What Ho, Wee Readers and welcome to another post of The Wee Writing Lassie. Well, as you might have guess from the title of this post I’ve been bitten by the Sex and the City bug … sort of.

In all honesty I’ve never quite gotten Sex and the City, at least in anyway that made me have an emotion other than irritation at it. I can understand it’s appeal on an academic sense, four female main characters trying to push the boundaries of what’s acceptable to talk about on Tv, particularly regarding female sexuality. But in practice whenever I tuned in all I saw was four people being assholes to everyone they met, including each other. Like, yeah on a meta sense it might seem great to the audience that Miranda Hobbes stood up while having lunch with her friends and berated them for being four grown ass, intelligent women with nothing to talk about but their boyfriends – but in the narrative, the world of the show, it’s a really shitty thing to do. Like … so are they not allowed to talk about their relationships, a part of lives, in front of Miranda less she have another hissy fit?

While I’m sure there’s a greater context to that scene, once again couldn’t bring myself to stay long enough to find out, I’m still kind of sick of people holding it up as a great feminist move on behalf of the character. Because the truth is it’s only that in the meta sense, in real life if you did that you haven’t made some great feminist statement, you’ve just been an asshole.

So yeah, Sex and the City … not for me. So, what you might be asking yourself, changed? Well, nothing really. I still don’t like Sex and the City. But then the sequel happened and at first I didn’t bother to watch it. Why would I? I already hate these people, I don’t need to see them twenty years on and with back pain, I can’t imagine it’s improved them significantly. And for the next few years that was it, but then screwing around on YouTube … as you do … I stumbled across a few reviews of ‘And Just Like That’. Apparently people didn’t just hate it, they loathed every last second of it. From the new characters, the woke version of New York – even actually woke people hated that, probably because it was so forced it felt like it was making fun of them – to the main four demons themselves. Wait sorry, three main demons, because one of them refused to come back which really should tell you everything about the kind of behind the scenes drama that plagued the sets of both shows.

I enjoy a a good hate watch as much as anyone, and if Sex and the City fans … arguably the target demographic of any sequel to that show said it was objectively bad, well what reason did I have to doubt them. But I was curious, could anything really be as bad all that? So I downloaded the first episode on my iPad, and sat down to watch it with my lunch. And … I didn’t hate it. In fact I would even say that the first episode of ‘And Just like That’, was really, really good. And even now when I’ve watched the rest of Season One and discovered how truly not good the rest of it is, I will stand on my pedestal and proclaim episode one, and maybe episode two and three, are actually good. In fact back then, I enjoyed it so much that I was even planning on a blog post on why I, someone who was not a fan of Sex and the City, could be objective on the actual quality of its sequel.

That was the early stages of this blog, so you can see how things change over time. For one thing, I can admit now that I am not as objective as I naively thought I was. True, I don’t have fond feelings for any of the characters of Sex and the City. But I do have feelings, I do carry over an impression of them – perhaps poorly formed but there undoubtedly- from the previous instalment of the franchise. Thus when I see a character being so throughly … what would be the right word here … assassinated… I can’t just note it down as something that happened. Oh don’t get me wrong, I’m not devastated or angry as apparently so many other people were … I find it kind of funny.

Well, we’ve reached the part of the post where I really should introduce the main point of it, or just admit I don’t have one. Thankfully, I’ve got one and her name is Miranda Hobbs (I can’t be bothered to remember her married name) and she’s a bitch. I’ve properly just offended a whole bunch of people there, but I will stand on my sad little soap box and scream it to the heavens if I have to, Miranda Hobbs is and always has been a bitch. She looks down on everyone she meets, whether it be friends, boyfriends, or casual acquaintances – she regularly participates in the slut shaming of those she pretends to care about (despite hating to feel slut shamed herself) and she once proudly proclaimed that bisexuality wasn’t a thing. Oh, isn’t it ironic. And yes, I’m talking about Sex and the City Miranda here … just in case my hatred of her confused anyone.

Because here’s the weird thing, many people hold up that version of Miranda as a feminist icon. I assume because she wore business suits and didn’t take shit from anyone. Which to be fair, all true – she did do that. But I would hesitate to call any character who treats the other women in her life the way this one did, as a feminist. She’s got superficial traits of a feminist, she’ ambitious and has drive to succeeded in the male dominated world of law. She’s easily the kind of character an audience needing a feminist outlet would gravitate towards, but let’s not make the mistake of thinking that’s actually feminism. Feminism is about bringing all women up, Miranda Hobbs just cares about bringing Miranda Hobbs up. The fact that she is a woman while she does so, is the only thing that makes that look feminist.

