announced<\/a> would be ending this Thursday after just three seasons, is different. It\u2019s the rare show brave enough to hate the viewer a little bit, and its own characters so much more.\u00a0<\/p>\nHow else to explain killing Lisa Todd Wexley\u2019s father twice? Or making traditionally sleek, demure Charlotte suddenly wear so many ruffles and prints? What, save profound loathing, could account for finally making Miranda gay and then having her fall for Che Diaz? Writers who loved or even liked Carrie Bradshaw might kill off Mr. Big, but they would not make her host a podcast.\u00a0<\/p>\n
And they certainly would not make Carrie\u2019s writing ability a central conceit of what will, sadly, be the final season. She\u2019s never been a particularly skilled prose stylist, but that was fine when she was dashing off her weekly column or getting $4\/word to make puns about purses for Vogue. This season, Carrie was writing a historical novel, and the writers were cruel enough to give us little snippets of it. Beginning, in Episode 1, with the first line: \u201cThe woman wondered what she had gotten herself into.\u201d<\/p>\n
OK, it\u2019s no, \u201cIt was a queer, sultry summer, the summer they electrocuted the Rosenbergs, and I didn\u2019t know what I was doing in New York,\u201d but there\u2019s nothing to indicate she\u2019s being set up by anyone with malicious intent, right? Wrong. This line will, a few episodes later, be heralded by her downstairs tenant, an award-winning biographer and, we are given to believe, expert of good writing as \u201cbrilliant\u201d and a sentence that \u201cstopped him in his tracks.\u201d Again, that sentence is: \u201cThe woman wondered what she had gotten herself into.\u201d<\/p>\n
You may be asking, well if the writers hate Carrie so much wouldn\u2019t they have Duncan say something cutting about her opening line? No. The deeper cruelty comes because I know it\u2019s bad, and you know it\u2019s bad, but nobody is going to tell Carrie. Instead, she will keep writing things like:<\/p>\n
\u201cAutumn was here, and as the leaves turned gold and the air turned crisp, the woman returned to herself. Her hours turned into days, her days turned into weeks, her pain turned into productivity. The family that would never inhabit her home, or her heart, faded from her life, the way the golden leaf faded to brown at her feet. She had done all she could. She had done all she could. She had done all she could.\u201d<\/p>\n
The minds behind And Just Like That\u2026 are diabolical and I am afraid to spend too much thinking about why I enjoyed watching them spend three seasons devising elaborate humiliation rituals for their central characters. It\u2019s possible I have my own masochistic impulse when it comes to these women. In any case, I will miss them dearly.\u00a0<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"It\u2019s pretty common these days for a television show to hold its viewers in contempt. Most \u201cbig-hearted comedies\u201d…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":59398,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[29],"tags":[49,48,75,348],"class_list":["post-59397","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-tv","tag-ca","tag-canada","tag-entertainment","tag-tv"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/59397","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=59397"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/59397\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/59398"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=59397"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=59397"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=59397"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}