David Eigenberg and Cynthia Nixon in And Just Like That... Photo / Supplied
The brutal dumping of Sex and the City's 'nice guy' Steve should terrify anyone convinced their marriage can't fail.
Gentlemen, your attention please. You may not have been watching the Sex and the City sequel And Just Like That… recently – which is a schoolboy error, but we'll let that pass – in which case you will have missed the Team Steve/Team Miranda contretemps.
Boiling it down it's basically the old story – boy meets girl in hot one night stand. Boy and girl are on and off in passionate doubt filled romance. Boy and girl get married, settle down, buy sofa, eat ice cream. Girl starts having wild sex with non-binary stand-up comedian. Boy is divorced before he knows anything is wrong.
Goofy, lovable Steve Brady – played with a kind of puppy dog charm by David Eigenberg – basically won Sex and the City with the best body, the most ruffled hair, and a hot, romantic reunion scene on Brooklyn Bridge after he cheated on Miranda and they reconciled with all the steam.
In And Just Like That…, he's still kinda silver foxy with The Daily Beast describing him as "sweet, kind, hunky Steve, with an ass as perfectly perkily domed as two scoops of sorbet". He was contented with his marriage. They'd meet at home after a hard day's work, relax on their little sectional sofa, watch TV and eat ice cream from their little dessert bowls they bought together. What's not to like?
So, when Cynthia Nixon's Miranda dumped him in episode eight and dumped him hard, it was so brutal that half the crew were wearing Team Steve t-shirts during filming (Eigenberg was Team Miranda). The tragedy was how little he saw it coming, and there are three points of view on display here – a lot of people have taken against that storyline because they're outraged at Miranda's cold, cold heart. Another group are terrified that they're fast turning into Steve (men) and yet another group are terrified they're married to him (women).
That wise philosopher of relationships Jerry Seinfeld once pointed out the dilemma Steve faced. Men want to make women happy, Seinfeld explained. Sometimes we do it, but we don't know how we did it. "If you ask; 'what did I do?' that looks like you don't know what you're doing. You can't do nothing. She says, 'I can't believe you're doing this?' You say, 'doing what?' She starts crying. You say, 'I didn't do anything.' She says 'exactly.'"
Seinfeld concludes that it's a game of chess except the board is flowing water, the pieces are made of smoke and no move you make will have any effect on the outcome.
But there are warning signs. Let's see if we can spot the mistake in poor old Steve's last-ditch attempt to hold his marriage together:
"Finally, in the last couple of years, we come to a place where it's not so goddamn up and down every day, where it's kind of the same: we get up, and we go do our s___, and we come back here, home, to each other, we sit on the couch, we talk about Brady, eat ice cream and watch some TV. That's married life, Miranda. That's life."
Yes, he actually said "and finally we come to a place where it's kind of the same". If you're saying that, my friend, you've already lost the game of chess.
Sure, at least half of the internet is cross with Miranda. But then, half of the internet is cross with everything. You're already furious about something, dear reader, and you haven't even started drinking yet.
But if you didn't spot Steve's error on the sofa with the ice cream, if you're one of those average married men who weigh three pounds more than a single counterpart as a 2017 study of heterosexual couples found, or if you're surprised by the news that 69 per cent of divorces are initiated by women whilst men and women initiate non-marital break-ups at equal rates according to 2018 research from Stanford University research… Then And Just Like That… is there for you.
Indeed, And Just Like That… and its predecessor should be legally mandated viewing for all men, and possibly even taught in schools. Few TV shows before or since have let men listen in to the opportunities and threats they face in the wooing and post-wooing marketplace. They are solid gold when it comes to insight into prospective or current partners thinking. Indeed, watching them feels a little bit like cheating.
What that Miranda scene is saying is – wise up, fatty. Put down the pizza and get to the gym and in the name of all that's holy do some research when you're planning date night. And if you don't have date night, then consider – how enticing is life with you versus the ideas she had when she was reading Pride and Prejudice as puberty stole over her? Just how Darcy are you?
Of course, you may be thinking you have nothing to learn from Miranda quitting her high-flying legal career and having sex with a non-binary comedian called Che because in your town there are no non-binary comedians, and the little lady is happy as Larry playing Candy Crush in the evening. As if the non-binary comedian bit means anything. My friend, I'm pointing at the stars and you're criticising my fingernails.
I have a number of male divorcees in my social circle, including myself. Some of them, it's true, drove that train wreck all by themselves in a spectacular piece of self-sabotage usually involving addictions. Gen Xers can't afford to have old school mistresses – it's all we can do to cover the costs of everyday life without adding expensive meals, gifts and a flat across town. But for most of us, it was the inertia rather than the momentum that did for us.
Other shows feature high divorce-related drama – the looming Our House sees Tuppence Middleton chuck Martin Compston out for wild sex in the kids' playhouse in the garden, for instance, while Grace and Frankie discover their husbands are now a gay couple and the Split's expensive lawyers oversee outlandish skirmishes involving frozen embryos or double lives.
But it's that bewildered speech by Steve that gut punches most of us. Just as we thought we'd got over the disagreements and wrangles and complications and finally reach the still water, our Mirandas started crying.
As Steves, we stared, alarmed, and pleaded "I didn't do anything".
And our Mirandas said, with deep, deep regret, "exactly."
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