And Just Like That S2 Reconnects Carrie With A SATC Flame - But Fans Are Divided

"And Just Like That"... Carrie Bradshaw reunited with her ex. It's no secret that in the upcoming second season of Max's "Sex and the City" sequel, Sarah Jessica Parker's character reunites with Aidan Shaw (John Corbett), the hunky furniture maker whom she leaves broken-hearted after cheating on him with Mr. Big (Chris Noth) in the original HBO series.

In the season 6 episode "To Market, To Market,"fans find out that Aidan married a woman named Kathy and they had a baby boy named Tate. By the time the second SATC movie rolls around in 2010, Carrie is married to Big, but she runs into Aidan during a girls' trip to Abu Dhabi. Aidan reveals he is still married and has two more sons,Homer and Wyatt. The former lovers later steal a kiss, then immediately regret it.

A lot has changed since then — at least for Carrie. In the first season of "And Just Like That," Big dies suddenly. Now, ahead of season 2, photos of Carrie and Aidan together once again have already been leaked on social media and some fans are not happy. On Instagram, some commenters expressed their hope that the reunion is just a dream. Meanwhile, others said Aidan deserves better. "I hate it. Why would we want this? Didn't he have a wife and kids?" one viewer asked. And others don't understand why Carrie can't meet any new guys. "Do no other men exist besides Big and Aidan?" one fan asked. 

In the first season of "And Just Like That," Carrie Bradshaw trades her newspaper column for a relationships podcast called "Sex and the City." After burying Big, she has a flirty relationship with her handsome producer, Franklin (Ivan Hernandez), whom she kisses in an elevator in the final Season 1 scene.

Showrunner Michael Patrick King admitted that he wanted viewers to wonder about Franklin. "My goal with Ivan, who plays Franklin, was to put an actor behind that booth that the audience would say, 'Who's that sexy extra?!?'" King told Variety following the finale. He cut down scenes featuring Franklin and realized that he needed to dial the flirtation back when an editor's wife speculated that Carrie would get with the podcast engineer. But after the photos of Carrie with Aidan were leaked, fans were still asking about Franklin. "Now I've got to go to bed wondering what happened to hot podcast boss guy! Aidan was married with 3 kids damn it!" one viewer wrote on Instagram. 

King also addressed rumors that Chris Noth was to be in a dream sequence following Big's death. "Dreams are always dicey," he told Variety. That stance could also serve as a clue that Carrie and Aidan's reunion is not a dream.

Dream or not, not everyone is upset about the return of Aidan Shaw to the "Sex and the City" franchise. One Instagram commenter called him "the one that got away." "Been waiting for this the entire second half of the first season," another fan chimed in.

And John Corbett himself even prematurely teased his character's return. In April 2021, Corbett told Page Six that he was going to be on the reboot. "I think I might be in quite a few [episodes]," he told the outlet. Sarah Jessica Parker later revealed that Corbett had been joking. "It was fun for him to say that," she told "Watch What Happens Live" host Andy Cohen in February 2022, before revealing that the actor reached out to her and apologized for joking to reporters about his involvement in the show.

But the "And Just Like That" star then hinted that Corbett could really reprise his role as Aidan for Season 2. "Having said that, I think he would be welcome... well I'm not gonna — I mean, yes, all of it is possible, all of it is possible," Parker said at the time.