Well, it’s over.
After 10 episodes and varying degrees of agony, the Sex and the City reboot And Just Like That… has come to an end. Or the first season of it, anyway. Despite the fact that the show has received decidedly mixed reviews, it has been HBO Max’s most successful original series yet, according to a recent interview with creator Michael Patrick King for Variety, so a second season seems to be more a question of “when” than “if.” And spoilers ahead, but the finale certainly seems to have been written with renewal in mind — in more ways than one!
To summarize briefly: Charlotte gets “they” mitzvah’d by none other than Hari Nef playing a trans rabbi; Carrie loses her podcasting job (thanks to Che Diaz), then gets another podcast, and passionately makes out with her new boss in an elevator; and most importantly, Miranda is about to U-Haul her way across the country, throwing away a highly coveted internship with a human rights organization to spend an indeterminate amount of time with Che in Los Angeles, who is filming a Roseanne-esque pilot despite the fact that they seem utterly incapable of telling a single funny joke.
Some other stuff happens, too, including a surprisingly moving portrayal of Carrie’s ongoing grief, but who’s able to focus on any of that, really, amid the ongoing antics of everyone’s least favorite nonbinary comedian/motivational speaker?
When I last wrote about Diaz, arguing that the character unintentionally broke boundaries by being one of the first nonbinary caricatures on TV, the show had just premiered. I worried, slightly, that I had been too harsh; that the show was still finding its footing, and perhaps Che would prove my cynicism about representation wrong. The show did indeed get better after those rough first few episodes; I even found myself enjoying some moments and being impressed by the nuance with which they handled issues of gender and sexuality.
Everything else that happened in episode five was (rightfully) overshadowed by the Che/Miranda kitchen hookup, but it also contained perhaps the best depiction of well-meaning parents struggling to support their trans child (while not quite understanding what that means) that I’ve ever seen. Coming out can be complicated, including for loved ones, and I appreciated that the show made space for that.
It saddens me to report, however, that I was indeed 100% correct about Che. Over 10 episodes, the character got plenty of time onscreen, spawning countless memes and think pieces. And yet, despite the number of times we’ve all heard those dreaded words — “hey, it’s Che Diaz” — what do we actually know about the character?
We know they’re poly or otherwise nonmonogamous, and extremely bad at it, considering that they didn’t think to ask Miranda about her actual relationship status before banging her in their coworker’s kitchen. We know they “do a lot of weed,” as they so awkwardly put it. We’ve gotten some oblique references to their family both during their “comedy concert” and in this last episode, when we kind of meet two of Che’s grandmothers for a few brief seconds. Are they gay-married grandmas? Why are their grandmas the only biological family members they’ve chosen to introduce Miranda to? Who are all of the people in this restaurant/club hybrid and how do they know Che?
None of this matters in the eyes of the show, though, because what really matters is that Miranda is getting whisked away to the City of Angels for the first time since the ladies escaped New York back in season three of the original show.
That’s really what the issue is with Che, and frankly, all of the show’s new characters of color. They’re not characters so much as they are set dressing — a handful of character traits jumbled into convenient narrative foils for our three leading ladies. They’re fantasy versions of people of color, living in a world where white women’s overfamiliarity with non-white people with whom they should have strictly professional relationships is welcomed and in fact, reciprocated.
Beyond being an issue of “bad representation,” it’s also an issue of bad writing; Sara Ramirez admitted that they don’t recognize themself in Che, and that’s probably because they are a three-dimensional person playing a decidedly one-dimensional character. And all of this becomes more egregious when you consider that these new characters were actually meant to be main characters, per a New York Times interview with the show’s creators.
Considering that the flatness of all the new characters was true across the board, I couldn’t help but wonder (sorry) why Che in particular struck such a nerve with me. After approximately two seconds of reflection, I realized that unfortunately, I’m a lot more like Che than I’d like to admit, though I hope considerably less annoying and also funnier, which isn’t a high bar to clear, let’s be honest. I’ve been out as queer since I was 13 and out as nonbinary since I was 16; I live and work in New York City; I pay my bills largely by writing jokes (and news, I guess) for you all; and I have been known to “do” the occasional weed.
Because I’ve been visibly queer for so long (and also probably because I’m not white) I have been the springboard for lots of people’s explorations of their own identities — and I don’t say that lightly or narcissistically. I say that because that’s what I’ve been directly told, by a bunch of people throughout my life. Every real-life Che has a dozen Mirandas swarming around them, looking for actualization. You can start to feel as though you exist in people’s minds solely as an idealized image of queerness, as a tool for self-discovery; you can feel as though your whole personhood isn’t being considered.
And that’s exactly what I see in Che: a phenomenon others have identified as the Manic Pixie Dream Queer trope. They swoop in, their hedonism and excess offering the perfect antidote to Miranda’s strait-laced life, causing her to upend her life in pursuit of her Authentic Self. Even the sole moment of Che standing up for themself against the extremely shitty way that Miranda treats them exists only to propel the latter’s journey of self-discovery forward — and of course, they immediately allow her to jump back into their arms.
By writing Che as an idealized queer, the character doesn’t actually get to be human. I know from personal experience what that’s like — to feel as though people want to extract meaning from you while never actually feeling like they care to get to know you beyond a surface level. And not to be That Deep about it, but the revolutionary Black lesbian feminist group the Combahee River Collective understood the harms of putting marginalized people (especially Black women) on these kinds of pedestals.
“To be recognized as human,” they wrote, “levelly human, is enough.”
I hope that Che gets the chance to be levelly human next season; right now, they feel more like a bunch of boxes on a checklist of Good Nonbinary Representation that the writers painstakingly ensured were all checked off — or like a robot ready to dispense “woke moments” at the press of a (literal) button. Regardless, I will be watching whatever comes next out of a totally unnecessary self-imposed sense of obligation.
And if things continue the way they’ve been trending, I am bracing myself for the inevitable scene of Che themsplaining what a polycule is to Miranda.
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