Well I don't know if I might have seen it with a different script, but it was impossible to see him clearly when literally wincing at cheesy lines such as the cringeworthy thing about her making him miss his deadLINE but giving him a lifeLINE. 😬And his naff response to her "sparkly" shoes: ('your Mummy???) And the business-like high-seriousness with which they sat down like two world leaders to discuss GCSE English level creative writing workshop "hacks" like her "brilliant" opening line in her thinly-veiled romantic autobiography historical novel, "All About Me (But Now Wearing a Crinoline)": "The woman wondered what she had gotten herself into." All I wondered was how she had already "gotten" a "gotten" into the very first line.
It was an utterly chemistry-free zone with Duncan and Carrie as far as I'm concerned. It was so scripted and awkward - not least the ridiculously tone-deaf Litlle Bo-Peep style basket filled with local goodies in lieu of actually letting the guy sleep.
I found it all depressing and a wasted opportunity.
Like many of us, I grew up with these characters a semi-generation older than me and everything seemed like a glimpse into a fast-paced, exciting world I was growing into. It was in its own way aspirational. They moved from cocktails and shoes I could only dream of to great apartments, engagements and babies, all kind of a step ahead. This series could have been an opportunity to see them at a new phase of life, wiser, grounded, having found their way to their own equilibriums, a chance to whet the appetite for the next phase.
Instead it felt like they had regressed.
Samantha of course is gone and, without updates, we can only presume she is still mauling men and licking her lips at phallic pepper grinders somewhere off screen.
Miranda, once highly intelligent, career-focused and razor-sharp is now hesitant and self-conscious about even kissing her date - who herself seems not to be able to get through a single scene without a long-faced monologue as yet another item of dirty laundry escapes from her copious "baggage." She doesn't like children, has a hang-up about kissing, finds depositing a bottle of gin at a partner's a daunting step ... and on it goes. Next Miranda is blurting out "c!"£" on tv or popping up with a rictus grin and a bunch of pink balloons screeching "they even have confetti in them!!!". Then she's creeping about chucking bottles of gin that are too much of a match for her self-control down the rubbish shute and wandering vacantly round someone else's home stark naked and absent-mindedly consuming their yoghurt like someone with advanced dementia. As for the karaoke scene ... Cynthia is doing so much more with her character in Gilded Age.
Seema appears to have so little in savings she is immediately reduced to having her lashes done at some joint so dodgy she has to wear an eye-patch thereafter, and rolling on her deodorant in the hallway of a large restaurant that inexplicably seems to have only one toilet cubicle she cannot possibly wait a couple of minutes to enter, a frantic demeanour that seems to have be been brought on by the fact she can no longer drive about get driven about by a speechless man in a poo-brown car that smells of cigarettes that you'd have to pay me to step into because she's genuinely convinced this is what it takes to crack the Real Estate industry. Meanwhile she's shagging a deodrant-less guy who seems to think his mother is a plant.
Charlotte, to be fair, is still Charlotte, and probably the only reassuringly relatable vignette.
But as for Carrie ... I now can't stand her! She's been reduced to a middle-aged woman stomping about like a toddler in a tulle princess dress from Primark, whinging and tantrum-ing about everything. "My favourite rainbow glass: waaah, waaah!"; "my nice garden: waah, waah!"; "I WANT a ridiculous kitty cat tree in my bedroom so I'm gonna HAVE it!"; "Who ate MY yoghurt??"; "No! I said you CAN'T talk to the man in my basement!"; "What's this conversation got to do with special ME!" and, worst of all, "No. No. NO! I will NOT take off my sparkly princess shoes. I don't CARE if its entirely inconsiderate and impractical and realistically would be trashing my phenomenally expensive floors and giving me bunions the size of onions!" It's as if this is all supposed to be somehow "cute" and yet I just found it utterly depressing - if not actually frightening. Please tell me this isn't life as a mature, middle-aged woman.
It's all so far from the aspirational.
PS I did like those two dogs.
Edited to deal with Miranda's foul language!