New Yorkers have been baffled by posters with fictitious plotlines for the show “And Just Like That …” We tracked down their creator.
This week, mysterious neon fliers began to appear around Brooklyn and Manhattan.
At first glance, they looked like the standard filming notices that are often taped up in New York to inform passers-by that they could end up in the background of a “Law & Order” episode.
These notices appeared to be for “And Just Like That …,” HBO’s fever dream of a follow-up to “Sex and the City.” But upon closer inspection, they advertised plot lines even more ludicrous than the ones that have appeared on the show.
“Project details: At brunch with the girls, Carrie reveals that she is Garfield the cat,” one reads.
Another: “Carrie goes on a bad date with Mr. Bean (the character) and then accidentally sends him a nude.”
The posters’ provenance was unknown and, to many online, vexing. People who spotted them circulated snapshots on X along with various theories: Was this a surprisingly edgy stunt by HBO to promote the show’s third season? A prank by Kim Cattrall, who played Samantha in “Sex and the City” but did not return for the reboot?
After a week of swirling rumors, the prankster behind the posters finally revealed herself in a an interview on Wednesday afternoon. The faux filming notices were created by Kat Thek, a writer in Brooklyn who has done intermittent, mischievous public art projects.
Ms. Thek, 37, said she had always appreciated the vague tidbits of information included on the filming notices she often spots around New York. She started making her own fantastical “And Just Like That …” posters using Google Slides last week as “a little treat” for herself.
“I was sort of surprised that it became a hunt,” she said.
Ms. Thek’s artistic high jinks go back about a decade. For one of her earliest projects, in 2016, she hung posters in the New York Botanical Garden suggesting that its corpse flowers were covering up the scent of actual dead bodies. The garden’s staff had to debunk the fliers online: “An artist has taken some ‘liberties’ with our logo,” read a post from the garden’s official Twitter account, referring to the artist as the “Botanical Banksy.”
In 2019, she handed out T-shirts printed up with a misspelling of certain popular sitcom. (“Freinds.”)
Last week, she tried making filming notices for the TV show “Young Sheldon” and for an imaginary “Spider-Man 4” movie, but neither got her creative juices flowing like the far-fetched possibilities permitted by the characters on “Sex and the City,” of which she said she was a lifelong fan.
“It’s almost like how Marvel has their cinematic universe, I feel like this is my ‘Sex and the City’ cinematic universe,” she said. “Anything could happen.” (Another example: “Carrie gets a face tattoo.”)
So far, Ms. Thek has hung up more than 100 of the multicolored fliers in Gramercy Park, the West Village, Lower Manhattan and the Clinton Hill neighborhood of Brooklyn. “I got caught hanging up one that was especially unhinged, and somebody stopped me and asked if it was a union job,” she said. She responded that she did not know. “They were like, ‘Ugh,’ and stormed away.”
Fans online have seemed receptive to her made-up plot lines. A post on X rounding up some of the signs has been viewed more than two million times. (“From what I hear that would be better than the actual show,” one commenter responded.)
Cynthia Nixon, who plays Miranda Hobbes in “Sex and the City” and “And Just Like That …” posted two of the signs to her Instagram story with three crying-laughing emojis.
However unlikely the scenario, Ms. Thek was hesitant to shut down the speculation that she had made the signs in cahoots with HBO. “I want to live in a world where that is possible,” she said.
HBO did not respond to a request for comment, but Ms. Thek eagerly awaits the network’s feedback. She said it would be an honor to receive a stern letter commanding her to remove the signs.
“A cease-and-desist from HBO would look great in my bathroom,” she said.
