Carrie and Mary and Rhoda and Me

Anyone who knows me (or my writing) knows that I will forever be preoccupied with Mary (Mary Tyler Moore) and Rhoda (Valerie Harper) and all the characters on the classic sitcom The Mary Tyler Moore Show -- my all-time favorite television series. It ran from 1970-77, and even now watching an episode or two on Hulu can take a nothing day and suddenly make it all seem worthwhile.

So why get into this now? Because I thought the 2000 pilot for Mary and Rhoda, a follow-up to The Mary Tyler Moore Show set 23 years after it had ended, was the second worst sitcom continuation of its kind I had ever seen and would forever hold that distinction … until And Just Like That came along. (The very worst was the Brady Bunch follow-up The Bradys, but that's a column for another time. Or not. Frankly, it is best forgotten. Let's stick with Carrie and Mary for now.)

Much has been written about how out-of-sync And Just Like That was with Sex and the City. It's easy to understand why. We were watching characters we had come to know well and care deeply about through six seasons of television and two feature films (the first one entertaining and true to form, the second one most definitely not). But they were acting in ways that didn't make sense at all.

It is understood that And Just Like That was never positioned as a comedy; it was more of a dramedy about people we knew in their thirties and forties navigating the challenges and indignities of getting older. But it was all heartbreak and misery (and mortality). This was not the right creative direction.

Said challenges involved forming new relationships with some people, ending old relationships with others, saying goodbye to old friends, and learning to manage bottomless bank accounts. Yes, these "aging" New Yorkers had no money issues whatsoever, which automatically located And Just Like That in fantasyland. So why not allow for some genuine happiness and a bit of whimsy since the show already was somewhat unreal?

As for the indignities mentioned above, they ran the gamut from Carrie collecting and spilling her own urine all over her bed (while her caregiver Miranda was famously enjoying certain physical relations in Carrie's kitchen) to Miranda dealing with the disgusting consequences of a lactose-intolerant dinner guest's excessive bowel movements. (File the latter under Things You Can't Unsee.)

Only rarely did characters seem to be enjoying themselves -- and when they did the fun was fleeting. (I'll bet Samantha was having a good time, but she was living off-camera in London.) Seriously now, even with a financial issue or two one's fifties and sixties aren't that bad. In some ways they are the best of times -- letting go of the past, letting one's give-a-damns take long vacations, etc. -- but you wouldn't know it watching this show.

That's where the Mary and Rhoda movie comes in. In that perfectly awful two-hour misfire, Mary Richards and Rhoda Morgenstern -- both so full of life and such strong women on The Mary Tyler Moore Show and its spin-off Rhoda -- were like Carrie and her friends also navigating "old age" (which I believe was their late fifties or early sixties at the time) and suffering endless setbacks along the way. They reunited in New York City after more than 20 years apart -- time filled with travel, marriage, motherhood, widowhood and divorce -- and were now starting their "third acts," as Jane Fonda might say.

The writing on both shows was the real problem, and so disappointing that not even top-notch performances could rise above it. Mary and Rhoda, for example, made no mention of any characters from The Mary Tyler Moore Show or Rhoda, which at the time prompted me to wonder if ignoring the interests of the show's core audience (ie: fans of the original show) was the right way to go. The only familiar thing in it was Mary's iconic wall-hanging -- the letter "M" -- that hung in both of her apartments in the original series. It was hanging on her wall in Mary and Rhoda, too, but (unforgivably) it was the wrong font! For me, this lack of attention to a major detail was the final nail in this ill-advised fiasco's coffin.

Conversely, almost every character from Sex and the City popped up on And Just Like That. Even Samantha squeaked in for a few seconds. But absolutely nothing felt right. With the exception possibly of Charlotte, who seemed in many ways to be same the woman we always knew, Carrie and company were all compromised in one way or another (especially Miranda!).

This was compounded for me by the fact that every time I watched an episode of And Just Like That during its third season on Max (now HBO Max) it was for some reason followed by an episode of Sex and the City, in sequence beginning with the very first one from 1998. The effect was jarring at first, but I came to enjoy these time-traveling double features. In fact, watching season one of Sex and the City all over again throughout the run of And Just Like That proved to be an unexpected treat. It was (and still is) a show about young adults whose lives had yet to be consumed by digital media, in a New York City that had yet to be forever changed by 911 and the cruelties of our contemporary economy.

Sadly, And Just Like That consistently suffered by comparison. Sex and the City did character-driven comedy and sharp human drama so well. And Just Like That couldn't get either one right.

I can't help but feel that before ending this column and forever bidding farewell to Carrie and the others I should say something nice. After all, they did much to entertain me for many years, and I am still enjoying Sex and the City reruns. So here goes: I liked real estate power broker Seema Patel (Sarita Choudhury) very much. She was for me the only "new" character on And Just Like That who clicked. I liked her even more by the end, when she was enjoying a new relationship with Adam (Logan Marshall-Green), a hunky gardener with whom she had little in common. These two could easily carry a sexy spin-off, but only if they were backed by writers who knew how to have fun exploring an unlikely romance.

Lingering thoughts about And Just Like That make me glad that Mary and Rhoda was never picked up. Had it been, I would have watched because, for better or worse, it would have been all about Mary and Rhoda! Had And Just Like That continued for additional seasons I would have stayed with it, too … because how could I not?

Still, in the tradition of Mary and Rhoda it felt from the very beginning like the creatives responsible for And Just Like That simply did not know what they were doing. And it stayed that way until the very end, when they decided to end the show just as Carrie … now a budding novelist who had moved beyond grieving Big and negotiating Aidan and was okay with tentatively taking on the next chapter of her life on her own … had finally become interesting all over again.

Seeing her alone in her gigantic Gramercy Park palace at the last, I couldn't help but wonder … were longtime fans going to miss the best years of her life?

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