Carrie Bradshaw (a woman who once wrote cheap puns about the taste of sperm) is too prudish to say the word “vagina” and Charlotte York (a former Park Avenue gallerina) is now using OpenTable to scout restaurants. All this while Miranda Hobbes (the human equivalent of a hard-shell briefcase) is considering a robot tattoo. The protagonists of And Just Like That are no longer the fabulous and flawed go-getters of a pre-recession New York, they are failed podcast hosts and neurotic helicopter parents and anxious widows. Do they even have fun? Whatever happened to fun?
Perhaps it’s unfair to measure these women against their pre-grief and pre-teenage children selves. We have seen how (an albeit privileged) life has led them into flannel-shirted neuroses: the embarrassing sex-capades and the “big mistakes” that have accompanied their self-betrayals. How fortunate, then, to encounter Seema Patel (played by Sarita Choudhury) as a 54-year-old with a barrel-brush blow dry and three iPhones. We don’t know where she’s been or even where she is going, but there are lines around her eyes and she wears full terracotta looks as warm as her Sobranie-burnt vocal cords.
Much like Samantha Jones, Seema functions as a gay man’s fantasy of feminine excess and fierce independence. The leopard-print headscarves and gold bangles, the gesticulating with cigarettes and the terse one-liners. And yet Choudhury has managed to imbue this caricature with so much wit and interiority that Seema feels like the most believable person in the series. Even her most clichéd lines are delivered with genuine guile. “I pay you to blow me, not shrink me,” she reminds a tactless hairdresser before wedging a plump Fendi clutch beneath her arm and leaving his salon in a cloud of giraffe print.
I ask Shafeeq Shajahan – a South Asian, non-binary playwright – what it is that makes Seema such an aspirational figure for queer people and their women allies. “She reminds me of all my aunties who rebelled against the ultra-conservative roadmap that too often gets laid out for Asian women,” they said. “These women don’t always find ‘the one’, which is why I found her conversation with Carrie so moving. And I don’t think she’s been crow-barred into the show as a PoC add-on, she is authentic. Plus, South Asian women have the best hair in the world, so that’s real representation right there.”
In other words, it is the person beneath the clothes that makes Seema such a powerful dresser. Unlike Carrie, Miranda and Charlotte, Seema seems to have arrived at her fifties with a firm sense of self. She refuses to be infantilised for being without a partner, and she refuses to spend even an hour in situations where she is not enjoying herself. She will not start wearing woven berets because she is dating a retired furniture designer and she will not get a cartoon tattoo just because she is dating a stand-up comedian. She knows herself too well.
This is an elite saleswoman (the best in the business, we are told), schooled in the art of dressing for success. The Gucci stilettos, the sculptural Lanvin bags, the Balmain gowns, the Fendi capes: these are the hard-won rewards of being as impressive at work as the properties she markets. “I splurged on that bag as a gift to myself after my very first big sale,” she tells Carrie when her Birkin gets stolen. “I bought it so long ago there wasn’t even a waitlist!” While the original trio devolve into pale versions of their former selves, Seema the ambitious singleton looks aspirational.
It helps that her clothes (moneyed and plush, like the inside of a dimly-lit hotel bar) are so clearly the effects of a woman who has learnt to live well. Where Carrie’s psychic break continues to express itself through pigeon bags and Bono glasses and wide-brimmed fedoras, Seema does not suffer from the same self-dramatised main character syndrome. There are things we do not know about her and that self-possession shows in what she wears. Big swags of satin, belted, and always in a palette of earthen neutrals, she brings mystique to this heinous (and perfect) programme. Seema Patel puts the Sex And The City into And Just Like That.