In the final episode of And Just Like That…, we said farewell to Carrie Bradshaw. As the notably low-key finale ended, we saw a montage of her loved-up inner circle—Miranda, Charlotte, Seema, L.T.W., and Anthony—with their respective partners, set to Barry White’s “You’re The First, The Last, My Everything.” And as for New York’s best-dressed (and boy-obsessed) former sex columnist? She realized that, just like “the woman” from her horrifying novel: “She was not alone—she was on her own.” Men come and go, but Carrie’s friends are her real soulmates.
But there was one of her besties who we didn’t get to say goodbye to: Samantha Jones. In the first season of AJLT, when Kim Cattrall’s absence from the show was the elephant in the room, a Valentino-clad Carrie skipped off to meet Samantha for a cocktail after scattering Mr. Big’s ashes in Paris. And in the season two finale, Cattrall appeared in a (reportedly very well paid) cameo scene. But in the final goodbye? Zilch. Not so much as a “text.” The only passing reference to Samantha’s existence was in Sarah Jessica Parker’s instantly-canon Instagram monologue—which, admittedly, did make me tear up. Still, I couldn’t help but wonder… maybe this is actually for the best? In fact, is Samantha the real winner of AJLT?
Since it was announced that AJLT would be coming to a close, fans of the show have felt the whirlwind of emotions that usually follow a breakup. (Haven’t we all been in a relationship that we knew deep down was doomed, but still didn’t want it to end?) One of the weirdest things about breakups—and why they can often make you feel like you’re losing your mind—is reconciling the beginning with the end. We’re often left asking: “How could that have turned into this?” And for dedicated Sex and the City fans, that’s what watching AJLT has so often felt like. How did the original show, which so many of us still turn to for comfort and guidance, morph into such a masochistic viewer experience? How did the characters, who once seemed so perfectly rendered, become so wooden?
With her absence from AJLT, Samantha has excused herself from this slow descent—and I think her legacy will benefit from it. The original SATC gave girls, gays, and theys everywhere a taxonomy through which to categorize themselves—albeit a very white, affluent, metropolitan one. I often describe myself as “a Miranda, with some narcissistic Carrie tendencies” (I’m a writer, after all) but lately, I’ve taken to saying “the old Miranda.” I feel the need to distinguish between the SATC and the simpering, apologetic AJLT version of her. But with Samantha, there is no need to make this distinction. We can still think of her as a whole person.
Due to Cattrall’s long-running beef with SJP and pretty much everyone who was involved in SATC—except stylist Patricia Field—she was not asked to be a central part of AJLT. We don’t know what the show’s version of Samantha would have looked like, but the first season of the spin-off was reportedly adapted from the script for the never-made third SATC movie, in which Big also died. And in that script, Samantha reportedly received unwanted nude pictures from Miranda’s teenage son, Brady. Instead of having to endure moments like this, she gets to exist in a cultural time capsule, untainted by what happened next.
Of course, the “old Samantha” wasn’t perfect. As one of the more daring, outspoken characters, she’s part of some of SATC’s most poorly-aged storylines, including an astonishingly ignorant season 3 episode where she dates a Black music mogul. In the first movie, one of Samantha’s main storylines was that she was “fat.” (And don’t even get me started on the second movie.) But despite this, younger audiences have embraced her by posting fan-cam videos of the PR-maven’s best SATC moments on TikTok.
I’m not surprised by this. Although her lack of sexual boundaries sometimes veered toward concerning, Samantha embodied a form of sex and body positivity that has aged pretty well. Gen Z Writer Riann Phillip, who watched SATC for the first time in 2023, thinks that she was ahead of her time. “I had to keep reminding myself that this show first aired in 1998, a pre-app time when casual sex and hook-up culture was still fairly taboo,” she wrote, describing Samantha as “unfazed, and proudly f****** whoever she likes, societal expectations be damned.”
And that’s just it. People often make the mistake of thinking being “a Samantha” is all about sex, when really, her character is grounded in shunning gendered conventions, and being much less conflicted about it than her peers, because she knows what she wants. We all have a friend who we wish we could be more like, because they move through life with determination, seemingly unbothered about what people think of them — they’re “a Samantha,” no matter their body count.
It’s also easy to forget that Samantha had a lot of heart. She’s the type of ride-or-die friend who would show up to your book launch hours after getting a chemical peel, even if her face looked like beef carpaccio. And in season six, when chemotherapy took her hair and diminished her sex drive — her armor — she found a deeper emotional connection with Smith, displaying a vulnerability that she had always resisted. Throughout the show, Samantha’s detachment from what women are “supposed” to do often meant that she gave great life advice. In fact, some of her observations were extremely astute, like when she told a disgruntled Smith: “First come the gays, then the girls, then the industry,” a savvy proverb that condensed decades of writing about queer culture’s relationship with the mainstream into one neat line.
But if the end of AJLT feels like a breakup, then fans are much further along in the grieving process when it comes to Samantha. Since the spin-off show debuted in 2021, we’ve had to come to terms with the fact we weren’t going to see her again—until Cattrall’s blink-and-you’ll-miss-it cameo, which she insisted was a one-off. And like any breakup where time is a healer, that distance has given us more perspective on her. One day, we might look back at AJLT with a similar nostalgic fondness, but right now, it’s difficult to look past the show’s wasted potential.
And speaking of breakups, in the first SATC movie, when Samantha ends her relationship with Smith, she tells him: “I’m just going to say the thing you’re not supposed to say.” (That she loves him, but she loves herself more.) If I were to sum up the core difference between the original show and AJLT, that would be it: SATC’s characters said the thing you’re not supposed to say, over and over again. Even though some of these moments aged poorly, the underlying honesty did not—especially when compared to the more tentative “teaching moments” that defined AJLT, where it felt like everyone was always on their best behavior.
I’m not sure how Samantha—who was famously unapologetic and uncompromising—would have coped in AJLT, where the characters spent so much time repenting for the franchise’s previous chapters. I suspect Kim Cattrall realized that the best way to respect her legacy, and that of Sex and the City, was to let Samantha Jones stay there. In other words: “I love you, but I love me more.”