It's One of the Worst Shows on Television. So Why Are People Still Watching It?
The woman wondered what she had gotten herself into. Like many viewers of And Just Like That… , Justyne, a 38-year-old university librarian in Portland, Oregon, has found herself in a strange relationship with the HBO Max show—one she can't quite describe. She'd first discovered Sex and the City as a high-schooler, returning to the series every few years for another rewatch. But this revival-slash-sequel, now in its third season, has left her perplexed. It's not that she consumes it, so much as she puts up with it, tuning in every week out of a sense of obligation rather than for entertainment. Objectively, the show is not very entertaining. “It seems like a social experiment at times because it's like a ghost of SATC , but just enough to keep me watching it and even looking forward to it every week,” said Justyne, who asked to be referred to by just her first name in this story. “It’s a toxic kind of nostalgia I don’t quite have a word for.” And, lest you think this is a Justyne problem, no, there are no other TV series that she watches like this. AJLT , she said, is “the only show I can think of that I’d put up with all this from.”
And Just Like That… , which premiered in 2021, is not, and has never been, a critical darling . When the 2025 Emmy nominations were announced on July 15, the show was once again nowhere to be found, to no one's surprise. HBO Max wouldn't provide me with any details on audience numbers, but the independent viewership tracker Samba TV found that just 429,000 households streamed the show's Season 3 premiere in the four days after its May 29 debut—a 62 percent decline from the 1.1 million households who had watched the pilot episode four years ago. And yet, people like Justyne are still watching, even if they are less than enthusiastic about it. Some maintain a sense of loyalty to the original series. For others, there's a morbid curiosity. But viewers I spoke with also described something far more unusual behind their continued patronage of a series that most can agree is not very good: a feeling of powerlessness and an inability to look away.
But viewers also described something far more unusual behind their continued patronage of a series that most can agree is not very good: a feeling of powerlessness and an inability to look away.
Three seasons in, something far more interesting is taking place around AJLT than on it. It may be the only show on television that owes its continued existence to an audience that feels as if they are being held hostage, but who have developed a relationship with the series that's akin to Stockholm syndrome. “Jail to the writers—all of them,” said Maggie Drew Brennan, 34, a researcher in Los Angeles. “Oh, also, I want 30 seasons of this show.”
It's a feeling that crops up in the majority of professional assessments of AJLT these days. Although this season is faring slightly better with critics compared to the previous one, they have still not been kind. Reviewers, including yours truly , have chafed at the show's “ boring” and “inane plots ,” “ unlikeable and inconsistent” characters , and the gargantuan suspension of disbelief required from viewers to believe that Carrie (Sarah Jessica Parker) is writing the next Great American Novel, despite her opus opening with the same middling sentence that I stole for this story. According to the Washington Post , AJLT has become a test of the stamina of SATC fans by twisting the original series into something unrecognizable, while the New York Times Magazine believes it to be a “strange and fascinating product” that openly torments its characters by treating them with contempt. Other outlets can't seem to decide whether the show is “ the great TV hate-watch of our time ” or “ so awful… [you] can't even enjoy hate-watching it .”
Certainly, the show does have fans who genuinely enjoy it, but many others are indeed getting what enjoyment they have from hate-watching. ( Research shows we are more likely to watch things we hate , rather than simply dislike, because it sparks more emotion, can actually make us feel perversely happy , and can create a communal anti-fandom bond with others.) And across social media, these people have turned their hatred of AJLT into something of an art. They post lengthy TikTok takedowns criticizing Carrie's behavior and the strange, bumbling character that Cynthia Nixon's Miranda has become . In fact, it was a TikTokker who first noticed that the show's writers had already killed off the father of Lisa Todd Wexley (Nicole Ari Parker) in the first season before doing so again this season. The bile is particularly strong on Reddit, where most of the 56,000 members of the r/Andjustlikethat subreddit haaaate the series and have lengthy discussions about their reasons for still watching. “ AJLT is like my equivalent of cheering on a specific sports team that has lost repeatedly every season for a few years,” one user wrote in a recent discussion about their communal hate-watching experience, “but I keep rooting for them because of how good they were when I first started watching.”
It is precisely this strong fealty to SATC that keeps many viewers coming back. For 31-year-old New York City tech worker Ashlyn Trussel, the original series was a defining piece of culture that helped shape her views on dating, sex, and womanhood. “It's cheesy, but I really do feel like the show changed my life,” said Trussel. “So I have an intense amount of loyalty to the girls.” But Trussel, like her fellow SATC loyalists, has been endlessly disappointed by AJLT , finding she no longer recognizes characters who had once been so instrumental to her personal development. She now mostly tunes in with the vague hope the show will return to its roots, although, in her words, “as the seasons go on, I become less and less hopeful.”
Joseph Lezza, a 38-year-old writer in New York, also cited fidelity to SATC as his primary reason for still watching what he described as “wealth porn” that somehow still manages to bore him. “We spend so many years with these characters and get invested in their storylines and root for them that it somehow, however irrationally, feels disloyal to abandon them,” he said.
“I don't think I'm hate-watching in the conventional sense,” said a 38-year-old screenwriter in Australia who asked not to be named so as not to jeopardize future work with Warner Bros. Discovery, the parent company of HBO Max. “It feels more like watching the Instagram stories of a friend who's going through a really bad patch. Like, I'm still invested, even if this isn't what I want them to be doing.”
