People are talking about And Just Like That ..., the Sex and the City reboot that runs on HOT 3 on Thursdays at 10:30 p.m., because it finally delivered on the long-promised reunion between Carrie (Sarah Jessica Parker) and her former fiancé, Aidan (John Corbett).
In the sixth episode of season two, Carrie, beginning to come to terms with the loss of her husband, Big (Chris Noth) in the first season, emailed Aidan. In the seventh episode, which aired last week, he got back to her, asking her to have dinner with him on a night that just happened to be... Valentine’s Day. After some mild complications – Carrie went to the wrong restaurant, echoing the episode of Sex and the City years ago when no one came to her birthday at a chic eatery, they finally reconnected.
Aidan, conveniently divorced, at first seemed to have forgotten their tangled history, in which she cheated on him and then dumped him. It suddenly came back to him, and he refused to go to her apartment, but they found a workaround of sorts that might allow them to rekindle their relationship.
But what has been lighting up the Internet is not so much what happened in the reunion, but the fact that it happened – that a character trailing history from Sex and the City showed up, reminding us of why we cared about these people and this show in the first place.
The huge cast of glossy-but-bland new people just can’t compete. It didn’t hurt that John Corbett has never looked better. According to reports, show-runner Michael Patrick King asked him to lose weight and get into shape before filming his scenes, something that is generally demanded of women in the entertainment world, not of men. He was also given a style makeover: Out went the wooden furniture maker’s turquoise jewelry and plaid shirts and in came a $600 designer jacket that looked odd at best. It’s impossible to say now what the series will do with Aidan, but it’s definitely a step on the road to getting the band back together, the last step of which will be the much-anticipated cameo by Kim Cattrall as Samantha.
AMAZON PRIME is launching a new series on August 4, The Lost Flowers of Alice Hart, starring Sigourney Weaver in a complicated and sometimes eerie family saga set in New South Wales. Weaver plays the grandmother of a girl who was badly abused by her father. The series gradually reveals the twisted family history and shows how the girl, Alice, comes to terms with the legacy of abuse when she grows up. Based on a bestselling novel by Holly Ringland, it’s long on atmosphere and intensity but will be too slow for some, even though it is anchored by Weaver’s commanding presence.
I usually think trigger warnings are absurd, but even though The Lost Flowers of Alice Hart does not show graphic violence, the series presents the abuse in a way that it very vivid, which is disturbing, and viewers should be prepared.
THE HBO series Winning Time: The Rise of the Lakers Dynasty, about how the Los Angeles basketball franchise became a billion-dollar business starting in the late 1970s, is back for a second season, on Hot HBO, Hot VOD, and Yes VOD from August 7. The first season, created by Adam McKay, who also made The Big Short and Don’t Look Up, was compulsively watchable, even for those who, like me, have little to no interest in basketball. The second season picks up where the first one ended, with the Lakers, triumphant after winning the NBA Finals in 1980, setting out to turn the one win into a streak, and it focuses on the next four years. It’s still not clear when the series will turn back to its 1991 prologue, in which the Lakers’ star Magic Johnson discovers and announces he is HIV Positive. But knowing that moment is coming gives a certain poignancy to the story. McKay is a master at making quirky, not conventionally likable characters interesting, and almost all of the season one cast is back, among them the outstanding Quincy Isaiah as Johnson, John C. Reilly as the Lakers’ visionary but abrasive owner, Jerry Buss, and Adrien Brody as coach Pat Riley. If you like McKay’s quirky sense of humor, this could be the perfect summer fun series.
Israelis making inroads
ISRAELIS ARE making inroads on television all over the world, even in the realm of international reality TV, and in the series, The Fashion Hero, broadcast in Israel on Cellcom TV starting on August 1, Israelis play a significant role. The show takes people who don’t fit the fashion-model mode – although they are all actually very good-looking, albeit in somewhat unconventional ways – and coaches them in a competition in which the winner will become a brand ambassador. Adi Barkan, an Israeli fashion photographer who has campaigned against using anorexic models, is one of the mentor judges, while Shani Kvodi, an actress who has struggled with bulimia, is a participant.