Like millions of other Sex and the City (SATC) fans across the world, I was palpably excited for And Just Like That (AJLT).

Having put the horrors of the second Sex and the City film out of my head, I was genuinely interested to see what the four favourite formerly single girls had been up to during their time away.

I wasn’t even put off when Kim Cattrall announced she wasn’t going to be returning as Samantha. While she was a pivotal player in the original quartet, Samantha’s storylines often failed to extend beyond which handsome man she was shagging that week.

I just couldn’t wait to sit around the brunch table with those women again, listening to them discuss life and love in their 50s, each salient point perfectly packaged with the characteristic sparkling wit that made the show so popular.

But as And Just Like That creaks towards the finale, I couldn’t help but wonder – why am I still watching it?

AJLT is clearly trying to right the wrongs of its predecessor – and SATC had numerous problems. Its lack of diversity, lazy reliance on stereotypes and its painfully outdated and offensive opinions on topics such as bisexuality and transgender women were certainly problematic.

While And Just Like That should be applauded in trying to correct its previous mistakes, the writing team has done such a cack-handed job in trying to be as ‘woke’ as possible that’s it’s embarrassing to the point of unwatchable.

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Characters of colour, such as Miranda’s law professor Nya Wallace, and Charlotte’s friend Lisa Todd Wexley, have seemingly been tossed in without being fleshed out properly. All we know about Nya is that she’s struggling to have a baby, a storyline we struggle to care about as Nya is given such little screen-time, while LTW merely serves as a mirror of Charlotte’s own middle-class neuroses.

Even when And Just Like That tried to honour different cultures – such as the Diwali episode where Carrie meets her friend Seema’s parents – the show is littered with errors: Seema tells Carrie ‘let’s get you a sari’ and Carrie responds that she saw one she loved.

The outfit she ends up wearing is actually a lehenga though – a different mode of outfit entirely. That’s not rectifying former mistakes, only further demonstrating ignorance.

The vast spectrum of gender has also been poorly handled by the reboot with the introduction of Che Diaz, who for whatever reason seems to insist on referring to themselves by only their full name, being another clumsy addition.

I quite like how Che is not defined by any struggle they faced being non-binary. They are fiercely unapologetic about who they are, and confident enough to know themselves, serving as a way in for Charlotte (and by proxy, the audience) to understand different gender identities (with Charlotte’s youngest child, Rock, also realising they’re more comfortable with gender-neutral pronouns).

But beyond that, Che has nothing more to them than being a promiscuous person that smokes weed, hosts what sounds like the world’s worst podcast and has sex in their colleague’s kitchen.

It’s great that the show wants to correct its former mistakes and consider a broader spectrum of characters. But if writers want to do that, they should at least make the effort to do it properly: researching and respecting these characters and giving them more than just flat, two dimensional personalities.

And Just Like That’s biggest sin, however, is the writers’ fundamental misunderstanding of characters they themselves created – with this being most evident when we see how Miranda has changed from the original series.

Her original arc in Sex and the City saw the once cold and cynical lawyer opening up her heart to Steve, her hard edges softening after she had a baby, moving to Brooklyn and even taking in Steve’s mother as she battles with Alzheimer’s.

In And Just Like That, Miranda is a bumbling, binge-drinking mess, who doesn’t like modern things such as podcasts (surely Miranda would love podcasts?), is fed up with her marriage to Steve (who is meant to be mid-50s but behaves like he’s about 106) and desperate for excitement.

I can appreciate that Miranda and Steve – the franchise’s longest-lasting couple now Mr Big is dead – could have grown apart. I can applaud And Just Like That for showing how a woman in her mid-50s is exploring a perhaps untapped part of her sexuality she never was aware of before.

But what I struggle with is the show’s inability to simply tell us that, without Miranda looking foolish and Steve appearing to be an idiot who doesn’t know how to finger.

In its attempts to be as ground-breaking as its predecessor, the writers of And Just Like That have failed to really glean what Sex and the City was always about.

Sex and the City was never a show that followed trends, it set them: it pushed boundaries without ever really trying. And Just Like That is trying too hard, and has forgotten what really lies at the heart of the show: the girls and their tight-knit friendship.

By putting Carrie, Miranda and Charlotte in these new, modern settings, writers have shown just how little they understood their own characters – or the audience watching it.

And Just Like that is tarnishing the amazing legacy Sex and the City had once left behind. It’s time for the writers to let Carrie, Miranda and Charlotte go.

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