Sex and the City was a show about an urban fantasia called New York. It walked and talked like the real city, but it was more glamorous. Everything that mattered happened in one portion of one borough, starting in Lower Manhattan and stopping just south of the Met. Carrie, Miranda, Charlotte, and Samantha lived in spacious apartments in enviable neighborhoods, roving from brunches to parties to dates, a revolving door of men jamming up their Rolodexes. To achieve its dreamlike state, the show’s inventors had to dispense with many of the city’s sweatier elements—including, most notably, the subway.

It’s long been a sticking point for fans: How could Carrie, a newspaper columnist bound to debt by a Manolo Blahnik addiction, afford to avoid the subway? She couldn’t, of course! In an alternate (read: real) universe, Carrie would have been hoofing it to her nearest station every day. Ever the Luddite, she would have marveled at the transition from tokens to cards and grumbled at the rising prices, treating taxis as a rare luxury instead of her given mode of transportation. She would have even used the subway as fodder for her column, a place to observe her fellow lovers and flirts and pervs. But alas, Sex and the City enjoyed the privilege afforded by TV Logic and kept her firmly above ground for the entirety of the series.

And Just Like That, however, seeks to change that. From the very first teaser of the new series, which debuts its first two episodes Thursday, the subway finally makes its grand appearance in the Sex and the City universe. And it’s not just lip service-y B-roll. Rather, the show shows Miranda (Cynthia Nixon), the most egalitarian of the bunch and the only one who dares to move to another borough, catching a ride on the train. 

It’s a rare sight that turns into a regular feature of this new series, with Miranda-centric scenes casually unfolding on subway platforms in the very first episode. The show leans in to the comedy potential of the subway, showing Miranda struggling to have a conversation over the sounds of a loud busker and the screech of an approaching train. In And Just Like That, Miranda has turned her back on corporate law and is going back to school, fired up to make change in a post–Women’s March world. One can imagine that Nixon, a lifelong New Yorker who previously ran for governor of the state and made subway conditions a key component of her campaign, stipulated that her character ride the train, burning the requirement into her contract. After all, even though the original series never showed us Miranda hopping in and out of stations, it’s easy to imagine the character taking it regularly. (“It’s just faster!” she’d assure her eye-rolling friends. “Honey, faster’s not always better,” Samantha would probably coo in return.)

Even though the subway wasn’t part of the original series, the show’s writers did refer to it now and again, humorously acknowledging its existence. When Stanford (played by the late Willie Garson) measures the length of his friendship with Carrie, he remarks that he met her back when she was still “riding the subway and wearing Candies.” To think riding the subway became such an anomaly for her that it morphed into a notable character trait. 

For all her New Yorkiness, Carrie was famously averse to public transportation in general. Her closest interaction with a nontaxi arrives in an episode when she’s coming to terms with how broke she is (a rare occurrence), and almost ends up on a bus that happens to have her face plastered on the side, a splashy ad for her column. The moment is in service of the joke, with the show’s writers angling away from public transportation until absolutely necessary.

There’s a similar moment in the first Sex and the City movie, when Carrie and Miranda are both lonely and commiserating over the phone on New Year’s Eve. Carrie can sense just how isolated Miranda is and, in a desperate bid to be with her friend, runs out of her apartment and goes into the nearest subway station. “It is the only time, in the entire series or either of the movies, that we see Carrie come up out of the subway or go into the subway,” writer, director, and executive producer Michael Patrick King said at the time. “That was a major thing for me as a writer: Carrie’s on the subway—that’s how much she’s trying to get someplace for her friend.”

That rare plunge into the subway is one of the many moments that underlines Carrie’s charmed existence, widening the gap between her previous money struggles and her now completely comfortable life. There were other flashes of struggle in the series, juxtaposing the quaint vision of New York with the real New York. The show occasionally depicted tiny apartments and trash-lined streets, true to life. In one episode, Carrie’s place gets mice; in another, she gets mugged (though the show makes it cutesy by casting a model-handsome man as the thief and having him namecheck her Manolos). But the missing piece was the subway, a core part of city life and one of New York’s great equalizers. More than a decade after the original show ended, And Just Like That finally embraces the train, getting with the times in the most classic, New York way imaginable. 

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