“Will not having sex mean that we aren’t Harry and Charlotte?” Charlotte York-Goldenblatt, played by Kristen Davis, asks her husband Harry Goldenblatt (Evan Handler) in an early episode of what we now know is the final season of the much-maligned and utterly addictive Sex and the City reboot, And Just Like That. During Season 3, Harry had been experiencing penile symptoms such as erectile dysfunction and incontinence, which prompted him to go to the doctor, who diagnosed him with prostate cancer. The side effects of his treatment could include both long-term bowel dysfunction and erectile dysfunction. The latter would have been an ideal opportunity for the show to explore what a diminished sex life might mean for the couple. After all, regular penetrative sex was so important to Charlotte that she left her first husband, Trey (Kyle MacLachlan), over his inability to get it up and his disinterest in addressing it. Has Charlotte’s opinion on the issue changed in the ensuing 25 years, during which time she has built a life and a family with Harry?
It seemed like this was the narrative arc Charlotte would face this season, but that would have required And Just Like That to be concerned with character development, storyline continuity, and any interest in the real lives of menopausal women. “My husband had cancer and I wasn’t allowed to say anything about it,” she lamented to an energy healer in a recent episode, which the show took as a topic sentence and ran with. Instead of this very real dilemma, we got Charlotte experiencing—checks notes—inexplicable vertigo and a “loud and totally unnecessary renovation.”
This cowardly avoidance has been one of many problems with And Just Like That since it premiered on (the newly re-minted) HBO Max in late 2021. The original show from which it spun off broke ground in the late 1990s for speaking frankly about the sex lives of…
