‘And Just Like That’s’ Che Diaz Is the Worst Character on TV

Everything we can't stop loving, hating, and thinking about this week in pop culture.

Manage newsletters View in browser with Kevin Fallon Everything we can't stop loving, hating, and thinking about this week in pop culture. This week:  Bemoaning the worst character on TV. Why everyone is obsessed with Yellowjackets. The life-affirming Elmo vs. Rocco feud. The one-year anniversary of E! covering the insurrection. The new gay agenda. Even I Can't Get Over How Bad Che Diaz Is My therapist said that Che Diaz can't hurt me.    Still, I couldn't help but wonder, how long will it take for these scars, this trauma inflicted by the indisputable worst character on television, to heal? I am an And Just Like That… apologist. Yes, there are moments of HBO Max's Sex and the City sequel series that are absolutely mortifying to watch, but I find there to be some versimilitude to that. There's no way these characters would adapt to a new generation and era of social mores without teetering in their stilettos trying to navigate things.    Is that different from the aspirational and sexy vibes of the original SATC? Of course. But in a great piece for Vox this week, writer Alex Abad-Santos underscored how that might be the point. The series "finds the demented comedy in life's humiliations," he writes. The reboot "isn't just about being fabulous. It's about reckoning with your obsolescence."    Be that as it may, the series is nothing if not polarizing. For everyone delighting in the indefatigable charms of Sarah Jessica Parker each week, there are those who seem to be personally offended by the series' lapse in quality. (I think it's gotten better and better each week.) On the other hand, The New Yorker's Emily Nussbaum, who is an authority on the legacy of the original series, tweeted, "Ok, I gave this SATC sequel 5.5 eps. I'm out. It's not fun-bad, it's just bad."   Yet in these divisive times—in all things related to Carrie Bradshaw or otherwise—there is comfort in knowing that there is one thing that seems to have united us all: A passionate hatred for the Che Diaz character on And Just Like That…   There is no exaggerating how insufferable this character is. To call them unwatchable is not hyperbole. "Cringing" is not a strong enough verb to describe what the body reflexively does when they are on screen, like a physical defense mechanism. It's more like an elaborate tuck and roll off the couch followed by an army crawl to hide under the bed before letting out a high-pitched scream of "No!" like the one I learned to do from Oprah during an episode of her talk show on how to protect yourself from being abducted.    Che, played by Grey's Anatomy alum Sara Ramirez, is one of the new characters added to the series in a woke panic, meant to address the original run's cardinal sin of unforgivable whiteness—a lack of diversity that would of course need to be rectified in any sort of reboot or revival. Several of these characters are truly captivating; I'm loving the friendship being formed between Carrie and Sarita Choudhury's Seema Patel, a dynamic that is starting to fill the void of the Carrie-Samantha friendship, if not necessarily the unapologetic raunchiness.    Every moment Che Diaz is on screen, however, is absolutely mortifying.    They are Carrie's gender nonbinary, pansexual boss, who hired her to cohost a podcast about gender and sexuality. It's actually a shrewd creative decision to introduce a character that forces these privileged, multimillionaire white boomers to fumble their way into a progressive mindset.    It's nice to see how casual, yet serious Carrie is about taking Che's identity at face value and getting used to using different pronouns. That Che would provide a mirror through which Charlotte starts to understand her own daughter is kind of beautiful. That they would be the catalyst for Miranda's sexual awakening was telegraphed a mile away. The storyline is good, though the Che stuff itself is nearly impossible to watch.   How unfortunate that a character like this is so heinous. No one wants to single out the only new LGBTQ+ character on a series as the worst. Yet Che Diaz leaves us no choice.    There should be conversation about gender, sex and queerness in a modern Sex and the City telling. And it should be jarring. It should be destabilizing for these women. It should also make sense, and be delivered in a way that remotely resembles how an actual human talks or behaves.    Whether it's the content of their podcast or everything that is said in what have become the four most harrowing words in the last 12 months of television—"Che Diaz's comedy concert"—whatever wokeness, enlightenment, or edginess that is supposed to be happening lands with all the grace of me tripping over my laptop charger cord while getting up to get another glass of wine on a Friday night.    It's not provocative, and certainly not intelligent. In fact, it comes off as if a smarmy far-right pundit or creator was satirizing or parodying those conversations and the left's wokeness addiction. That's how broad and obtuse it is.   