Well, it’s not Sex And The City but with Samatha as a cat named Fred, but we are indeed getting a new chapter of the HBO series—and it is indeed without Kim Cattrall. “I couldn’t help but wonder… where are they now?” SATC star Sarah Jessica Parker posted on Instagram Sunday along with a video teasing a new HBO Max series called And Just Like That…
The new series will follow Parker’s Carrie, Kristin Davis’ Charlotte, and Cynthia Nixon’s Miranda “as they navigate the journey from the complicated reality of life and friendship in their 30s to the even more complicated reality of life and friendship in their 50s,” reads a press release sent to The A.V. Club. The ten-episode, half-hour series—named after a phrase Carrie uttered often via voiceover—is scheduled to begin production in New York late spring. Parker, Davis, and Nixon will executive produce alongside original series producer, writer, and director Michael Patrick King.
“I grew up with these characters, and I can’t wait to see how their story has evolved in this new chapter, with the honesty, poignancy, humor and the beloved city that has always defined them,” says HBO Max’s head of original content, Sarah Aubrey. Of course, one story that won’t be evolving—at least on camera—is the fourth member of SATC’s foursome, Samantha. Actress Kim Cattrall has long had a tense relationship with Parker, and in the years since the poorly received sequel movie the Filthy Rich actress has been vocal about not wanting to return to the character. “It’s a no from me,” Cattrall told Mail Online in 2019. “You learn lessons in life and my
lesson is to do work with good people and try and make it fun.”
For her part, Parker has denied any “feud” between the actresses. “There is no catfight, there never has been a catfight,” Parker told Vulture in 2018. “I’ve never fought with someone publicly in my life, nor would I.
And I spent time with all of the women on the set. People need to
recall that it wasn’t just two women on the set fighting, because that
just never happened. We are enormously proud of what we got to do… We
spent 10, 12 years of our life doing something that I really loved and I
feel privileged to be part of and I don’t want this to eclipse it or
change its experience for that audience that was so good to us for so
long.”
HBO Max’s press release makes no mention of how the series will handle Samantha’s absence—though Cattrall has suggested that perhaps Samantha return but recast as a BIPOC actress. “It’s a great part. I played it past the finish line and then some, and I
loved it,” she said in a 2017 interview with Piers Morgan. “Another actress should play it — maybe they could
make it an African-American Samantha Jones or a Hispanic Samantha
Jones.”
Cattrall has yet to acknowledge the new project on social media, but maybe that’s because she’s on a long walk.
118 Comments
No Samantha? That’s so Samantha.
And just like thatmy interest evaporatedAnd I wondered, was it really just all about Samantha all along?
It’s bugging me that I can’t place it – what movie is this gif from?
Sex and the City.She was also on 3rd Rock From the Sun.
Here’s a better idea of the context. I fucking love this episode.
It’s not from a movie. It’s from the penultimate episode of the show. For some reason they decided to be hilariously dark just before the end, and I was here for it, lemme tell ya.
Oh, how my sister and I cackle at that scene. (My sister says that if it were based on her life, you’d see her strutting past before pushing the irksome one out of the window)
They should’ve done a take where Wallace Shawn pushes her out the window. C’mon, it would’ve killed at the wrap party!
It’s a shame Cattrall didn’t get her own show (either playing Samantha or someone else). She definitely could have Carried it. Yeah, that was bad but I can’t stand Parker.
Hi-Yooo!
This needs to come back, lol.
The first person, I mean Bot, I thought of when I saw this article.
But now I’m over that, we had a little spat…
Sadly, Estelle Winwood is unavailable.
But she’s swell!
I bet she smells like Juicy Fruit.
Have you heard about her one-woman show Give ‘Em Hell, Estelle ?
I was front row, every night.
She’s cute, she’s rooty-toot-toot. I bet she smells like Juicy Fruit
This is why we think you’re swell, Kim Cattrall.
Cynthia Nixon went from running for Mayor to this again?
They could always cast Kim Darby instead. They say she’s a woman of True Grit!
They’d better figure out a damn good explanation because in real life you’d never see a scenario where 15 years pass and four friends don’t remain as close as ever.
lol reminds me of some comments on the Saved by the Bell reboot where people were worried about how the show would explain Screech not being in it. People actually do stop keeping in touch after high school and college and make new friends and it’s not unusual at all for someone who was a good friend to barely be a part of someone’s life later in life.
I read a great essay a few years ago (can’t remember the writer or platform, sorry!) The genesis of the article was “showing our wedding pictures to our kids.”And the kids recognized all their extended “aunts and uncles” from the wedding party…all except one person. Who was a terrific friend of the couple up to and including the wedding, but then not afterwards.Not for any specific reason, but because…that’s life. People come and go from our lives. People who were SOO important to us in our youth just fade away. Live moves on. It happens.
