Greetings, icons!
We are now in a post-2025 Emmy nomination announcement world and a post Buckingham Nicks reissue announcement world. And, to top it all off with the most bittersweet of cherries, we are in a post-And Just Like That cancellation1 and poop-filled finale world.
(Edited to add because the moment after I published this post, I saw THE NEWS: We are also officially in a post-Taylor Swift & Travis Kelce engagement announcement world…I will be leaving them out of the discourse below. All I will say now is this: I did in fact listen to her entire New Heights episode and thought it was cute. Happy for them even if Travis Kelce is boring!)
Thus, it is a time for much-needed reflection, contemplation, and speculation. My favorite activities! We’re moving forward, but we’re also looking back.2
Sometimes compulsive heterosexuality delivers. I consider one of its greatest gifts to be Good Girls Go Bad by Cobra Starship featuring Leighton Meester3. The song’s call-and-response bridge is so dumb and fun, and most importantly the musical embodiment of “ahh yes, the two genders.”
Without compulsive heterosexuality, there would no be toxic heteronormativity, otherwise known as fuel for Fleetwood Mac’s longevity. Arguably toxic heteronormativity’s most iconic duo, Stevie Nicks and Lindsey Buckingham left bread crumbs earlier this summer hinting at the reissue of their debut record, Buckingham Nicks. In celebration of the now official and much-anticipated news, may I point you towards this excellent Switched on Pop episode exploring that buried treasure of an album and Madison Cunningham and Andrew Bird’s interpretation, Cunningham Bird.
The fact that Buckingham Nicks predated the duo’s stardom bodes well for its reissue. It seems to be the platonic (lol) ideal of riding the nostalgia wave. Instead of trying to extend an already hashed-out storyline, the re-release is making something public that was not commercially available for decades. It’s a win-win for both the artists and the fans alike.
While capitalizing on fan nostalgia has always been a thing in the music industry, it is much more precarious in film and television. Which leads us to another queen of toxic heteronormativity, that plucky Carrie Bradshaw. I’ve just decided that I will die on this hill: she is as much of an archetypal anti-hero as Tony Soprano, and she was doing it first!4
Carrie as self-obsessed protagonist, mired down by the ramifications of her questionable decisions but buoyed by her (also at times questionable) friendships, is the legacy I’ll choose to remember after the dust settles from And Just Like That’s three-season run. It’s deeply troubling to see what the grip of complete creative control can do to such beloved characters and the mini-universe they inhabit. Every character that graduated from SATC into AJLT’s alternate reality was a flattened, lobotomized version of themselves. And each new person introduced into the show’s social circle clearly served an externally-motivated purpose to assuage the creative team’s insecurities (don’t get me started on Che Diaz).
I am not alone in any of these sentiments and not the first person to posit that I really would have loved to see Carrie navigate her grief and the trials and tribulations of older adulthood more. I think about the work of writer and speaker Nora McInerney. I found her podcast, now called Thanks for Asking (formerly known as Terrible, Thanks For Asking), in the wake of my own grief almost eight years ago. In a perfect world, I imagine AJLT taking on the spirit and flavor of McInerney’s projects. Something that gets at the notion from her viral TED Talk, that “…we don’t ‘move on’ from grief. We move forward with it.” The idea that Carrie could still cherish her Big love while also finding new footing was apparently an idea so atrocious to the AJLT writer’s room that they just had to re-entangle her with Aiden. Ugh.
(Maybe it is too much to ask of the industry these days to deliver “real,” or at least, real-adjacent stories. I’ve been thinking about an interview with Anne Helen Petersen on KCRW’s The Sam Sanders Show5. Petersen mentions how modern media consumption habits are changing, and the authentic narratives of people facing real issues in their real lives are more available in podcasts than other mediums. This phenomenon definitely articulates why I’ve been an avid follower of McInerney’s work for years.)
The last scene of AJLT kind of embodied its core issues in a way. I’ll try to explain: we finally see Carrie realize she can be content and fulfilled with just herself, yay! But at what freaking cost? She’s dancing around her huge-ass Gramercy Park house and it’s devoid of all her signature style and flare. Even though this scene was built up to be an earned moment of character development, it landed elsewhere. It was just…sad. It was giving profound, existential emptiness. It was giving allegory of the cave, but like before the prisoner goes outside and sees everything beyond the shadows. She has herself, yes, and she also has this mansion of unrecognizable stuff….it just isn’t what it could have been!
Perhaps AJLT can serve as a cautionary tale against riding the nostalgia wave and resurrecting once commercially viable and popular culture. We girl-bossed a little too close to the sun on this one, SJP & MPK6.
As Ellis Grey, Meredith’s mother on Grey’s Anatomy, famously said: “the carousel never stops turning.” Time keeps moving on, but that doesn’t mean I can’t keep looking back to share some stuff that may not be as ~relevant~ right now:
This is a lovely essay about Zohran Mamdani and Ramy Youssef that brought me to an inexplicable alchemy of emotion and tears, written by the magnificent Hanif Abdurraqib.
One of my favorite shows this year, The Pitt, is up for a shit-ton of Emmy’s AND just released a teaser for Season 2. I’m so seated!!! And I’m making KD watch season 1 in anticipation. Highly recommend the series if you consider yourself an alum from stanning Grey’s Anatomy and will forever have a Grey-Sloan Memorial Hospital-sized hole in your heart because it is now basically unwatchable. Side note/precious moment from The Pitt: Taylor Dearden’s Dr. Melissa King reciting the Savage chorus to herself is one of the best details from this show and gives me strength on the daily,
I just listened to this KQED Forum episode, Is Your Perfectionism a Problem? and felt so seen. Lots to unpack from it, but I’ll save that for my therapist for now. :)
Iconically yours,
JCW
While the official narrative from HBO is that AJLT’s ending was showrunner-led, it seems suspicious given where the storylines were at the time of the announcement. Not to mention that the The Gilded Age announced its renewal a few days before the AJLT news.
I swear I had this phrase and concept drafted BEFORE the internet somehow showed me a headline from the President in my alma mater’s online magazine. So rude.
Thinking of this song in more depth led me to wonder about Leighton Meester’s music career. If she were fifteen years younger, could she be an Addison Rae and Tate McRae contemporary? If you were looking for a sign to go into a deep dive of her three album discography, this is it.
Sex and the City premiered on June 6, 1998. The Sopranos followed seven months later, first airing on January 10, 1999.
It is with great regret that I omitted Sam Sanders from the first Iconic Behavior post, as he is an indispensable face on my personal Mt. Rushmore of culture critics.
SJP = Sarah Jessica Parker. MPK = Michael Patrick King (Writer and director from the SATC days/AJLT’s showrunner).
All the things I wanted to hear your takes on and more! Thx for weaving together the personal and the public so well