Alongside the revolutionary fashion, conversations around sex, and iconic friendships, a big thing we loved (and continue to love) about Sex and the City is Carrie’s voiceover. And Just Like That… it disappeared. In the reboot, we only get a brief voiceover from Carrie at the end of each episode – with no narration throughout the episode, when it comes to her and her friends’ exploits.
Fans have cried out for the voiceover’s return, with one tweeting: ‘Only thing missing from #AndJustLikeThat other than Samantha is Carrie’s voiceover.’
Another posted: ‘You can’t have it with the voiceover at the end only. It’s needed throughout so just commit to it. So what if it’s a SATC staple?’
There are so many reasons why we love Carrie’s voiceover – it’s nostalgic, it’s hilarious, it draws the characters’ storylines together beautifully. Take the commentary around Miranda’s brief dalliance with a sandwich street salesman (‘she was a lawyer and he was a sandwich') and Charlotte’s obsession with her Rabbit vibrator (‘with a little help from her friends, Charlotte decided that she wasn’t going to settle for herself‘). And obviously, all the ‘I couldn’t help but wonder...’ moments. The voiceover sealed the delicious dynamic between Carrie and her friends, and made all of their stories come to life.
Plus, since the shock of Big’s death in season one of And Just Like That, we want to hear Carrie’s interior musings even more as she navigates her grief. Along with the fact that she started a podcast – which could've easily been extended into a voiceover – Carrie’s audiobook rendition of Big’s death scene made us miss her voiceover even more.
Chances are, though, we won’t be hearing Carrie's voiceover of old again – at least if showrunner Michael Patrick King has anything to do with it. For him, Carrie’s reduced voiceover in the reboot means she has more time to be in the action, instead of trying to make sense of it from outside.
‘I always knew there would be no voiceover, because the thesis of this show is that Carrie has no overview. She’s in it,’ he told Variety in an interview. ‘And the fun of Sex and the City was that she’s almost looking at it from above, and she’s summing it all up.’
He went on to explain that And Just Like That is messier by nature than Sex and the City: ‘There’s a writerliness to the show that was all very tidy. Even if it was an ugly moment, Carrie would have a voiceover that could lighten it and give you distance on it and make the audience feel taken care of.’
So could this erasure of the voiceover, then, reflect the messiness and discomfort of getting older, and of the world as it is right now? Is it meant to demonstrate the beauty of removing yourself from the narrative and just focusing on living? Of not trying to make sense of things and just letting go?
Although you could argue a lack of consistent voiceover throughout episodes of And Just Like That distances the reboot from one of the things we loved most about Sex and the City, maybe that’s kind of the whole point. The reboot has seen a lot of experimentation – new characters, politics, points of view – and not everything has been perfect.
But if the absence of a voiceover is meant to indicate a relinquishment of control for Carrie, leading to her living in the chaos of the moment – I couldn’t help but wonder, perhaps we can come to terms with our loss.