And Just Like That Series 2 finale: How the Sex and the City sequel became the ultimate 'cringe-watch'

With a Kim Cattrall cameo finishing off the season with a flourish, the show has become mocked and loved in equal measure. Why does it inspire such conflicting emotions, asks Laura Martin.

At the opening of the finale of And Just Like That series 2, for a mere 70 seconds, fans finally got what they had been waiting for: the long-awaited cameo from Samantha Jones, played by Kim Cattrall.

Warning: this article contains spoilers for the And Just Like That series 2 finale

More like this:

–   How the And Just Like That gang are ageing in style

–   Why The Idol became TV's biggest disaster

–   How Suits became a streaming hit

Filmed as a phone conversation between Samantha and Carrie (Sarah Jessica Parker), the scene saw the inimitable Ms Jones call to say she wouldn't be able to make her surprise flight to New York after all. She wished Carrie well, and in another pleasing throw-back for avid Sex and the City viewers, made reference to the time she crashed Soho House New York pretending to be a British woman called Annabel Bronstein.

That Cattrall's appearance was held until the final episode of the series felt like a bit of a dangling carrot to viewers for sticking with a show that could be a slog, and has invoked a multitude of ever more complex feelings. 

On X, formerly known as Twitter, throughout the new run, viewers attempted to explain their conflicting thoughts: "And Just Like That is so wild because I watch every episode through my fingers like a horror movie and when it's over I wish it was 5 hours longer," wrote one person, while another added similarly: "It is an absolute disaster of a programme and in no way true to the original, but I can't stop watching it and can't wait for a new episode every Thursday."

Some might brand it a "hate-watch" – an expression that has become popularised in the past decade to refer to shows we love to mock. But that seems a term more fittingly applied to a universally panned series like HBO Max's recent The Idol, a show so bad that viewers tuned in purely to see how much more offensive it was possible to get. The way in which AJLT – created by SATC director and writer Michael Patrick King, and following three-quarters of the original quartet of gal-pals; Carrie, Miranda (Cynthia Nixon), Charlotte (Kristin Davis) and a whole ensemble cast of new friends, almost 25 years on from their original life in New York – is viewed feels completely different to that. It's more of "a cringe-watch": something fans view with a mixture of affection and embarrassment. And even as they loudly complain about its missteps online, they're guaranteed to be glued to it once more when its returns for a third series, as has just been announced. 

"I'd describe it as feelings of dizziness and anxiety mixed with extreme guilty pleasure," says Dylan B Jones, co-host of the So I Got To Thinking Sex and the City podcast, trying to describe his relationship with the show. "And if social media on the show is anything to go by, most fans are experiencing similar feelings." His co-host, Juno Dawson agrees: "I'm not sure I've felt for anything the way I feel for AJLT. It's like being in a very long-term relationship, and you're not in love anymore, but you've come too far to quit. There's still glimpses of the person you fell in love with, but I do spend time questioning why I'm still here."

The debate around And Just Like That has been thriving right from when it premiered in 2021, thanks to what Jones describes as the "surrealness of seeing characters we've loved for decades, being subjected to extraordinarily perplexing narrative decisions”. He's right: some of the characters did a complete 180: in AJLT series one, Miranda, despite being an intelligent, high-flying lawyer in SATC, became a floundering, awkward and needy woman. She was, then, suddenly an alcoholic, which apart from a few throwaway comments, was all but forgotten in season two, and then had an affair with the highly divisive character, non-binary comedian Che Diaz (Sara Ramírez).

If the storylines felt pulled out of thin air, perhaps they were. Speaking in The Cut, Cynthia Nixon explained Miranda's coming out: "It was honestly a two-sentence conversation between Michael Patrick and I … He said, 'What do you think? Should we make Miranda queer">window._taboola = window._taboola || []; _taboola.push({ mode: 'alternating-thumbnails-a', container: 'taboola-below-article', placement: 'Below Article', target_type: 'mix' });