For those of us who loved the original show, and saw something of ourselves in the protagonists (archetypes drawn loosely from Mary McCarthy’s drily poignant 1963 novel The Group, also set among privileged women in Manhattan), it is difficult to know what to make of this trashing of the canon.

Most of the fan base watched AJLT slavishly, holding on grimly, our horror and outrage only spurring us onto the next episode, to see what fresh hell was next.

Ah, Miranda has lost her phone – that’s it, that’s her story arc for the episode. Charlotte is sad because her daughter Lily has sold her designer clothes (again, that’s it, that’s all that happens to her in that episode). And oh, here is Carrie quitting her podcast because she refuses to say the word “vagina” on air.

If this seems strange for a woman who made an entire implausible career out of being a sex columnist, it is only one of a thousand nonsensical plot points and will have to get in line.

As SATC fans, we hated AJLT, but we couldn’t loosen our grip on it, or it couldn’t loosen its grip on us. I have tried hard to parse the precise reasons for this.

The show is attempting to represent beloved youthful heroines as they tramp through the lowlands of middle age; after they have arrived at the things they were imperfectly striving towards in the original: love, parenthood, career success.

The original Sex and the City disappointed many fans in its finale when it devolved into a traditional marriage plot, wedding Carrie with Big, the man who had tortured her on and off for the entire six seasons.

And Just Like That is necessarily concerned with what happens after the attainment of the goal, which is generally a period of what psychologists call hedonic adaptation, the realisation that getting what you want didn’t make you happier or change your personality as you had hoped. This is a theme ripe for comedy and pathos, but not in the hands of these show runners.

I think the show’s real offence is its timidity – as mentioned, Carrie, alleged sexual anthropologist, is too prudish to correctly name her anatomy on her podcast, to the extent where she would rather wind the project up than say the v-word.

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Later in the series, Carrie is offended when Charlotte asks her if she (Carrie, a single, sexually active woman) has a condom because Carrie believes that implies she might have an STD.

And when one of the 40-something side-characters falls accidentally pregnant at the height of her career, and already with three kids, she is dismayed. But the possibility of terminating the pregnancy is only alluded to in hushed tones, never spoken or discussed.

It’s hard to see why - in the original series, Miranda was all set to get an abortion and changed her mind at the last minute. Her grown son now features in AJLT.

Worst of all, the show features the women in it responding to the social and moral changes of the last 20 years with bafflement and stupidity – Carrie’s podcast even has a “woke button” that is pressed whenever anything “woke” is discussed – which seems to stand for anything related to popular culture.

The show behaves as though these educated women can’t read, discuss or relate to anything that happened after 2004.

They cringe before the contemporary, and it rings untrue. Because if middle age does have consolations for women, among them is a boldness that comes with no longer worrying so much about what other people think.

But middle age is also the time when you get stuck in your ways. So maybe that is why so many of us original fans cannot quit AJLT, and will also watch the next season, which has just been announced.

Hope is ageless.

Jacqueline Maley is a senior writer and columnist.