Sarah Jessica Parker, Cynthia Nixon, and showrunner Michael Patrick King comment on the similarities between Carrie’s fiction novel and the other HBO/Max series.
Of all the unhinged thoughts we had watching the first episodes of And Just Like That season 3 (what even is that bonnet Carrie Bradshaw wears for a sherbet outing in Washington Square Park? … Virgin nun sexcapades, Miranda? Seriously? … Rosie O’Donnell just singing Wicked‘s “For Good” number in the middle of Times Square?) our main question circles this book Carrie is working on.
We know it’s a work of fiction, that it’s set in the 1840s, and that it seemingly takes place in New York City. Carrie appears to be taking inspiration from her new duplex in Gramercy Park. There also happens to be another HBO/Max show that stars Cynthia Nixon and takes place in turn-of-the-century Manhattan. So is this mystery novel secretly the story of The Gilded Age and is this an undercover crossover?
The short answer is no. No it isn’t. Showrunner Michael Patrick King confirmed as much when Entertainment Weekly asked him about it ahead of the season 3 premiere.
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Sarah Jessica Parker.
“No crazy crossover between And Just Like That and The Gilded Age,” he says. “Carrie’s writing a book that takes place in the past because she doesn’t really understand what her life is like in the present. So it’s really just a writing contrivance to actually pay homage to the house she’s living in, which is very Gilded Age, very turn of the century, and also fun for writing and to hear Carrie’s voiceover again, but in a new way. We always try to do something a little bit new every time.”
Please enjoy EW forcing the other stars of And Just Like That to respond to this question.
“Actually, weirdly, there is a beautiful chandelier in Carrie’s living room that is almost very similar to a chandelier that we have in the Brook household where I live as my other character. So that’s sort of surreal,” Nixon says of this coincidence.
When asked if there was ever a time when she thought it was a crossover while reading the scripts, Nixon adds, “That would be really, really great. We would discover that Ada [her character] is actually… Well, she doesn’t have any children, so she can’t really be an ancestor of Miranda’s.”
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“Isn’t that funny?” Sarah Jessica Parker responds when asked about it. “It wasn’t intentional. The clothing, we didn’t know about that when we started doing fittings because I was working in London over those months. So we started fittings in London. [Costume designers] Molly Rogers and Danny Santiago came to London and they were pulling from crazy little places, and a bunch of the stuff they pulled was Victorian. I immediately, of course, wanted to wear all of that. And then Michael simultaneously was writing this story about Carrie writing this fictional novel about a woman in the Victorian era with no Gilded Age in mind, crazily enough.”
“If you were forcing me to do a storyline about a Gilded Age crossover within And Just Like That,” King says (to which EW replied, we are!), “I would say that Cynthia’s character on Gilded Age‘s dog — I think his name is Pumpkin — breaks into Carrie’s backyard. She doesn’t understand how a dog time traveled through some portal to get to the present, but the dog is probably fixed, which makes it very And Just Like That.”
