HOLLY WAINWRIGHT: 'A love letter to my toxic friend.'

This article originally appeared on Holly Wainwright's Substack, Holly Out Loud. Sign up here.

She's selfish. Shallow. Unreliable.

She's rich. Barely works. Shops all day.

Kind of vain. Terrible taste in men.

I've known her now for 27 years. We've grown older together, and I'm not going to lie, sometimes it hurts how good she looks without sleeves, and how she still moves around in that body. The teeny-tiny one that looks just so in clothes. The one that we were all supposed to have.

I'm talking, of course, about the fictional character I've spent more time with than any other. Carrie Bradshaw, who this week announced her own demise.

Watch: 'And Just Like That' Season 3 Trailer. Post continues below.

In two more weeks there will be no more And Just Like That, and the world is collectively cheering and sneering. This show has become unwatchable, the critics say. These women have become ridiculous, they write. Carrie died a long time ago, someone posts. Ratings have been on a slow slide, reporters report.

Of course, the end of the show signals the end of the Sex And The City universe. There will be no more Carrie Bradshaw by the end of August 2025.

Amelia Lester, whip-smart Mamamia Out Loud co-host, agrees that it's time. On Monday's show she suggested that we had been in a toxic relationship with Carrie Bradshaw for too long.

She's right. We have already listed her faults, and a show centred around a skinny white lady who lives a one per cent life feels like it's from another time, like Carrie's latest book.

Listen to the full episode. Post continues afterwards.

And AJLT is an expensive white-elephant of a show whose excesses are many. Redecorating an entire apartment in a high-profile Manhattan building to shoot a three-minute scene there? Auditioning six puppet makers to get exactly the right one for a 90-second joke? Hiring and fitting out an entire bakery on a corner block in New York City and letting it stand empty, for months until it was called up for its coffee shop scenes in two shows out of five? (All of these things definitely happened, and so much more, and you can hear all about it on the AJLT Writers' Room podcast if you would like your jaw to perpetually be on the floor.)

Those excesses feel like they've been applied to the characters, too. In this iteration of the once almost gritty Sex And The City it's turned up to Eleven. The jokes, the slapstick, the reactions. It's like they've all been made bigger for older eyes to see, like the text on your sister's smartphone.

And yet, and yet.

She's also wrong. Because Carrie Bradshaw means something. That doesn't mean she should live forever, but I can't celebrate her ending. She is one of the all-time great television characters. A woman who, along with Charlotte, Miranda, Samantha and latterly Lisa and Seema, influenced at least one generation — maybe two or three — to see so many things differently: Sex, of course. Fashion, definitely. Friendship, ab-so-f**king-lutely.

I can — like many women — instantly call up a Sex And The City episode to address most of life's conundrums.

Maybe our girlfriends are our true soulmates.

He's Just Not That Into You.

Why do the Smug Marrieds get all the gifts?

If I really wanted to settle down, wouldn't I have made it happen by now?

Were you made for each other? Or were your lights just on at the same time?

I'm sorry. I can't. Don't hate me.

And more. Oh, so many more.

I will mourn my toxic friend Carrie Bradshaw. Image: HBO.

These women and their audience have been through break-ups and break-downs together. Losses of loved ones and collagen. Hair colours, jobs, friendship fights, dumb ideas, sexual discoveries. We are nothing like these women, but they are shiny, glamorous avatars, once kept close by brutal honesty and sharp little truths.

So I will mourn my toxic friend Carrie Bradshaw. Even more so, perhaps, because despite all the excesses of And Just Like That, I love that I got to watch her grow older.

There's a subtle ageism buried in some of the criticism of this show. Fifty-something women still behaving, sometimes, like besotted ingénues. Failing at relationships. Wrestling with their sh*t. Being silly, playing for laughs. We will tolerate a pratfall from a young woman, in fact they are almost compulsory in any telling of a story about a Hot Mess heroine, but not over the age of 40.

Grown-up women are meant to have our sh*t together in all ways. After all, who will hold the flailing messes of the world together if not us?

So for me, there is joy (pun intended) in seeing "old" faces getting the big romantic storylines, and the gags, and the sex scenes and the f**k-ups. Because stuff just keeps on happening to you as long as you're alive, and sometimes, it's a mess.

Carrie Bradshaw is flawed, and sometimes problematic. She's inconsistent, and often wrong. She's funny, and sad, and excellent company for a walk, coffee or cocktail on a good day. She'll keep your secrets for you, and she'll turn up when you need her.

And in those ways, the otherworldly Carrie Bradshaw is like a lot of my real-life friends.

Although not one of them has her arms. Or her shoe collection.

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Feature Image: HBO/Max