Let's go round again

And just like that, we can't let anything go

As I saw the smiling, greying stars of 1997 sleeper hit The Full Monty posing to promote their Disney Plus spin-off series 25 years later, I thought: ENOUGH.

I grew up in Sheffield, where the film is set, and the year I turned 18, my home town thrust its way onto the world stage, with the movie nominated for Oscars and turned into a Broadway play. It was an exciting time.

I passed my A-levels, went to university, met my first serious boyfriend and thought I was unstoppable. I’d voted for the first time that spring and the Tory government that had ruled for my entire childhood was finally gone.

When Tony Blair played Things Can Only Get Better throughout his election campaign, I took it as a guarantee. The arc of the moral universe was bending towards justice.

Sure, things hadn’t worked out for my parents’ generation, but we were smarter than them, we were coming of age as the UK came out of a recession, we had Britpop.

A year later, Sex and the City came along. My then-boyfriend tuned in excitedly then just as quickly switched off after realising it wasn’t so much about sex or even the city as women’s inner lives and stuff. Also shoes.

I continued to watch, enthralled by the Cosmos and heels and the (fantastical) life of a freelance journalist in Manhattan. It was wholly unrealistic and entirely what I hoped my future would look like, even though I’d already dropped out of university due to a chronic illness from which I’d never recover.

Post-9/11, my faith in the future and the moral arc of the universe started to droop but Carrie Bradshaw and co. continued to search for love and the perfect pair of Manolos and in the last season, we saw them all settle into the lives they wanted: Carrie with Mr Big, Samantha single, Miranda married to Steve, and Charlotte and Harry about to adopt a baby.

It didn’t need an update or an upgrade, but it got one, then another. First in 2008, when — after an initial, traumatising wedding day dumping — Big and Carrie tied the knot and Miranda and Steve weathered infidelity. Then, regrettably, in 2010, when the whole gang went to the Middle East to be racist and make fun of Samantha’s post-menopausal vaginal dryness.

Bringing back pop cultural properties used to be rare, so we knew that when the SATC movies had wrapped up, we wouldn’t see these characters again. Apart from anything else, Kim Cattrall had repeatedly stated her lack of interest and they couldn’t make it without her.

But then, just like that… they did. Calling it And Just Like That… meant that they could chuck in new characters, ditch old ones, and play by their own rules. Have Carrie work for a podcast that inexplicably takes live calls? Why not. Add the most annoying comedian character in existence and have them break up Miranda’s marriage? Sure.

Kill off Mr Big on his Peloton in episode one so Carrie spends the whole first season in the depths of grief? Please god no, was my first reaction, shortly followed by oh, go on then.

By the time AJLT came around, I’d been hurt before.

When Gilmore Girls was rebooted as A Year in the Life, I blocked off the day in my diary, stocked up on Twizzlers and Pop Tarts, stayed off social media in case of spoilers, barricaded myself in my bedroom and pressed ‘play’.

Huh.

The theme tune wasn’t the same, Sookie wasn’t there except for a cameo where she confirmed that she and Lorelai barely spoke anymore, and Rory was whiny, entitled and lacking in journalistic and interpersonal ethics.

The long-awaited season four of Arrested Development was truly execrable and Veronica Mars came back for one decent follow-up and one that left fans of the original devastated.

Also back, and also widely considered bad: Will and Grace, Roseanne, 24, Dallas, Roswell, Dynasty, Murphy Brown and Gossip Girl.

The Friends reunion, meanwhile, was not so much bad as sad. A couple of hours of “remember the episode when….?” when the cast could have just as easily turned to everyone watching and chanted, “YOU’RE OLD, YOU’RE OLD, YOU’RE OLD”.

I get the impulse to make these programmes. Advertising dollars are down (I assume), familiar names are comforting and we’d all like to get back to a time before Covid, Donald Trump and Brexit.

New and unfamiliar characters no doubt feel like a risky proposition for studios and audiences alike.

Plus, maybe there’s a part of all of us that believes that if we keep watching the same old shows, the planet won’t fry, our governments won’t constantly persecute the people who least deserve it, and none of us will have to change or die.

Whereas SATC promised you would always have your friends, AJLT suggests the more sober truths that life will always be sad, that midlife is mostly about navigating loss of different kinds and that women’s real problems aren’t the humiliations of dating but our inevitable march towards death and plummeting revenues in the podcasting industry for everyone except top-tier celebrities.

As the first series wore on, though, I warmed to it and to Carrie’s Big-free future. Let’s face it, he’d always been a nightmare to talk to or take anywhere. No one wanted to watch him and Carrie living a smug, settled life.

If I have to see these characters again (and apparently, I do, at regular intervals, for as long as we both shall live), they’re going to have to be facing new challenges: burying a husband here, questioning their sexuality there, each of them making friends with someone from another race for the first time.

What usually stops even the most poignant programme or film from plunging us into despair is that it ends, leaving us in the middle of the action so we can imagine the rest.

If we keep watching Carrie and co. forever, we’ll have to witness them in their care homes, falling and not getting up, ordering IV Cosmos into their 90s, their lives no better than our own.

And yet, while they’re still around, I can’t turn away. Even despite Carrie’s continued cowardice and Kim Cattrall’s overpaid and underacted season two cameo, when the time comes, I’ll watch series three of And Just Like That… as soon as it debuts.

It might only provide the faintest lift of dopamine as opposed to the full rush but that’s better than nothing.

It’s like life with a long-term illness in an ongoing global pandemic amid a genocidal society on a rotting planet: not what any of us were hoping for, but the best we can get. As long as I’m here, I might as well press ‘play’.