‘And Just Like That’ Episode 5 Finally Gave Carrie Bradshaw Back Her Joy

Every now and again on Sex and the City, Carrie Bradshaw would meet a certain kind of man. He’d be cute but not devastating, and their chemistry would be undeniable but not quite smoldering. He would stick around for an episode or two, enabling some of the show’s most puckish humor, and then he would kindly exit stage left while Carrie and the girls gossiped about him at brunch. In its second season, And Just Like That is finally bringing these guys back.

Last season, we got Peter—a figure best remembered for projectile-vomiting next to Carrie after a date and not much else. And at the start of this season, there was Carrie’s podcast producer Franklin, who unfortunately got laid off along with her and the rest of the team when she refused to talk about vaginal dryness on air. (I’m still baffled by that—literally, why?) This week, we finally got a whiff of the old Sex and the City when an app developer named George Campell (Peter Hermann) nearly runs Carrie over in a bike lane. Now that’s love in Manhattan, baby!

Critics have already proclaimed that And Just Like That Season 2 feels a lot more like Sex and the City, and this week feels like the beginning of that transformation. Carrie’s dressing up like Cosmopolitan editor Helen Gurley Brown for Charlotte’s Halloween benefit before moseying over to a hotel bar to pick up guys with her friends Seema Patel (Sarita Choudhury) and Nya Wallace (Karen Pittman). Charlotte (Kristin Davis) and Harry (Evan Handler) show up in The Americans cosplay, while Miranda (Cynthia Nixon, who also directs this episode) dons a clown nose to satirize “the comic disaster that is my life.” Does it get more Sex and the City than this?

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