For Trussel, AJLT is different from other shows she hate-watches. To her, it's not a series where the characters are “so bad they're good” or make “flawed yet relatable” decisions. It's also not a series where the storyline is “so insane” she feels forced to stick it out to learn the ending. “This one is just bad, in my opinion,” she said. “I hate-watch with hope that it changes, not with any genuine interest in the storylines or connection to it in any way.”
Executive producer Michael Patrick King and the creative team behind AJLT have been clear that they view the series as an evolution of SATC and not a reboot. The problems facing Carrie and Co. are certainly different than the ones they grappled with in their 30s, and naturally the show is different as a result. These women are now approaching 60 and dealing with widowhood, grown children, and a youth culture they no longer fully understand. But the relationship between the two shows can often feel confusing. At some points, you can see AJLT treat its source material with admiration through references and in-jokes, such as when Andy Cohen shows up in this week's Episode 9, cameoing as the shoe salesman he briefly appeared as in Season 6 . At other times, it seems to show great hostility to its predecessor, going out of its way to have the current iterations of its characters—particularly Miranda—behave in ways that are completely antithetical to who we were long told they were. “It's a baffling experience. I have no idea what the show is trying to be,” said Anthony Balderrama, a 42-year-old marketing professional in Chicago. “I've never experienced a show quite like this. There seems to be both a reverence to what the original series was and a total disregard for it within each episode.”
The AJLT writers are perhaps somewhat self-aware of this complaint. In the second episode of this season, they have Miranda “discover the joy of hate-watching” (wink wink) by becoming addicted to a Love Island –esque show that she knows is trash but can't stop bingeing. Yet the storyline is also representative of what can make AJLT feel so torturous to behold. When Miranda leaps with a waitress over their shared passion for the show, it causes her to effectively stalk the poor woman in a failed, bumbling attempt to ask her out. It's mortifying behavior from a character who was once a no-nonsense evangelist for “ He's just not that into you .” Much of the season is dedicated to further embarrassing her, a slap in the face for any fans who were once invited to identify with Miranda so long ago.
Viewers I spoke with frequently faulted the show's writers for everything from clunky dialogue to inexplicable character decisions. There was also criticism that the show is over-stuffed with competing plots, some of which don't tonally gel with one another. For much of the series, for example, the majority of the show's humor has been left to Charlotte (Kristin Davis), who occasionally seems to be existing in some separate screwball comedy. “It feels like 40 different writers are working on one series without communicating or digging deeper,” said Ashleigh Carter, a 33-year-old New York editor. “The episodes seem to have no cohesive plot, no themes being explored, no ties between the women that bring them together other than the fact that they're in this show. It has become a caricature of the original series.” What keeps Carter coming back, then? To put it simply, pure morbid curiosity: “How are they going to make my girls worse?”
“How are they going to make my girls worse?”
Ema O'Connor, 33, a writer and union organizer in New York, also feels as if the writers have not been collaborating closely enough, suggesting that they have been playing a variation of Exquisite Corpse , the game where players add to a drawing or story with no context of what was added before them. Like someone on Reddit , she was particularly annoyed when a young character on the show tried to explain the meaning of polyamory to an older one, but instead referred to it as polysexuality —something completely different. “Michael Patrick King clearly just wrote it, no one bothered to Google it, and if there was anyone in the room or on set who knew the right term, they did not feel empowered to speak up,” O'Connor bemoaned. “And this is a show that is supposedly at least partially still about love and sex in New York!”
This season, two of the AJLT -exclusive characters—Che Diaz (Sara Ramírez) and Nya Wallace (Karen Pittman)—have been written out of the series, seemingly without any explanation. (Pittman had scheduling conflicts , while Ramirez's character was not a fan favorite .) But, as I noted in my review of the season, the sudden absence of the series' only real middle-class figures has only underscored the extent to which AJLT is now almost exclusively set against the backdrop of money, not sex. For many people, the result feels hollow. “ AJLT is like Carrie's new home—bigger but not better, completely empty, with no urgency to fill it,” said Glen Larkin, 44, a Los Angeles screenwriter and podcast host. “Carrie moves through the seasons like walking on her bare floors with heels, making noise but going nowhere. She can have everything she wants, but seemingly wants nothing but to complain about yogurt.”
“I'm watching just to see if the extreme wealth burns away the last of her humanity,” Larkin added. “Is this her serial killer arc?”
Charity Thomas, a 50-year-old art department coordinator in Brooklyn, also fondly recalled the more humble era of SATC when Carrie and her friends would sit on the floor of her apartment eating Chinese food out of takeout containers and playing cards. Thomas moved to New York from Chicago in the mid-'90s, and even though she is Black, she felt represented by the ladies on the screen—how they supported each other, went out constantly, and treated one another like family. Now, though, these women feel like strangers to her, splashing cash around town and surrounding themselves with new friends of color who, to Thomas, feel tokenistic. “As a middle-aged Black woman who loved these goofy white ladies, what they've become is almost antithetical to the people they were on SATC ,” she said.
Still, when the season finale airs on July 31, Thomas said she expected to be sitting in front of the television with two of her friends all the same, despite her misgivings. “We're getting together to watch the end,” she said. “I’m making soft things to throw at the TV.”
