Three seasons in, can Sex and the City’s reboot get any more excruciating? Elsewhere, the terrifying genius of Nathan Fielder; the brazen rise and fall of disgraced Tory peer Michelle Mone; and a cosy Welsh whodunnit with Timothy Spall
What is the deal with And Just Like That… – why isn’t it better? With the arrival of the third series of Michael Patrick King’s Sex and the City follow-up (Sky Comedy/Now), there’s no pretending any longer that the concept merely has to bed in. Or that it’s just about adjusting to the central characters, Carrie (Sarah Jessica Parker), Miranda (Cynthia Nixon) and Charlotte (Kristin Davis), being older – not shiny young New Yorkers any more.
As we rejoin Carrie, she’s living in a new house with the glossy dimensions of a ballet school. It’s ridiculous: her late husband, Big (Chris Noth), who perished during a Peloton session in the first series, was rich, but not Vanderbilt-level wealthy. Her reconnected love Aidan (John Corbett) is still stuck on a farm in Virginia. With a writing career that takes about three seconds max a week, Carrie spends her days wafting about in voluminous designer gear that makes her look like she’s moonlighting in Les Misérables.
Elsewhere, other characters do their best: Sandra Dee throwback Charlotte bickers with husband, Harry (Evan Handler); Seema (Sarita Choudhury) sells real estate; Lisa (Nicole Ari Parker) edits films; and Anthony (Mario Cantone) opens a Hot Fellas cafe – one of the few real amusements is watching cast members gingerly force down carbs. There’s serious illness, infidelity and excruciating phone sex between Carrie and Aidan (“Touch yourself!”). Lesbian Miranda is no longer with Che (Sara Ramirez) and liaises with Rosie O’Donnell’s Mary. The big joke is that Mary is uncool, but, frankly, going by the six episodes (of 10) I’ve seen, so is And Just Like That…
It’s not just that SATC’s hypersexed Samantha is still much missed (owing to real-life contretemps between Parker and Kim Cattrall, Samantha made only a brief cameo in the last series and appears here via banal texts). And it isn’t about the characters being older: look at Jean Smart acing it in Hacks. For all the silliness, Sex and the City had bite. In AJLT, the writing is listless, baggy, dated – social satire from the lukewarm tap. And just like that, this viewer loses patience.
Also on Sky Comedy, the second six-part series of The Rehearsal delivers a fist bump of pure left-field genius. It’s the work of Canadian comedian Nathan Fielder, who I’m starting to suspect is the David Lynch of factual comedy.
Fielder’s previous outing, Nathan for You, purported to help struggling businesses but was intent on exposing the self-serving underbelly of modern capitalism. In the first series of The Rehearsal three years ago, Fielder helped people prepare for difficult conversations (building a life-size replica of a bar) or parenthood (a woman was given a taste of motherhood with a troupe of differently aged child actors and child robots).
Season two focuses on aviation safety and how miscommunication between cockpit crews results in plane crashes. In the moments after a simulated crash there’s the first sighting of Fielder, stood glowering in roaring flames like a docureality Satan. From there, things escalate, starting with a replica of an airport terminal. Fielder’s signature deep-dive segues and wormholes include everything from antisemitism and neurodiversity to doubts about his own ethics and a fake singing contest with unwitting contestants.
The Rehearsal is like free-falling through an Escher drawing, but one that makes you howl with laughter
As per, he crosses the line so many times – masturbation; dressing as a baby and breastfeeding from a huge wooden puppet; effectively calling a multi-conglomerate “Nazis” – that the line becomes meaningless. The effect is of free-falling through an Escher drawing, but one that makes you howl with laughter. In some ways, what Fielder does is traditional: delivering a sad-clown character in the megalomaniac mould of Tony Hancock (“No one could stop me because this airport was all mine”). In other ways his stunts are truly innovative: while others might end at an absurdist spot, that’s merely his starting point.
I can’t reveal what happens in the final scenes, but I can tell you that I couldn’t believe what I was watching, and that what Fielder does shocked and scared me more than any thriller. Don’t miss this. The Rehearsal is the Shutter Island of TV stunt comedy and Fielder’s greatest masterpiece to date.
The Rise and Fall of Michelle Mone (BBC Two) is a two-part docuseries that relates just that. The ascent of the Ultimo push-up bra entrepreneur from Glasgow’s tough East End. The gilded heights: the OBE, the canoodling with the Conservative party, her admission to the House of Lords as Baroness Mone of Mayfair. Then the fall from grace, with Lady Mone and her second husband, Doug Barrowman, discovered to have links to a company awarded an eye-watering £29m PPE contract via a “VIP fast lane” during the pandemic.
Initially, Mone seems winningly sparky. She’s shown brazenly promoting Ultimo, but that’s what working-class people have to do when they start out. It starts curdling later: former employees won’t go on camera, but she fell foul of industrial tribunals for allegedly bugging offices. The details surrounding the £29m contact are grotesque, not least as the PPE was revealed to be of inferior quality (Mone has since taken a leave of absence from the Lords).
Assorted reporters, business associates and legal heads line up to discuss Mone, including Jolyon Maugham of the Good Law Project and BBC journalist Laura Kuenssberg, who conducted an interview in which Mone seemed to assert that it was not a crime to lie to the press. Fall from grace? Watching this, it looks more like a plummet.
Still with BBC Two, Paul Doolan’s Death Valley is a six-part, Welsh-set cosy crime drama that wears its slippers with pride. Timothy Spall plays retired pretentious actor John Chapel, who believes his role as a TV detective helps him solve murder cases. Gwyneth Keyworth is Janie, the no-nonsense detective he teams up with.
The whodunnit element is underwhelming (I’ve played games of Cluedo more bloodthirsty than this), but fun is had with Chapel’s affectations, Janie’s fangirling and the oddball local people. Death Valley evolves into a poem to small-town eccentricity, with some characters politely bumped off. Classic British Sunday night viewing.
Photographs Ken Goff/Rogan Productions/BBC, Balazs Glodi/72 Films/BBC
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