Sarah Jessica Parker Thought Ending the Disastrous 'And Just Like That' Was the 'Honorable Thing To Do'

I got around to watching the season finale of the great TV hate watch of our time over the weekend, and it really was just as awful as advertised. Despite being the last episode of the series, the runtime was surprisingly short—34 minutes compared to the usual 45 this season—as it limped into the ether with an actual toilet overflowing with sewage.

It really was the perfect metaphor. It didn’t even feel like a season-ender, much less a series finale to a sequel series of a six-season show and two films. Forget the lack of closure for the supporting characters—even Carrie Bradshaw’s storyline went out with a whimper. “The woman realized she was not alone, she was on her own.” It’s almost as though showrunner Michael Patrick King got bored, decided he didn’t want to do it anymore, and hastily wrote his way out of a fourth season.

“We felt this was the honorable thing to do,” Sarah Jessica Parker told The New York Times about ending the show. “It’s very easy to stay. It’s where we’re all happy. But you have to be principled when you make these very difficult, agonizing decisions because there are a lot of people who are affected.”

And she’s not exactly wrong about it being honorable, at least to the extent that it put longtime viewers out of their misery. As for why now, specifically? “Because that’s where the story ended. We could have gone on doing coffee shops. There’s a million ways to do it that are easy and familiar and fun, but feel exploitative to us.”

Shame they didn’t stumble on any of those million ways to make it “easy and familiar and fun” during the final season. Still, I’ll concede that continuing a bad show with millions of fans who felt some loyalty might indeed have felt “exploitative.”

Not that Sarah Jessica Parker is paying attention to the hate watchers. “I don’t think I have the constitution to have spent a lot of time thinking about that,” she told the Times. Well, clearly.

“We always worked incredibly hard to tell stories that were interesting or real.” To whom? “I guess I don’t really care. And the reason I don’t care is because it has been so enormously successful, and the connections it has made with audiences have been very meaningful.”

Meaningfully bad, perhaps. Not that I particularly cared. There’s something to be said for stringing a character like Aidan along for nine seasons only to assassinate him in the end over, basically, a broken window. The very ending may have been merely bad, but everything leading up to it was epic in its awfulness, and there is something commendable about that.

At least Harry got to end the series with an erection.