Television ages differently when nostalgia stops demanding obedience.
New York, April 2026
Michael Patrick King’s claim that And Just Like That will age well is not really a defense of ratings or immediate approval. It is a wager on delayed understanding. His argument rests on a simple but revealing idea: audiences often punish a sequel series for refusing to remain embalmed inside the emotional logic of the original. In that sense, the backlash against And Just Like That was never only about writing choices or character arcs. It was also about the public’s resistance to seeing beloved women age in ways that disturb the fantasy they once represented.
That matters because legacy franchises are rarely judged on neutral terms. They are judged against memory, and memory is almost always unfair. Sex and the City survives in popular culture not only as a television series, but as an era, an attitude, and a version of femininity that many viewers still want preserved in amber.
And Just Like Thatdisrupted that desire by insisting that Carrie, Miranda, and Charlotte could not return unchanged without becoming artificial versions of themselves. The result was predictable. Growth was read as betrayal because nostalgia had already decided what continuity should look like.
King’s point becomes more intelligible when viewed through the history of television itself. Many shows that were mocked, resisted, or misunderstood at first later gained retrospective legitimacy once the culture around them shifted. Time changes not only taste, but the moral weather in which a show is interpreted. What feels awkward, too direct, too “woke,” too sad, or too unruly in one moment can later appear honest precisely because it refused to flatter the audience’s earlier expectations. In that sense, King is not only defending And Just Like That. He is defending television’s right to be judged outside the panic of first reception.
There is also a deeper gendered tension beneath the debate. Popular culture still claims to want mature female protagonists, but often only on the condition that they remain legible, glamorous, and emotionally familiar. And Just Like That unsettled that comfort by allowing its characters to become lonelier, stranger, more politically self-conscious, more sexually awkward, and less protected by the myth of effortless urban sophistication. That made the series messier. It also made it harder to consume as a luxury fantasy. For some viewers, that looked like failure. For others, it looked like honesty entering a space where polish had long disguised itself as truth.
This is why King’s comparison to changing perceptions matters. He is effectively arguing that reception is not fixed and that cultural products often have to outlive their own first wave of dismissal before they can be seen more clearly. That is especially true for works attached to iconic predecessors. Sequels are usually judged not on what they are, but on what they deny people emotionally. And Just Like That denied viewers the perfect return of a world they wanted back unchanged. That denial may be exactly what allows it to age better than its immediate critics expected.
Still, the bet is risky. Not every controversial sequel is vindicated by time. Some are simply messy in ways that history will not redeem. King’s confidence therefore reveals something else as well: a willingness to treat criticism not as final judgment, but as part of the life cycle of a work that may need distance in order to be read properly. That is not always self-serving. Sometimes it is accurate. Culture often needs to lose its initial irritations before it can decide what was actually being attempted.
The deeper pattern is clear. The future reputation of And Just Like That will depend less on whether it pleased viewers in the moment and more on whether later audiences come to see that it was wrestling with something television still handles badly: aging, female continuity, grief, reinvention, and the discomfort of becoming someone less iconic and more real. If that happens, the show may indeed age better than its reception suggested. Not because it was misunderstood in every respect, but because time sometimes makes honesty more legible than nostalgia ever could.
The visible and the hidden, in context. / The visible and the hidden, in context.