‘Sex and the City’ reboot without Samantha?
SEX and the City fans couldn’t help but wonder: What would a reboot of the popular HBO show look like?
Seventeen years after the show concluded, we’re about to get an answer: On Sunday, HBO Max announced three of the four best friends would be getting back together for a 10-episode reboot called And Just Like That…
What will it be without Kim Cattrall playing publicist Samantha Jones, the friend who was always pushing the rest to be more adventurous? Here’s a big clue: Sex has vanished from the show’s title.
Fans of the HBO hit, which ran from 1998 to 2004, expressed their displeasure on Twitter, responding with GIFs of Samantha saying “that’s just stupid”, wondering what the point is in reviving the show without Samantha, or suggesting the character get her own spin-off set in London. For years, Cattrall has made it clear she doesn’t want to be part of a third movie or a reboot.
But for Jennifer Armstrong, the author of Sex and the City and Us: How Four Single Women Changed the Way We Think, Live, and Love, the change makes sense. While Armstrong says a show without Samantha “is very hard to imagine”, she notes that “characters, people, humans move on all the time. Friendships end”.
The show’s creators will account for Samantha’s absence in some way, Armstrong says: Maybe she drifted apart from the other women; maybe Samantha stayed in Los Angeles, where she had moved in the first Sex and the City movie; or maybe she bought a farmhouse during the Covid-19 exodus. Armstrong notes a group of friends not all being in the same place 17 years later is “more realistic” than if they had all been still friends and living in New York.
Armstrong says, she also views Samantha as a symbol of her era. “So much of the transgressiveness of Sex and the City was her and the way she contributed to the discussions. She brought the dirtiest words and filthiest thoughts. She said things in a straightforward, unapologetic fashion. That was a huge part of what made the show sociologically a huge deal at the time.”
Perhaps we’ve learnt the lessons Samantha had to offer. “Samantha taught the went off the air, other TV shows, such as have pushed the envelope further.