The interactions between Che and Cynthia Nixon's Miranda are hard to watch. That's not because of any discomfort with the queer attraction being explored. It's because Che is unhinged. The shotgunning of weed off a vape pen. The fingerbanging in Carrie's kitchen while Carrie pees her bed. The instruction to Miranda to "DM me" if she wants to hang out again. It's hard to put into words the vibe, other than to say the vibe is unsettling. Every time someone calls Miranda "Rambo," an angel loses their wings.    Blessedly, Che only appears in flashback to the aforementioned kitchen fingering in this week's episode, but their presence looms large as the catalyst for a serious discussion between Miranda, Charlotte and Carrie about what Miranda is doing and how this affair could explode her life. It's beautifully acted. It's the best scene of the episode. It's all we could ask for, after weathering these last six weeks of And Just Like That…: talking about Che, but not having to hear from Che.   If, like me, you have the great misfortune of being unable to remove your eyeballs from your Twitter timeline—it's a disease—then you've seen that I am not alone in my thoughts about Che Diaz.    For the past few weeks, even on days when a new episode of And Just Like That… hasn't dropped, there's been a non-stop barrage of posts dragging the character for filth, whether it's comparing them to Omicron or illustrating the terror one feels anytime they introduce themselves on their podcast: "Hey! It's Che Diaz!" Where does Che Diaz rank in the pantheon of horrible TV characters? I'm not sure they're as bad as Ellis Boyd from Smash or Dana Brody from Homeland. They might give April from Gilmore Girls a run for her money. They're at least as annoying as Ani from 13 Reasons Why. Is this a Cousin Oliver/Brady Bunch series killer? It's too early to tell. That, actually, is the disappointing thing here.    There's something admirable in the messiness of this series—and appropriate for a group of women unmoored as life's circumstances force them to figure out, yet again, who they are and what they want from the world, not to mention how to exist in it as it changes around them. Yet from what I can tell, the biggest talking points thus far haven't been about that, but about Peloton, the disturbing accusations against Chris Noth, and how unbearable Che Diaz is. It would be a shame if the series doesn't get another season because these things have overshadowed any true examination of the show.    And just like that, in spite of Che Diaz, here we are defending this series again.  Try Getting Me to Talk About Anything But Yellowjackets Over the holidays, Americans seem to occupy their time with a suitable, wholesome seasonal activity: bingeing a TV show about teenage girls who start killing each other and becoming cannibals. Nothing says "the holidays" like love, family, and gruesome televised trauma.  The Showtime drama series Yellowjackets has been a massive word-of-mouth hit this winter. We first wrote about it after four episodes of it had aired, desperate for people to watch. Since then, four more episodes have launched and, with two to go before the season finale, it's become the kind of watercooler obsession that rarely happens these days.  Fans aren't just gushing about it on social media. They're digging through Reddit message boards for theories about what might happen, piecing together clues like Carrie Mathison during a psychotic break. And the uninitiated are scrambling, catching onto the fact that everyone else is talking about this show and realizing that if they don't get their ass in gear—which is to say, park it on the couch for eight hours to catch up fast—the worst thing that could possibly happen to a person as we enter yet another winter of pandemic house arrest might be their fate: A very good TV show is going to be spoiled for them.    As much as we spent 60-70 percent of our day screaming into our pillow in lonely despair that, two years later, the circumstances of the world around us remain frustratingly familiar, there is something, at least in the pop-culture space, that has changed.    The TV series that became cultural phenomena, exploding as word-of-mouth ensured that everyone you knew was watching, had been feel-good TV, mindless distractions, and ultimately diverting, ridiculous entertainment. The final season of Schitt's Creek was huge. Reality series as benign and boring as Love Is Blind and Selling Sunset, truly two of the worst shows to stain our television, became beautiful, welcome escapes. Something like Tiger King was dumb enough to distract us for a bit. As things got darker, Ted Lasso and the title character's gee-golly sunniness became a savior. This last year saw comedies like Hacks and Only Murders in the Building build interest week after week.     That all makes perfect sense. Who wanted to be further traumatized by brutal fiction at a time when reality was already so harrowing? But Yellowjackets indicates that we've turned a corner. We are salivating over this show about survival, carnage, and lingering PTSD.    