Sex and the City was never interested in feigning realism, and so the dialogue - piercing, unnatural, extravagant - felt appropriately a piece of the fantasy world we lapped up each week. Nya Wallace (Karen Pittman), feels disingenuous - like our protagonists aren’t interacting with niggas out of any real desire to broaden their social circle, they’ve just been forced to by circumstance. The addition of Seema and Che, along with Black characters Lisa Todd Wexley (Nicole Ari Parker) and Dr. It’s a superficial evolution for audiences that have come to expect more diverse worldviews than Sex and the City ever offered. The show’s writers grafted women of color and queer folks onto the lives of the three primary white characters - ensconced in a world of privilege, wealth, and glamour that is either wildly disinterested in or outright hostile to those on the outside - without any barbed complications. It’s hard to be fully convinced by Choudhury’s line reading when I don’t buy Seema’s existence in the AJLT universe to begin with. If Samantha’s lines twinkled like a new Tiffany bracelet, the lines of And Just Like That … drag along your skin like cheap fake gold that leaves your wrist the color of mildew. “I will wear whatever and blow whomever I want as long as I can breathe and kneel!” Choudhury aims for something similar, but not even her skills can make cohesive what the writers haven’t thought through - the impulse to inject a touch of titillation into the blandness of middle age. “I will not be judged by you or society,” she declared in season four, in the kind of lush cadence that flies around moneyed worlds. She would take scraps of dialogue and draw them out into a full meal, infusing lines with a deliciously constructed sense of feminine excess and confidence. Cattrall similarly understood the silliness of the words her character was asked to utter and refused to look down on Samantha for saying them. Consider Seema’s line again: “I pay you to blow me, not shrink me.” Choudhury communicates the line with heated frustration, her broad posture aiming to take up space, refusing to be made a punch line in the performance. It starts and ends with the laborious humor that misunderstands what made Sex and the City so enthralling. But it’s also a disservice to a reboot that seems ashamed of its own existence, turning a story that once revolved around prickly anti-heroines into one starring soft-edged caricatures of women in middle age. It’s of course a disservice to Choudhury, a performer who seems lit from within by a fire no rude hairstylist could dampen. And Just Like That … knows it can’t exist without the forceful sexiness and humor of Kim Cattrall, so its creators wrote a character who functions as her proxy. What’s glaring here is that Choudhury has been asked to wear Samantha Jones drag - from the animal-print power suit, a kind of look that rests entirely on the confidence of the woman inhabiting it, to this silly-ass line aiming for a sharp wittiness. But as she stalks off, whatever sparkling wit Choudhury imbues into Seema’s delivery grows leaden. It is surely only thanks to Choudhury’s skill and rich presence that this line even somewhat works. She moves to sever all ties with him, but she turns back to deliver the line that has gathered us here today.Įyes welling with fury, lips tight with venom about to spill, she says, “I pay you to blow me, not shrink me.” ![]() No wonder you’re still alone!” Music and conversation cuts to a hush. “You’ve sat in my chair for ten years with your red flags and standards. ![]() “Listen to your standards,” he tells her. Forget the rigors of modern dating she faces as a woman of Indian descent in a world primed to favor whiteness, or the apps that treat people like meat on a conveyor belt. He’ll become a mouthpiece for the story’s shoddiest impulses, arguing that Seema, a longtime client and single woman - who has just left her recent paramour after discovering he was still living with his ex-wife - has become the worst thing a woman can be: picky. “Are you ready to be blown?” her stylist asks with amusement, crudely foreshadowing the cut-rate romantic narrative drama that’s about to unfold. A Fendi First Medium bag is slung over her shoulder. A cheetah-print Sergio Hudson power suit comes together around her waist with a chunky camel-shaded belt that matches her strappy heels. A silk leopard-print scarf frames her sunglasses-clad face. The luminous Sarita Choudhury walks into a hair salon and makes a beeline toward her character Seema’s stylist. And Just Like That season two owes Sarita Choudhury an apology.
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