The Miranda from ‘And Just Like That’ is an entirely different animal all together . Oh she’s very much still a bitch, and I really wouldn’t call her a feminist icon, but then again no one else would either. While you could conceivably call old Miranda inspirational in certain aspects of her life : she was ambitious, she knew how to stand up for herself, and at least in theory, she had strong principles and stuck to them. The New Miranda has none of this, she looks at these qualities, the very few qualities that mad Miranda someone who you could pretend was a likeable and admirable character and she spits on them.

That ambition? Gone! She throws away a very difficult to get internship so she can follow her new squeeze to LA for the summer. In an act that makes her look less like the RomCom heroine she thinks she is, and more like someone having a cross between a midlife crisis and a psychotic episode. That ability to stand up for herself has either been twisted and warped to the point she shuts down any conversation that even remotely hints at judging her for her horrible, horrible actions. Or, in the case of her relationship with Che, has vanished entirely. Turning her from a person that could stick up for themselves into someone who is both so stubbornly resistant to criticism that she stops anything interesting from being said; and so weak willed that she drops everything to be with a person who can’t even be bothered to tell her they’re moving to a whole other state in private. And then we have the biggest issue of contention with Miranda’s old fanbase, her moral decay.

For Miranda Hobbs was someone who was venomously opposed to the act of infidelity. This is a woman who would scream at her friends in the street if she caught them cheating on their partner, who threw her husband out of the house after she discovered his one night stand, and took a whole film to forgive him. To the Miranda of yesteryear while the sin of cheating on your significant other could be forgiven, given the right amount of grovelling and regret on behalf of the cheater, it was still very much a sin. It was a crime, it was something only trash people with garbage souls did. And to that the new Miranda says, unless it’s me of course.

She gleefully jumps into an affair with Carrie’s new boss Che Diaz, a Non-Binary unfunny comedian. And this isn’t just a one night stand thing either, it’s basically a full on relationship by the time Miranda finally gets up the nerve to tell her husband – at the end of the season – that’s she having an affair. And she certainly didn’t do that because she felt guilty about it.

Of course none of these observations are new, they are in fact quite common criticisms of the New Miranda. So you might be asking yourself why have I bothered to even write them down at all, then? Ha, ha, you have fallen into my trap I see. You’re right of course, there’s nothing new about noticing that the Miranda of ‘And just like that’ has degraded from her ‘Sex and the City’ counterpart. However most criticism and critics – that I have read to be fair – seem to blame the abysmal writing of the series. That obviously this was just some kind of horrific mistake on behalf of the writers. And yes, indeed, the writing of the majority of this series, is terrible. But I don’t think the writers intention for this character can be so easily read as all that. That is to say, I am throughly of the opinion that everything Miranda has done, every cringe inducing escapade, has been a deliberate attempt on the writer’s behalf to make the audience hate her.

Really, don’t believe me? You think they intended you to like a character who has sex with her best friend’s boss, in the kitchen of said best friend’s apartment, while that best friend is lying in another room of that apartment recovering from hip surgery? Really? You think they actually made Carrie, the main character of both shows and currently grief stricken widow (spoiler), pee in a plastic drink bottle because she was in too much pain to get to her bathroom without help, and the person that was meant to be helping her was too busy breaking her marriage vows were food was prepared, because they wanted you to feel sorry for that person?

And this isn’t just me pointing to the terrible things a character does and crying – the writers meant for them to do that, we were meant to hate them. No, Miranda’s actions are bad in universe and I have proof!

I ask the reader to turn their eyes once again to the character of Che Diaz.

They are not a nice person certainly, but then again as they have been written by the same geniuses that write Carrie and Miranda, that should not be a surprise. Most, if not all of the characters on this show are throughly unlikable people, with garbage souls – so expecting the non-binary person to be an exception from this is, odd. Yes, that’s the kindest word I can use, odd. But whether or not their character is deserving of all the vitriol they get is not the point here – the point is really not Che at all, but rather how the writers use them.

For you see Che is not just Miranda’s new love interest, oh no, they are her guide into the frightening new world of the LGBTQ+ community. What it is, how it works, the ins and the outs of it – I never said they did it well, but Miranda’s intense infatuation with Che is an excuse for her character to explore that side of herself, and the narrative does tend to hold them up as a leading figure in the New York LBTQ+ community, so bear with me. In a sense, the writers want us to see them as an authority figure, a yard pole for behaviour that should be allowed to be acceptable. So thus when it finally comes out that Miranda is not, as Che had believed, in an open marriage but rather simply cheating on her husband with Che – the writers want us pay attention to their reaction.

Because it’s not one of acceptance, it’s not one of humour, or pity for Miranda’s situation – it’s one of horror, and disgust. They are absolutely horrified that Miranda has essentially turned them it what they had never wanted to be – a home wrecker. It’s a mildly self centred horror, they are a self proclaimed narcissist after all, but it is a horror none the less. And when Miranda replies with the rather pathetic, “you knew this was all new to me,” with a great big grin across her face, the writer’s want you to hear Che’s next words, so I’ll repeat verbatim.