It's a series that jumps back and forth through time between when a plane carrying a high school girls' soccer team crashes in the wilderness in 1996, leaving those who made it to desperately fend for themselves as they waited 19 months to be rescued, and 25 years later as four of those girls—played by Melanie Lynskey, Juliette Lewis, Christina Ricci, and Tawny Cypress—grapple with the disturbing lengths they went to in order to make it out of the woods alive. (This is where the aforementioned cannibalism comes into play.) I've been wondering about its popularity, too, as Station Eleven, HBO Max's series about a pandemic that nearly wipes out all civilization and a traveling Shakespearean theater troupe that attempts to find meaning in the aftermath, also builds in popularity. Just months ago, we would have thrown our TV out the window rather than sit through a series centered on a lethal virus. Yet, like so many, we find Station Eleven to be cathartic and beautiful. It shares an element with Yellowjackets, I think: At this point, we're interested in stories about what happens after we survive.  I won't spoil what's going on in Yellowjackets right now, though if you've been watching, there is a treasure trove of deep-dives online into clues and theories about what happened in the wilderness to keep you entertained until Sunday's new episode. But I do want to single out one thing that I've found particularly brilliant about the series.    Sure, there is no hesitance in revealing—with unflinching, gross detail—just how violent and gruesome what these girls are going through in the woods is. The show smartly teased this massive mystery in the first episode, this sequence in which we see a girl chased and murdered, a contingent of them masked in cult garb, and then, of course, eating their victim. But it also hasn't flashed back to that sequence since.  Fans are loving piecing together the clues as to what happened and attempting to identify victims and cult members, but by refusing to inundate us with more footage of that time in their journey, Yellowjackets is only titillating us even more to find out what might be revealed in the finale in two weeks. I can't wait. Buzz-buzz, bitches. Elmo vs. Rocco Is All I Live For It is with humble self-awareness that I recognize that not everyone is a garbage-feeding masochist who spends their entire life scrolling online. (That common New Year's resolution to cut back on screen time? Couldn't be me.)  And so I acknowledge that it can sometimes be impossible to describe to a normal, healthy person the nuances of an utterly meaningless thing that becomes a social media obsession for a day or two, but probably makes zero sense to anybody who is not extremely and interminably online. That said, I must bring up the Elmo vs. Rocco feud. The short version is that someone unearthed a clip from Sesame Street in which Elmo appears with Zoe and Zoe's imaginary friend, Rocco, who is an actual rock. Not a rock-like Muppet who talks and has human features. Just, like, a rock.    In the first viral clip, Elmo wants a cookie but is told he can't have one because Zoe is saving it for Rocco. Elmo loses it. He's being deprived of a cookie because of a rock?! In another, Zoe wants Elmo to wish Rocco a happy birthday. Elmo is simply not having any of Zoe's shit with this. It's some of the best comedic timing I've seen in a while, and it's from Sesame Street.   Anyway, Elmo began trending. The discord between Elmo and Rocco got labeled "a beef." Elmo released a statement in response, shading Rocco yet again. Jada Pinkett-Smith invited Elmo and Rocco to the Red Table.    It's all ludicrous and meaningless—but a nice reminder that sometimes the hellscape that is the internet can be a lot of fun.  #NeverForget E!'s Insurrection Coverage A year ago we were all in shock over what was happening at the U.S. Capitol during the insurrection. No one knew how to process it. That included the folks over at E!, as in the celebrity news channel and former home of the Kardashians.    I am forever indebted to writer Carey O'Donnell, who fastidiously documented E!'s coverage of the insurrection—yes, E! Inexplicably covered the insurrection—and on the one-year anniversary of that fateful day, resurfaced the one single thing about it that still makes me laugh uncontrollably. Points Were Made. I hear GLAAD just updated its mission statement after Cardi B sent this tweet.  What to watch this week:  Search Party: On my tombstone it will read, "More of you should have watched Search Party." (Fri. on HBO Max) The Righteous Gemstones: A comedy about a scamming megachurch starring John Goodman. Need I say more? (Sun. on HBO) Euphoria: The youths are back to terrify you! (Sun. on HBO) What to skip this week: Darcey & Stacey: There are *three* 90-Day Fiancé spin offs premiering Monday alone. This must be stopped. (Mon. on TLC) The 355: There are worse ways to spend an evening than watching Jessica Chastain, Penelope Cruz and Lupita Nyong'o be kickass spies. But there are better ways, too. (Fri. in theaters) Advertisement © Copyright 2022 The Daily Beast Company LLC 555 W. 18th Street, New York NY 10011 Privacy Policy If you are on a mobile device or cannot view the images in this message, click here to view this email in your browser. To ensure delivery of these emails, please add emails@thedailybeast.com to your address book. If you no longer wish to receive these emails, or think you have received this message in error, you can safely unsubscribe.