Occasionally, I still think about season six, episode nine of Sex And The City, “A Woman’s Right To Shoes.” In it, Carrie (Sarah Jessica Parker) is forced to remove her Manolo Blahnik heels at a friend’s baby shower only to have them stolen from the foyer. The friend offers to pay Carrie back but balks at the $485 price, kicking off an episode-long meditation on the choices (and spending habits) women are entitled to make. The episode is classic for a lot of reasons. It’s enraging, it’s a conversation starter, it sheds a harsh light on societal expectations of women…take your pick.
This hour of And Just Like That… rips off its predecessor and then commits an even greater sin of being terribly boring. And Carrie repeats the pun—“A woman’s right to shoes”—for the dumbest reason imaginable. You see, Carrie suddenly has a downstairs neighbor in her building’s garden unit—a very famous biographer named Duncan Reeves (Jonathan Cake)—who spends six months of his year holed up in New York writing. We are treated to a montage of Carrie walking through her house in many pairs of insane heels (set to “These Boots Are Made For Walkin’,” of course) until he finally snaps and raps on her door, demanding she remove her shoes in the house so he can sleep and write in peace and quiet.
Carrie acts as if he’s asked her to cut off her arm. “I don’t care if William Shakespeare himself is renting under me, the shoes do not come off,” she laments to the ladies over brunch. I’m sorry, what? You’re not at a party; you’re at home during the day. Preserve your arches. Miranda (Cynthia Nixon) tries to commiserate by sharing that she too is having neighbor problems at her Airbnb, and Carrie responds in the most Carrie way ever: “What does that have to do with me?” This will not be the meanest thing that Carrie says to Miranda in the episode.
Carrie does everything she can think of to win over this new neighbor except for the simple solution of removing her shoes indoors: she buys runners, she brings him a welcome basket of goodies, and she makes other people (Miranda) take their shoes off in the house. When Miranda points out that Carrie has her shoes on, Carrie says, “Yes, but I know how to walk in them.” Duncan himself orders Carrie some hideous house slippers (nursing-home slippers, according to Carrie), and of course that doesn’t go over well.
When Miranda’s actual neighbor issues escalate (he threatens her with a meat cleaver while fully naked), she temporarily moves in with Carrie and you have to wonder how these two have been friends for decades. Miranda is a terrible roommate—eating Carrie’s food, wandering the house in the nude at night, spreading out her work stuff across Carrie’s table—but Carrie is also mean and prickly. How do these two not have a better read on each other and their preferences? It becomes clear they cannot live together, and Carrie finally asks Seema (Sarita Choudhury) to help Miranda find an apartment. Seema’s only other activity this week was flirting with Carrie’s gardener again and getting turned down for a bank loan to rent her own real-estate office in Tribeca.
In the end, Duncan himself causes a bit of a racket when he forgets about his boiling pot while writing and sets off the fire alarm, and he and Carrie make peace over dinner. They both talk about their writing anxieties—he’s attempting a biography of Margaret Thatcher, and she’s trying her hand at fiction—and seem to find some common ground. When Carrie gets home, she takes off her shoes, as if this is some massive sacrifice or display of growth. The whole thing is very hollow and boring.
The better display of friendship this episode is between Lisa (Nicole Ari Parker) and Charlotte (Kirsten Davis), who drag their families “glamping.” The display of wealth here is distressing, but also confusing. Why pay to sit in giant tents while you’re still in New York and can see the Statue of Liberty. Isn’t the point of glamping to be luxuriously, grotesquely comfortable while in nature? (I am not a glamper or a camper, so I don’t know.)
Not much happens while glamping because everyone is kind of pissy: Lily (Cathy Ang) didn’t want to be away from her boyfriend; Harry (Evan Handler) keeps getting bitten by mosquitos; Lisa and Herbert (Chris Jackson) are squabbling about communication issues, and she feels guilty for having a little work crush on her editor.
But Charlotte wants more than anything to make it a nice weekend because it turns out Harry has prostate cancer. (I guess that scene where he peed his pants wasn’t as pointless as it felt at the time.) He begs her to keep it to herself because he doesn’t want everyone to think of him as “the cancer guy,” but that clearly is a bit of a drain on Charlotte. When she and Lisa escape for some quiet time, Lisa asks her if she wants to talk. Though Charlotte clearly does, she shakes her head tearfully out of respect for Harry, and Lisa nods but puts a gentle hand on her back. It feels like the only authentic moment of the episode.
Stray observations
- • I sort of thought Carrie just owned the whole house, considering she also has jurisdiction over the garden, but the show does not go into the real-estate nitty gritty for me. If she really hates this man that much, couldn’t she stop renting to him?
- • Lisa’s outfit when she’s leaving for her work trip makes her look like a haute-couture bellhop.
- • Aw, Aidan sent Carrie that stupid table that we’ve been hearing about for almost half a season now.
- • I really hate when this show evokes Samantha because it feels so unearned. But when Carrie tells Miranda that Samantha has reported Duncan is a lot of fun, I did smile at Miranda’s response: “Well, he’s like 6’5″, so that’s her kind of fun.”
- • It’s hilarious that Lisa and Charlotte decide to escape to “the spa,” and it’s a three-foot-three-inch kiddie pool. Had to cut the budget somewhere.
