‘And Just Like That’ writers stand by the show — poop nuggets and all

This article contains spoilers from And Just Like That seasons 1-3.

Loved it or loved to hate it, you watched it.

Everybody had something to say about And Just Like That, right up to the very end of the Sex and the City sequel series, which debuted its final episode on HBO Max last week. Pigeon purses, abnormally large hats, the stand-up comedy stylings of Che Diaz (Sara Ramírez), hand-licking phone sex, clogged toilets… the show featured some pretty wild storylines always guaranteed to start a conversation online.

Julie Rottenberg and Elisa Zuritsky, two members of the writers’ room who also worked on Sex and the City starting in season 4, had front-row seats to it all. As the series comes to a close, the duo sits down with Entertainment Weekly to discuss bringing the show to a close, how they processed that audience reaction, a legacy SATC cameo they considered but never brought back, and more.

ENTERTAINMENT WEEKLY: What was the vibe like in the And Just Like That writers’ room? You’ve had so many fun stories, so many kooky elements kind of thrown in over the years. I imagine it must have been a unique pitching environment.

JULIE ROTTENBERG: It was the perfect combination of hilarity. These are the funniest, smartest writers you’ll ever find. In fact, for a while when the writers’ room was a Zoom room, I would get complaints from my kids, like, “Keep it down. What the f— is so funny?” So tons of laughter, definitely rigorous debate. We are known for it. It can get ugly and sweaty and veins popping out of the sides of my neck.

Also you’d be surprised maybe by how much love and care and concern there is about each writer personally. We know whose parent is sick or whose kid was just in the ER last night. And because every story you saw on the show came from our personal lives, we have to be really honest and naked with each other. So you have to have that kind of trust and be able to share your most embarrassing [story], whether it’s a dating story or a parenting story or a marital problem. It gets pretty real, pretty fast.

ELISA ZURITSKY: It was how we were raised on Sex and the City. That was our first real writers’ room experience. We came into it in the beginning of season 4 as super fans and not knowing really what to expect from the other writers or what to expect from our boss. We were certain we were about to be fired every day for not being enough. Instead, we found this really intensely personal experience. Those relationships with that writers’ room have also carried on through the years.

That’s where the best television can really grow, when you’re in a room with people who, for hours and hours, make you laugh, make you think, make you wanna share hard stuff, funny stuff, weird stuff, silly stuff, and bad stuff — bad ideas that don’t stand a chance. All of that is necessary for a really good show to get off the ground.

What are some examples of those wild, to use your phrase, Elisa, “bad ideas” that were thrown out in the writers’ room?

ZURITSKY: That is so dangerous! You know we can’t throw those out so willy-nilly.

ROTTENBERG: It’s funny because, in many writers’ rooms, someone will say, “And this is the bad pitch, but I’m just gonna say it and maybe it’ll spark something better.” I believe it was Michael Patrick King [And Just Like That showrunner]…

ZURITSKY: He hates that.

ROTTENBERG: It’s like, “I don’t ever wanna hear that. Do not preface a pitch with this.”

ZURITSKY: If you think it’s bad, the don’t say it.

ROTTENBERG: But I’m trying to remember any of the quote-unquote bad pitches.

ZURITSKY: I will say personally that I repressed them so quickly after I’ve pitched them. I’d be too way too embarrassed to bring one out.

ROTTENBERG: Sometimes there are ideas that just don’t make it to the screen because we don’t have the space for them. Sometimes in a new season we’ll remember like, “Oh yeah! We never did that.”

ZURITSKY: The banana story from season 3 in the fourth episode. Julie, I really think that, when first you pitched that from your building, that was a season 1 pitch that we didn’t find time for until season 3.

ROTTENBERG: I will say, without naming names, there have been ideas that someone has shared that we’ll all fall in love with. Then a few days later, that person will come back and say, “Guys, that would end my friendship with this person. You cannot use it.” That’s always the most frustrating because once you’ve fallen in love with an idea…but you know, we also have to maintain our friendships and marriages and face our children.

ZURITSKY: Sometimes we found ways to disguise.

Let’s talk about this being the final season. Did you know from the start that that episode was going to be the final episode?

ROTTENBERG: Each season we have treated as if it might be the last one. At the end of that first season, we were all sort of like, “Is that it? Are there more stories to tell? Should we just leave it as it is?” And then the second season, it was like, “This could be it.”

ZURITSKY: That dinner party could’ve been it.

ROTTENBERG: So I think when the third season came around…we didn’t know for sure, but turns out, in this case, it was.

