Samantha, as if living in the shadow of the character who left a void impossible to fill. Lisa, on the other hand, embodies the classic figure of the career mother who wants to emerge and leave a mark, but ends up being almost caricatured in its representation: its complexity is reduced to a cliché.

And Just Like That... Season 3 HBO — And Just Like That… Season 3 HBO (Image Credit: HBO)

Looking at this first episode, the truth is clear: And Just Like That was hit by the news and the audacity of the first season, but now seems to have lost direction. That bold, brilliant spirit and pungency that characterized the mother series has dissolved completely, and has not been replaced by something like this validity. And perhaps, after this vision, – you have also recently convincing second season – would have been better off ending with one, solid season. If the writers fail to give a new meaning to the path of the protagonists, it will be difficult for even the most loyal fans to stay on board. And Just Like That has never been a realistic show, and the third season confirms it with enthusiasm, indeed, with pride. The series abandons any claim to likelihood of turning into an uninterrupted high fashion show and finds absurd narratives that really seem to come out of a lucid dream of Carrie Bradshaw. The outfits are increasingly theatrical: from the lace and fringed suit worn for breakfast at Tiffany’s to a Simone Rocha dress with a coordinated coat used to float around the house like a 19th-century widow in full creative crisis.

Even a checkered hat that looks like a picnic tablecloth becomes an excuse for a surreal walk in Central Park. Fashion does not accompany the narration: it is the narration itself. The camp component reaches textbook levels. Rosie O’Donnell’s cameo is perfectly calibrated, hilarious without slipping into farcical; Charlotte chasing a university consultant called Lois “The Finger” Finger head seems to have come out of an episode of 30 Rock, while Carrie engages with a historical novel that sounds like a pastiche written by an artificial Sex calibrated on Pride and Prejudice and Yet all this excess has something tender: there is a new, almost self-deprecating awareness, in the way the series stages its aesthetic delusion. It is as if And Just Like That knew very well that it was a luxury, frivolous, and inconsistent operation, and decided to laugh about it with us. After all, this is its charm: a form of glamorous escapism that does not need to be justified.

Despite some signs of improvement over previous seasons, And Just Like That Season 3 continues to remain anchored to the surface. The series plays with the concept of frivolous escape — and it is right that it does so, since it is aimed at an audience fond of glamor, clothes and New York living room dramas — but it does so without ever really deepening the themes more current and interesting that also emerge from time to time. There is mention of aging, changing family roles, mental health, and loneliness, but everything is quickly covered by dialogues detached from reality, narrative clichés, and comic skits too studied to be authentic. The series also struggles to manage the maturation of its characters. Miranda has had an important evolution on the identity level, but is often ridiculed by embarrassing plots. Charlotte, who could be explored as a woman poised between the maternal and professional roles, is instead pushed into the territory of caricature hysteria. What about Carrie? He continues to live in his bubble, unable to emancipate himself from his eternal sentimental dilemmas. The series seems to mean something about middle age and second chances, but it does so with the lightness of a cocktail sipped by the pool. It’s entertainment, of course, but with little to say.

Composed of twelve episodes, And Just Like That… Season 3 … improves compared to the previous two, trying to get closer to Sex and the City but without doing it completely. As for the script, there are fewer forced moments than in previous seasons, but the dialogues are still far from being as bright as those of the original series. As already mentioned, the new characters still struggle to find a really interesting narrative space. Other dynamics still seem unlikely, as well as pulling a little for long. As always, however, the photography is cured and patinated and fully respects the ’glam aesthetic of the series. Nothing to say, however, about the acting of Sarah Jessica Parker, Cynthia Nixon, and Kristin Davis, who are confirmed as excellent actresses, able to give depth to their characters despite the difficulties of the script. All in all, there are nostalgic cues that fans of Sex and the City will appreciate.

And Just Like That… Season 3 Review: The Last Words

And Just Like That… Season 3 is a pastiche of frivolity, fashion, and nostalgia, in which Carrie Bradshaw continues to make the same sentimental mistakes, and her friends struggle to emerge from little incisive plots. The cast has been intelligently displaced, but the new storylines remain partly disconnected from each other. Despite the limitations, the mix of absurdity, cameos and visual comfort makes the series an irresistible guilty pleasure for the most loyal fans. And Just Like That… Season 3, arriving from May 30 on HBO Max, almost definitively cuts the umbilical cord with the HBO Sex and the City cult series, of which it is a sequel. Carrie, Miranda, and Charlotte remain old friends with whom we feel we share memories of youth, but AJLT is consolidated as a manifesto of a moment of life, that of fifty years between new fears, decisions to be faced or postponed.

Cast: Sarah Jessica Parker, Cynthia Nixon, Kristin Davis, Sarita Choudhury, Nicole Ari Parker, Evan Handler, Mario Cantone

Created By: Michael Patrick King

Streaming Platform: Max

Filmyhype.com Ratings: 3/5 (three stars)