In the third season of Sex and the City, Carrie sits on a bench and unpeels the wrapper from a Magnolia cupcake. She takes an enormous, frosting-laden bite just in time to say, “I have a crush,” and the half-masticated cupcake becomes an odd accent to her colorful leather patchwork coat and chicly tied neck scarf. HBO’s favorite fictional It Girl chews with her mouth open.
It’s an easily overlooked detail — until you do notice it, and realize it’s been there all along, a little bit of grit in the cotton candy fantasy. It might even be the last honest part of a character who has gone full fantasy.
And Just Like That…, the highly sus reboot, might get a lot wrong in its attempt to recapture the charm of the original series — Charlotte has one volume, Samantha is gone, and Miranda is shopping for second-hand mattresses. But despite all the retcons and character assassinations, it stays true to at least one strange detail: Carrie’s open-mouth chewing endures.
“She kind of does this slop slurp thing with noodles too. It’s gross,” wrote one Reddit commenter. “Maybe the problem is her fine motor skills when it comes to eating,” theorized another. “Whenever one of our dogs gets food stuck on his lip my husband and I call him Carrie Bradshaw,” added a third — perhaps a reference to the time Big literally had to lick osso bucco off her lip.
In a show obsessed with aesthetics, this is one detail that never got a glow-up. How did an otherwise chic character make it through six seasons, two movies, and now a reboot series without an upgrade to her table manners? You’re telling me that Big, king of the “I’m just being honest” deflection, never mentioned it? How did Berger let such an obvious opportunity for a passive-aggressive snipe pass him by?
It disrupts the illusion of Carrie’s fabulousness. But then, that’s what makes it so interesting. As a former dancer, Sarah Jessica Parker is a famously embodied actress. “When we were walking together one day, she demonstrated the difference between her natural gait—pin straight, delicate, quick—and Carrie’s, which has an ambling bravado,” observed a 2023 New Yorker profile. Parker has perfected Carrie’s physicality over the years, so it makes sense that this extends to her sloppy eating habits. They become another way Parker has thoughtfully built character. She’s leaning into Carrie’s messiness in ways the script doesn’t explicitly name.
Even now, when Carrie talks with her mouth full of Hot Guys sourdough, we’re reminded that she was always an outsider in Manolos, a scrappy investigator who found her way into the cultural elite of New York City. She grew up differently than someone like the Upper East Side-coded Charlotte, and her table manners show this without telling.
Unlike Hannah Horvath, the designated writer of Girls whose character is built around quirks and unflattering honesty, Carrie has always been more aspirational. Where Girls relished its characters’ mess, Sex and the City demurred. A thousand reactionary Substack posts have been launched about Carrie’s flaws because her worst tendencies — to make every conversation about herself, spend every dollar she earns, and get ketchup all over her face while eating a hamburger — clash with the show’s fantasy, which only deepened with time. When the second movie rolled around, the incisive sociology of the show had become an unmitigated capitalistic phantasmagoria where the highest stakes were the possibility of an international flight spent in coach.
In And Just Like That…, Carrie’s life has even fewer life constraints. She floats down the street of Gramercy Park in Simone Rocha, untethered from financial woes or professional stress, incumbered only by problems of her own making.
So thank God she still slurps. That tiny, undignified detail is the last human detail of a character who has otherwise left Earth to live in a Manolo Blahnik metaverse. Bradshaw might have changed her address, her wardrobe, and even her co-stars, but she never changed the way she eats.
Maybe open-mouth chewing is the only real continuity we have left.