ZURITSKY: I am a fan of the show, a viewer of the show, and obviously involved in building stories for the show and extra personally connected. All of those parts of myself I think exist at the same time. Carrie [Sarah Jessica Parker], especially, reaching this cathartic, peaceful moment where, after an entire series of longing for love, idealizing partnership, grappling with all of those cultural pressures to have a family, a marriage, a partnership, [she] reaches a point at her age and station to look around, have this full life with friends, have all of these family units that are around her, and see very clearly the beauty and sometimes pain of those relationships and sometimes grossness of it — obviously in the form of Miranda’s [Cynthia Nixon] overflowing toilet, which has probably happened to most people at one point in time in their lives.

Oh my God. Yes. Talk to me about that.

ZURITSKY: Look! That’s a thing that happens in most people’s lives at some point. It’s gross, but it’s really funny, too, and it’s mortally embarrassing. We do revel and laugh. We get through our embarrassing experiences by telling them to each other and laughing about them. So [it’s a] long-winded way of saying, for her to take in all of the versions of happy family, happy coupling around her and look around and say, “Wow this is delightful, I kind of have it all,” that felt very exciting to me as a person, as a writer, as a follower of this character all these years.

ROTTENBERG: I’ll just add, since there has been so much talk about the overflowing toilet, I echo Elisa’s statement that that happens in real life. We’ve all been there. The day we shot that, the toilet piece, it was separate from shooting the whole day. I directed a couple episodes this season and I was directing a scene on that toilet stage where Miranda’s apartment was. Michael was on another unit, he was directing on another stage, and I knew I had to finish my work in time for Michael’s unit to come over and shoot that toilet scene. So I was up against the clock. I remember I called Michael and I was like, “Michael, the toilet is ready.” [Laughs] The whole crew was getting the lighting set up for the toilet and we were literally just shooting the toilet bowl ’cause we had shot everything else.

Jumping off of this, I’ve been so fascinated with the audience’s reaction to the show. People love to watch the show. There are people who love to hate-watch the show. There’s also a segment who are obsessed with Carrie’s pigeon purse from season 2 or her massive hat in season 3, the Giuseppe marionette — the detail with which they dissect the show. And all of them came back week after week to watch the show. How have you both processed the audience reaction and their relationship to the show as the seasons have gone on?

ROTTENBERG: It’s intense!

ZURITSKY: I will happily admit I am much more plugged into social media. Like, in our partnership, I am the town cryer. I tell Julie what they’re saying. 

ROTTENBERG: I’m like in bed, in the fetal position.

ZURITSKY: I put on my hazmat suit. [Laughs] I go out with my pith helmet and my snorkel and I do it. So I’ve had an emotional journey. The first season, I was super duper curious and I completely forgot that I needed to have a hazmat suit on. I forgot that I needed to bulletproof my soul. I’m gonna throw a million analogies. But I really did. I forgot how mean people can be, especially when they’re behind their keyboard and their little computers. I was still really interested, but I felt personally hurt and really misunderstood by so many of the reactions.

Then in the second season, I definitely had a thicker skin, but I was more detached. Like, I’m not gonna really seek it out. I had my experience making the show, I don’t really need to bask in the reactions. And the third season, I feel like I brought both of those together. I feel almost like I have clinical distance and almost like I feel like an anthropologist now. This is a very interesting experience watching these reactions, peoples’ visceral, most intimate relationships with these characters and the reflection of themselves. I really think they’re wrestling with their own youth, and I can relate to that, too. There have been examples where I’ve had a similar sense of outrage or disappointment at something that’s come back that hasn’t matched [the] original. So I relate to it as a person.

But it’s quite fascinating. It’s become much more interesting to me than painful.

ROTTENBERG: I am not really on social media and, therefore, not as brave, but I do have two teenagers who are basically my conduit to the internet. They are not shy about sharing what they’re seeing. I also have had to learn how to metabolize the level of fervor, shall we say, and have to remind myself sometimes that it means people really freaking care about these characters. The possessiveness people have around these characters is so intense. It is as if they are real people who these viewers know and understand.

The fact that Carrie would stand for this or Miranda would behave this way, it’s almost like an affront to people. As writers, we’ve worked on shows that everybody watched and we’ve worked on shows that nobody watched. So we know how rare it is to write something that everybody watches. If the cost is, we’re gonna get violent [laughs] reactions, I’ll take it because it means people care. It means they’re engaged enough…And to need to talk about it, that says everything.

