There are many ways And Just Like That differs from its Manolo-shod predecessor, some for the better (it’s great to see more queer and non-white characters) and some for the worse (it’s all just so… clunky) but there’s one change I can whole-heartedly get behind: the show’s apparent disavowal of the sanctity of its central clique. Where Sex and the City focused on a mostly closed unit of four, And Just Like That follows an expansive network of variously interrelated individuals. It’s a healthier, more realistic representation of friendship, and I love to see it.
Growing up, I always wanted to be in a clique: a close-knit gang of pals who knew each other inside-out and stuck together, forsaking anyone outside the group. The women of Sex and the City might be the ultimate iteration of that: firm friends who regularly meet to eat brunch, drink cocktails and talk about everything with one another – and no one else. OK, sometimes they let Stanford join in, but only when it’s not “just the girls this time” (I’m looking at you, season six Carrie). Other acquaintances do feature every so often (particularly in season one, when the show was still figuring out its format), but, while they’re frequently extremely well-drawn and memorable characters, they mostly serve to underpin specific plot points, appearing in a single episode before disappearing. Those people aren’t important, you see: Carrie and her girls have each other, which is all they could ever need.
That’s how I thought friendship was supposed to look – a self-contained and self-sustaining group – because it was how it was always presented to me, in books like The Baby-Sitters Club and The Famous Five, then, later, in TV shows like Friends, How I Met Your Mother, and, of course, Sex and the City. So, I did my best to replicate it, but it rarely worked out like I hoped. Obsessing over group dynamics rather than simply focusing on my own, one-on-one relationships made me constantly anxious about what everyone else was doing. I’d compare my friendships with those between others in the group, becoming paranoid that people were closer with one another than with me. More often than not, I was left feeling like I was on the outside looking in. I thought that I was doing friendship wrong.
Sometimes, though, things did work out: I was part of a lovely gang in sixth form which we unofficially called “The Eight” – a shorthand grown out of repeated references to doing things “just the eight of us” (“want to hang out at mine on Saturday? Not a big party or anything, just the eight”). We had in-jokes and developed a kind of private language as we self-mythologised, like describing significant events as “gates”; “Lemon Gate”, when Andrew ate a whole lemon – pith and all – for a dare, or “Sambuca Gate”, when everyone did flaming shots and Emily somehow ended up in A&E with a broken finger. I remember those days fondly, because the truth is that, when things are going well, it feels good to be in a clique: there’s a sense of safety in it (broken fingers aside), a sense of belonging. The problem is, it doesn’t last.
Things changed: school ended, and we were scattered across the country as we all set off on different paths. We kept in touch, but it wasn’t the same. I threw myself into my university’s theatre society, which went some way to satiating my need to be in a group: when you’re part of a cast – working together towards a shared goal, seeing each other most days for rehearsals – camaraderie builds quickly. You feel like you’re part of something, like you belong, and it’s amazing. But then the show ends, everybody goes back to their regular lives, the sense of a unified purpose dissipates, and you’re left feeling lost. To mitigate that, I turned to my housemates: surely they could provide the close, exclusive group I so vehemently believed I needed? Sometimes they did, and I wildly contorted myself in an effort to keep it that way, censoring myself, shrinking myself, pursuing a romantic attachment I didn’t even really want because I thought – subconsciously, at least – that it would help preserve the unity of the clique.
It had the opposite effect, of course: by trying to hold everyone close to me, I ended up driving them away, and hurting myself in the process. It’s something that’s captured brilliantly in the TV adaptation of Dolly Alderton’s bestselling memoir Everything I Know About Love. Maggie (a fictionalised Alderton) is desperate to preserve the dynamic of her friendship group. When her friend Birdy falls in love, Maggie greets it, and the changes inevitably accompanying it, with resistance and resentment, leaving Birdy feeling she has no choice but to remove herself from the equation altogether. The series ends (spoiler alert) with Maggie all alone, having alienated herself from her friends. That’s the problem with cliques, as I eventually came to realise: people, and the relationships between them, naturally shift and change; a too tightly-knit gang doesn’t leave room for that.
It would be remiss of me not to acknowledge that the portrayal of female friendship in Sex and the City was groundbreaking: it was the first time we saw women on-screen talking that freely and openly, and looking back now, 25 years on, it remains fantastic viewing. Still, I’m glad that, in And Just Like That, the shape of that friendship has evolved: Carrie, Miranda, Charlotte, Seema, Lisa, Nya, Anthony… They all know each other, sure, but they are not a group and we very rarely see them in the same place at the same time. The show also gives more space and significance than Sex and the City did to its peripheral characters, like Carrie’s jewellery designer neighbour Lisette, whom she curls up with in bed eating chocolates, or her ex-podcasting colleague Jackie, whom she probes about the vagaries of cis-het men. Carrie has a much wider circle of close friends now, and I’m happy for her.
I’m still friends with (most of) The Eight, and I still have friends from university. These days, though, I’m not so concerned with being a part of a group. Instead, I try to focus on nurturing my individual relationships. As a result, I, like Carrie, have friends from all different areas of my life; school and university, writing and bookselling, boating and parenting. Some of them know each other, but most of them don’t, and I’m OK with that. It isn’t a tight-knit gang, but a loosely woven network, with plenty of room for everyone to breathe and grow and move in whichever direction life takes them. It’s better this way.
