And just like that, ‘Sex and the City’ turned on Android phones
In case you somehow missed it, Miranda Hobbes truly, madly, deeply hates her shiny new 📢ANDROID📢 phone.
It’s impossible not to be aware of this technological hostility in the third episode of And Just Like That… Season 2, that Cynthia Nixon’s character is ready to throw her device in the sea — she spends most of the latest episode waging war with it, calling it loudly by its non-Apple operating system’s name.
The second season of HBO’s Sex and the City reboot sees Miranda serving up her signature form of wide-eyed frustration at her fresh Android phone — she lost her iPhone during a beach clean in episode 2. Miranda seems to be using a Galaxy S22 or S23; Carrie (Sarah Jessica Parker), Charlotte (Kristin Davis), Lisa (Nicole Ari Parker), Nya (Karen Pittman), and Seema (Sarita Choudhury) all have iPhone 14s in varying sizes, some Pro, some with AirPods. Even the surfers that help Miranda in episode 2 have an iPhone.
In episode 3, Miranda spends the large majority of her dialogue hurling vitriol at her new Galaxy. Running lines with Che (Sara Ramírez), Miranda gets frustrated when she double taps her phone screen and causes the text to zoom out. “The type got all small again. I hate this new phone!”
When Miranda misses a call that didn’t appear when she had the script open, she’s beyond annoyed. It’s likely Miranda’s phone has been set up with Focus Mode, an Android 10 feature that lets you pause selected apps temporarily and block notifications.
“Dammit! How could I miss a call when the ringer is on?” she exclaims, putting emphasis on the non-Appleness of the phone. “This 📢ANDROID📢 has a mind of its own! I can’t believe I let the salesperson talk me into it.”
Later, standing in line at Warner Bros. Studios waiting to see Che’s live taping, a call comes through, as Miranda has that thing on loud. Her upset son, Brady (Niall Cunningham), accuses her of not picking up his multiple calls, and she responds, “I’m sorry, it’s this new phone, I don’t hear it ringing half the time.” Miranda then hides her phone from the show’s security guards without putting the phone on silent or airplane mode and sure enough, ends up getting a Skype call (a Skype call!) right in the middle of some of Che’s best work. Weirdly, Brady asks, “Mom, why are you FaceTiming me?” which means that Miranda has accidentally called him? Or he’s just using FaceTime as a verb for Skype? Who can say?
It’s not the first time we’ve seen an Android phone make waves on And Just Like That…. Mashable’s culture editor Crystal Bell wrote about Carrie’s nebulous relationship with technology when Season 1 saw longtime Apple user Carrie using a 2018-released BlackBerry Key2 — granted, in the first episode, Carrie also uses a rose gold iPhone 8, surrounded by people using iPhone 12s.
“Carrie has never been a fan of cool, new tech. She’s tech agnostic,” Bell wrote, unpacking Carrie’s history of using her trusty devices until they combust. “To her, tech isn’t an accessory — that’s what shoes are for — but rather a necessary evil.”
Sex and the City‘s own connection with tech has evolved over the years, but the series mostly connected its characters through landlines, with not a dating app or social media platform in sight. Since the show first aired in the late ’90s, Sex and the City author Candace Bushnell told the Guardian, “Technology’s been the biggest change. I go to a bar and 90 percent of people are on their phones.”
It’s strange how much focus And Just Like That… puts on Miranda’s loudly Android phone, as Apple famously doesn’t allow characters deemed villains to use iPhones. Take Succession, for example, which saw the biggest, baddest villain Tom Wambsgans (Matthew Macfadyen) as one of the only main characters to use an Android phone. But seeing as Carrie already broke the Android ice in Season 1 of And Just Like That… and characters like Carrie’s producer Franklyn Hernandez (Ivan Hernandez) use non-Apple tech like a Microsoft Surface Laptop 5 in episode 2, it’s unlikely the show is deliberately making Miranda the villain through her phone — last season, they found other ways to do that.
Nevertheless, Miranda’s Samsung’s days may be numbered — I wouldn’t be surprised if she goes back to the beach on an archaeological mission in episode 4 with the way she talks about her current phone. Did you hear it’s an 📢ANDROID📢 ?
