Sarah Jessica Parker has, at lost last, responded to fans who loved to “hate-watch” And Just Like That.
Parker had a pointed response when asked for her thoughts about Sex and the City fans who watched the show just to dump on it. “I guess I don’t really care,” she told The New York Times in an interview meant to bid farewell to Carrie, the character she’s been known for playing over three decades. “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.”
She went on, “I don’t think I have the constitution to have spent a lot of time thinking about that. We always worked incredibly hard to tell stories that were interesting or real.”
Fan reception of the SATC reboot had always been mixed, and wasn’t any less so when it was announced that the show would end for good just two weeks before the finale aired on Thursday. Showrunner Michael Patrick King felt the show’s story had already reached its best conclusion when he decided Season 3 would be And Just Like That’s last.
“I never wanted to be like, Oh, that storyline again— which is the one rule we’ve had in the writing room: Don’t repeat. And we’ve done a lot. The one thing we haven’t done was get Carrie to the point where she says, ‘Maybe I’m enough,’” King told Variety of the show’s divisive ending Wednesday.
He added that fan criticism of the show is a “double-edged sword” that he couldn’t answer decide whether he’d “miss.”
“What I’ll miss is the fact that we created something that was so alive that there was a dialogue with the fans at the time—or the audience, or the non-fans,” King told the site. “If I didn’t want a reaction, I would write haikus and put them in a drawer. Unfortunately, I’m in the Colosseum. I run out there and go, ‘Here we are again!’ and people have a reaction, and it’s thrilling and harrowing.”
The other side of that, King said, echoing Parker’s comments Friday, is that “it’s not Zen.”
Fan response is “is a mirror to a lot. The good mirror is: It’s a mirror to the work. It’s a mirror to the beauty of what the entire cast and crew is doing, the magnificence of those actresses, the laughs, the heartbreak. That’s all thrilling,” he explained. “The cracked mirror is: ‘This isn’t my show. What did they ruin [Sex and the City] for?’ You look at yourself in a cracked mirror—it’s not attractive!”
Parker has shared similar thoughts about the strong feelings of the show’s fans with People this week, when she revealed that she “never” looks at social media to see their feedback.
“I think you’re going to perhaps read things or hear things that don’t always feel great,” she said. Her own feeling about the way Carrie’s story ends is satisfactory, however. She told the Times that she’s happy with Carrie’s ending: “I feel good about her. I think she’s set up pretty well.”
