Sex and the City author Candace Bushnell was ‘startled’ by creative decisions in And Just Like That

Writer said she stopped relating to Carrie Bradshaw in series three of the original show

Sex and the City author Candace Bushnell has admitted she was “startled” by some of the creative decisions in And Just Like That.

The new reboot, which reunites fans with Carrie Bradshaw (Sarah Jessica Parker), Charlotte York (Kristin Davis) and Miranda Hobbes (Cynthia Nixon) in their fifties, divided critics, with many questioning Miranda’s affair storyline in particular.

In a new interview, Bushnell – who wrote the newspaper column that inspired the Sex and the City franchise – admitted that she was “really startled by a lot of the decisions made in the reboot”.

“You know, it’s a television product, done with Michael Patrick King and Sarah Jessica Parker, who have both worked with HBO a lot in the past,” Bushnell told The New Yorker.

“HBO decided to put this franchise back into their hands for a variety of reasons, and this is what they came up with.”

When asked if she saw herself in the reboot, she said: “Not at all. I mean, Carrie Bradshaw ended up being a quirky woman who married a really rich guy. And that’s not my story, or any of my friends’ stories. But TV has its own logic.”

Bushnell said she stopped relating to Carrie in the original show’s third season, when she left the writing team.

Sarah Jessica Parker as Carrie Bradshaw in ‘And Just Like That’ (©2021 WarnerMedia Direct, LLC. )

“When the character of Carrie sleeps with Mr Big after he’s married to somebody else – that’s when I felt like the character’s becoming something other,” Bushnell said.

The writer applauded the new show’s racial diversity, claiming the original Nineties series had a largely white cast because “that was how people cast things then”.

“It was the way that people in TV were… I don’t think anyone was consciously trying to be nasty about it; they just really didn’t think,” she said.

And Just Like That’s recurring cast includes several people of colour, including Sara Ramirez as comedian Che Diaz, Sarita Choudhury as estate agent Seema Patel, and Karen Pittman as university professor Nya Wallace.

And Just Like That... can be streamed on NOW.