‘And Just Like That’ Boss Talks Reviving Carrie Voiceovers, New Season 3 Characters & More

Fun, summery, sexy, and aspirational are four words And Just Like That… showrunner Michael Patrick King uses to describe the third season of the Sex and the City spinoff, which finally returns to TV screens after a two-year hiatus. “I think it is everything I want it to be,” he tells TVInsider. “It is a continuation of these characters that you have known, some for many, many years, and some for just two years, and where they are on their lives.”

Despite the fact that it’s been two years since we’ve seen Carrie (Sarah Jessica Parker) and her Manhattan girl gang, it’s only been a five-week gap for the show, and “everybody picks up from where they left off,” teases King.

That means Carrie and her former love, Aidan (John Corbett), who rekindled their romance over the course of Season 2, are still trying to figure out how to work a sudden long-distance relationship after Aidan’s decision to wait five years until he can fully commit to living with Carrie in New York. She’s not the only one playing the waiting game: Seema (Sarita Choudhury) refuses to put her life on hold to join boyfriend Ravi (Armin Amiri) on an Egyptian movie shoot. Meanwhile, Miranda (Cynthia Nixon) has made amends with ex Steve (David Eigenberg), Charlotte (Kristin Davis) and Harry (Evan Handler) are smoothly navigating parenthood, and Lisa Todd Wexley (Nicole Ari Parker) is dealing with the fallout from her recent miscarriage.

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“It’s not starting over,” King says about the paths of the characters for Season 3. “It’s continuing. We’re always trying to say that no matter what your age, you’re still growing, you’re still living, you’re still experiencing a new thought or a new direction, and it’s liberating, because at this point, society is still telling people in their 50s that they should be kind of wrapping it up. You figured it out. And what we’re trying to do is say, no, there’s more ways to go. Something is going to come into your life at any age that makes you have a new thought and maybe go in a new direction, depending on how great or how ruthless, or how much you want to find love or fulfillment or career.”

Read on for more of what to expect from the show’s much-anticipated third season.

I’m very excited about this season. I’ve been a fan since the original series, watching in my little tiny New York studio bedroom and wishing I could live in some big West Village apartment.

Michael Patrick King: Wait until you see Carrie’s apartment this season. It is so gigantically aspirational for New York. It’s one of my favorite characters in the show this year, where she lives at Gramercy. And, you know, part of the fun of Sex in the City is back in the day, was you looking at it in your studio and thinking “someday”… and then Carrie living in a one studio, and then thinking “someday,” and here it is, that day is here.

So you’re saying that’s going to make me want to move from my nice little suburban house with a backyard back to Manhattan, right?

King: That was my goal. My goal was to show people an idealized, fun, Manhattan, beautiful, aspirational moment for Carrie.

There are a lot of changes in Season 3—new cast members are coming in and other cast members have left. From the trailer alone, it feels like this season is about a lot of new things: New loves and new career moves and new feelings. How much would you say this season differs from Season 2?

King: It’s all the same characters. It’s just where they are on this road—where Miranda is after the last tumultuous two seasons for her, where Charlotte is with her family and going back to work. We put a new level of work into Lisa Todd Wexley’s life, and we have Carrie working a new chapter of her life in the way she writes. She’s actually going to write a book this year and go back to voiceovers. The important thing when you’re doing a series is to keep going forward. Even if you have to push through walls to get into new rooms, you just don’t want to stay in the same room because the audience has already been there for many years, right?

What Sex in the City and And Just Like That… have always tried to do is say, be an individual. Be you your way, not the way society says. So for us, it’s very exciting as writers to constantly turn in stories that go I don’t know if that’s a good choice or that’s brave. I don’t know if I would do that. So hopefully people will be relating to all the different turns and twists that they’ve had in their careers. A lot of women, when they hit 50, have to really look at careers. So it’s really about: What’s my career? I’m a career person. What happens if that starts to dry up or change? How do we keep going forward as ourselves? How do we express ourselves, and how do we find the things in life that make us feel the most alive? We have this amazing cast of actors, the ones you’ve known for 27 years, the ones you grew up with, and then the ones you’ve known for three years. And now this year, we’re bringing even more actors in. We found some very exciting male actors. There’s a couple of characters that are single, there’s some love interest, both male and female, that no one has ever really met. The season’s in bloom. It’s summer. Everything’s in bloom. And that doesn’t mean it’s not without drama.

Craig Blankenhorn / Max

In the season finale, during Carrie’s “last supper,” she made everyone go around and say what they were letting go of. Her answer was expectations. In your opinion, how well did Carrie and her friends do when it came to following through?

King: Journey has a lot to do with that threat. Carrie says she’s let go of expectations, and she was almost psychic in knowing that the next thing that happened to her was she’s going to really have to let go of expectations. She had an expectation that everything was going to work out. Aidan was going to move into Gramercy with her immediately and, instead, he threw a big curve. So Carrie is really trying to do the most she can with living in the moment and seeing what she feels about what’s happening to her. Carrie is not a character who ever has really lived that much in the moment. She’s always been, as people in their 30s do, projecting what year they need to go after what they want. I want Mr. Big. I want Aidan. I want this. I want to write a book. Now she’s at a place where she has to go, Okay, what am I getting? What do I do with it? And it’s kind of exciting. I don’t think they’re letting go of expectations as much as they are saying I’m stepping up to see what I want out of my life. If I expected to be this person, I’ll let go of that, because maybe I’m going to be this person instead. I mean, you know, you make your best plan, and you see what happens.

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Was there anything in particular that you were really excited to explore or storyline that you were excited to dive into that you hadn’t been able to do previously?

King: I mean, the joy of doing a series is that if you get another season, you get to go someplace you want to go, and that’s usually sort of evolving the characters. Anthony [Mario Cantone] loved Giuseppe [Sebastiano Pigazzi] and his family and his roots, and it turns out to be Patti LuPone is his mother. So that’s very exciting for us to do something that’s that kind of forward motion for a character, and of course, to realize the dreams of who these characters are and to give, just from a writing point of view, each of the actors something so special to play because I know they can play anything. So for me, the combination of getting to work with actors and writing for them is always thrilling. But I do have to say, going back to Carrie’s Gramercy house, to actually fully explore what that world was the thing that I had a lot of fun with this year—going upstairs and downstairs and outside and what’s under there. It was a very big, extravagant character for us to play with, like this big white doll house.

And Just Like That…, Season 3 Premiere, Thursday, May 29, HBO Max