I try to take it as a compliment, but sometimes it’s mind blowing. It is a bit of a Rorschach test. All of these stories come from personal experience, so it can feel very personal. Some of the most personal stories are the ones that people are like, “That would never happen!” It’s like, “Yikes, that was my life.” You do feel very naked.

I’ve been surprised by the level of specificity some of the audience will hone in on. Was there a philosophy in the writers’ room about the Sex and the City universe. Rosemarie Dewitt played a completely different role on the original series. There’ve been a couple of veterans of Sex and the City playing different roles.

ROTTENBERG: Some of them were Easter eggs for careful viewers. Some of them were probably actors we thought, “So much time had passed. It was such a small part that you wouldn’t clock this person playing another part.” I don’t know if you clocked that the banker who Seema [Sarita Choudhury] goes to ask for a loan, played by Stephanie Cannon, she was the banker in the original series who rejected Carrie’s loan.

ZURITSKY: And obviously Andy Cohen as the shoe salesman.

ROTTENBERG: André De Shields. He was the teacher in Charlotte’s [Kristin Davis] tap class [on Sex and the City], and then he came back as Nya’s [Mia Jordan] mentor. Sometimes it was fun. Sometimes it’s we love to work with actors who we couldn’t get enough of. But it’s also its own universe. So we tried to walk the line between acknowledging there are gonna be people paying very close attention…If we know nothing else, it’s the people pay very close attention.

A personal burning question: the legacy Sex and the City cameos or guest stars that almost were. I listened to Kristin Davis’ podcast. She wanted a Trey [Kyle MacLachlan] cameo. There was a season 3 scene involving a Post-it note that visually made me think of Berger [Ron Livingston].

ROTTENBERG: In the writers’ room, every now and then, we’d be like, “Do we wanna run into Berger all these years later?” He probably has a family and kids. That’s fun for us as fans of the original show. But, yeah, I’m trying to think of others…We’ll think of some other goodies.

What were the conversations around sex? Sex and the City was always very sexy. Samantha (Kim Cattrall) alone brought so much of that. Clearly, And Just Like That is a different show and has a different mission statement, and yet it also has the moniker of being a sequel to Sex and the City.

ZURITSKY: The first thing that pops into my head when I hear that question, and it’s a good question, is the death of Big was such a driver for And Just Like That. From that event came the series. Michael has said many times he would never have brought the show back to watch them in their wedded bliss. So with that as the dominant color to the whole first season, from there and the fact that we were very overtly embracing “these are 55-year-old women,” the sex was…

Certainly we wanted it in the universe, but it wasn’t in the title, notably, and we didn’t want to lean on it too much because it felt like it isn’t necessarily the driving force in this series for these women, that we were catching up with them all these years later. They had much more complicated family dynamics that they were focused on. They were going to be there for their friend who was grieving. If you think of it as a ship, that felt like everything would follow from that and it didn’t seem a particularly sexy moment for everybody’s lives.

ROTTENBERG: I’ll add it was also important to us, and hopefully this came through on show, that a healthy sex life was part of almost all of their lives. You saw Seema with a guy where she’s taking her vibrator out and he is appalled. That’s just part of her life. You saw, obviously, Charlotte and Harry [Evan Handler]. We wanted to keep their sex life alive, which is why the prostate cancer was especially scary for them. We wanted to show that Carrie and Aidan [John Corbett] still had great sex. She talked about that they were having better sex than when they were together the first time. We wanted to show that, for many women, their sex life only gets better as they get older, which is rarely talked about.

The reaction to us bringing these women back when And Just Like That was first announced, there was this like, “What are they gonna talk about? Menopause?” So we wanted to disabuse that and show that like, yes, in your 50s, you’re also dealing with death and hardship and divorce and raising health issues and the strain of being alive, but hopefully you also have a healthy sex life along with it.

ZURITSKY: It’s funny to look back on it all even now, but people had such polarizing and activated responses to Miranda’s storyline in that first season. She I think embodies someone who was coming into her own for the first time sexually in that first season, but we had to work our way into that.

ROTTENBERG: It’s true, having just heard that scene played again where she and Che are in the kitchen and Carrie’s peeing into a peach Snapple bottle. Miranda says, “I’ve never felt anything like that before.” I’m probably botching the line, but that was the idea. That did feel maybe inflammatory to some people, but we felt like that was important to show, that for her it was like a rebirth of her sexuality.

This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity and brevity.

Sign up for Entertainment Weekly‘s free daily newsletter to get breaking TV news, exclusive first looks, recaps, reviews, interviews with your favorite stars, and more.