“New to being Queer is one thing, lying and married is another.”

What Miranda is doing, the cheating, the lying to both partners in the equation, this is wrong. The writers know this is wrong, and they want you to know it too. Not to teach you any kind of moral lesson – I think that would be quite beyond them – but because they want you to hate Miranda, they want you to be disgusted by her, to look at that woman on the screen and think, ‘God, she’s the worst’. And judging by the level of virtual towards the character in almost every review, or passing comment I’ve read on the internet, they have certainly succeeded.

But the thing you must be asking yourself right about now is, why? Why shank your character so hard in the belly like this? Well, before I start I want to reiterate that this is all just a theory of mine, and not hard solidified fact. Granted it’s a theory that has some legs, considering everything Miranda does – but that’s all it is, a theory. So like, when I say they did this to spite Cynthia Nixon, the actress of Miranda Hobbes, it’s a speculation. Having said that, the possible reason why they would want to do this is verified fact straight from the actress herself. She had the love interest that was supposed to awaken Miranda’s latent bisexuality, changed.

It had originally been planned to be Mia, her Professor when she went back to law school and both characters would act as a closet key to each other.

But apparently Nixion really did not like this idea – the reason why seems to change depending on where I read the interview but either it was because she felt that sleeping with her Professor was a line that Miranda wouldn’t cross, or because she found the idea unsexy. Referring to it as two straight women flopping at each other – assuming I haven’t misremembered the quote, I’m not going back to check. She then pushed for the Che character, who was not conceived as such, to be the love interest instead.

Now I could be completely wrong, maybe they had no hard feelings about this at all. Maybe they welcomed the constructive criticism, and jumped at the chance to rework their original idea to accommodate someone who would clearly know the character well, having played her for so many years. However giving the fact that Mia, and at least the remains of the law school plot are still there in the show, despite not really having a narrative purpose with the affair plot surgically removed from them, I find that unlikely. Clearly they liked the character of Mia enough to keep her in the show, and to keep the storyline of her troubles with infertility, and trying to decide if she really wants a child at all giving all she has to go through to get one. Not judging that, Mia is one of only two likeable characters in the whole show – the second being Steve, (Grady! That was the married name, okay, that was going to bother me all day, back to the rant) who we see so little of in season one, he’s more of a cameo than a character. But while her storyline is certainly one of the few I stayed awake for, I would be lying if I said it felt needed in a sequel to Sex and the City. Like this is a really interesting story, with a lot of depth and nuance to it, but what’s it got anything to do with the three remaining witches of the Upper East Side and their search for more Man Flesh? True she’s Miranda’s new friend but all that does is make Mia look like she has terrible taste in friends – particularly since their introduction was Miranda being really, really racist towards her.

Having said that, at least she has managed to escape the curse of being romantically entangled with Miranda – a silver lining if ever there was one.

Steve and Miranda were a fan favourite couple before ‘And just like that…’, so any character made the catalyst for their marriage going up in flames, was going to have an uphill task of being accepted or barely tolerated by the target audience. Perhaps Mia being an actually decent person on a show full of assholes could have managed it, but it was the death nail to the likability of Che Diaz, unfunny comedian and self proclaimed narcissist asshole.

I’m not saying that’s the only reason people didn’t like them, there were many reasons not to, but it certainly didn’t help. Which you know must have been very annoying for the Writers who spent time crafting this character and then were forced to change their entire role in the story. Che had been more imagined as a friend of Carrie’s, and a side character primarily in her storyline not Miranda’s. Which you can kind of see the bones of in the first few episodes, particularly when Che takes Carrie aside to talk about the problems she’s having talking about sex on their podcast. It would have been an interesting dynamic to watch unfold, that friendship, but instead most of Che’s scenes revolve entirely around their relationship with Miranda and now they and Carrie are the friends that never hang. Instead we got … well.

God, it’s like Miranda makes everything less interesting just by her involvement.

Ah, there’s that old feeling of hate in my chest again – it seems like the writer’s have done their jobs well. Maybe a little too well, if I’m to be honest. But what do you think? Have I just gone nuts, or is there some grounds to my mad cap theory?

If you’ve enjoyed this long ass rant on the deliberate character assassination of a fictional person why not follow the wee blog if you haven’t already. Also check me out on X, Instagram, Mastodon, Threads, Spotify, Tumblr, TikTok, YouTube, Goodreads, Facebook and Kofi where I am also active. And if you want to find out whether of not my view on Miranda has changed upon finally making myself sit down and watch the second season of ‘And just like that…”, sign up to the Wee Mailing list by June 10th. I know it’s a long way away, but I need the time. Until next time Wee readers, keep safe, write well, and a have a very bonnie day.