Samantha turned out to be Trump’s 6th press secretary. It was only for 16 days, but it was enough to splinter the friend group.Though if there were a Trump voter among any of them, it was Charlotte, right?
Charlotte seems like the most likely Republican, but Samantha seems like the most likely Trump voter. Or, at least, after Trump won she’d be angling for PR work with pro-Trump folks and horrifying people at brunch with the details of her spectacular one-night-stand with Michael Cohen.
her spectacular one-night-stand with Michael Cohen.Ew. Just…eeeew. I mean, I’d rather the show began with Samantha breaking up with Rudy Giuliani because he started jerking off in Borat 2 than imagine anyone having sex with Michael Cohen.
Or Samantha expressing outrage that she was replaced by her protege kayleigh mcenany.
In Rudy Giuliani’s bed? Okay, still gross, and more public acknowledgment than McEnany deserves after shameful term of office, but it sounds plausible, at least.
“Mmmm there’s nothing like a ‘yes man’ makes you scream ‘Yes, man!’”
Charlotte would be a huge fan of Mike Pence.
Luckily, there’s a built-in excuse for any lost friendships in 2021, “She became a Trump supporter.”In the alternative, I’d nominate Aisha Tyler as nuSamantha. She’s a little younger than the rest, but then again she’s gotta carry the show’s sexy quotient pretty much by herself.
I feel like every time a TV series regular asks for more money this year, the producers will threaten to write out their character in the most insulting and humiliating way possible by turning them into a Trump supporter. If an actor is particularly difficult, the writers can make them a participant in the insurrection.
They can say Samantha got trampled at the Capitol when one of the heels on her Manolo Blahniks broke off.
Good friends drift apart all the time with no “good explanation.”
All. The. Time. Only on TV do we get a nice little explainer about a ‘trip out west.’I’d be more than fine with a simple “I don’t even talk to that bitch anymore.”I’m sure they’ll just kill her off.
“Samantha…died while traveling back to her home planet….”
Samantha took up a new hobby piloting light aircrafts. She attempted to cross the pacific to much fanfare, her three closest girlfriends saw her off, but somewhere around the mid mark a bleep on the radar suddenly went quiet. No one knows exactly what happened to her. Some say aliens, others sabotage. A quietly held theory is that she’s on an island somewhere, in tattered NY fashions, sunburnt and subsisting on shellfish and tropical fruits. damn, that girl did go. They missed her at first, grieving over their expensive wine lunches, pausing and staring listlessly in to their pasta over things unsaid, and then they said good bye. Typical Samantha with her fancy piloting license, couldn’t just be cool and stay in the city.
Samantha took up a new hobby piloting light aircrafts. She attempted to cross the pacific to much fanfare, her three closest girlfriends saw her off, but somewhere around the mid mark a bleep on the radar suddenly went quiet. No one knows exactly what happened to her. Some say aliens, others sabotage. A quietly held theory is that she’s on an island somewhere, in tattered NY fashions, sunburnt and subsisting on shellfish and tropical fruits. damn, that girl did go. They missed her at first, grieving over their expensive wine lunches, pausing and staring listlessly in to their pasta over things unsaid, and then they said good bye. Typical Samantha with her fancy piloting license, couldn’t just be cool and stay in the city. The final episode of ‘Dynasty’ spin-off ‘The Colbys’ went out with a bang as Fallon Carrington-Colby (Emma Samms) is abducted by aliens.
heh, I like my story better. The character never changed her ways, she didn’t settle down and make a family so that all the audience felt better about themselves, there was no happy ending. She went and got her pilot’s license and left (potentially in a beautiful mid-pacific fireball). And the girls never got closure.
They will kill her off and get it out of the way probably first seconds of the pilot. Why leave the door open or “Chrissy Snow” her, she not coming back.
Why leave the door open or “Chrissy Snow” herAs a nice gesture? An olive branch? Being the better person and moving on with dignity and grace?
But if they kill her, the show will have to write the other actors sad and that’s a buzzkill, for a show I enjoyed but is basically a cotton candy fun show with one-liners.
So basically they’d be making her Col. Henry Blake, because they wanted to stick it to McLean Stevenson for leaving.
“Samantha’s plane was shot down over the Sea of Japan. There were no survivors.”
The new series will follow Parker’s Carrie, Kristin Davis’ Charlotte, and Cynthia Nixon’s Miranda “as they navigate the journey from the complicated reality of life and friendship in their 30s to the even more complicated reality of life and friendship in their 50s,” reads a press release sent to The A.V. Club.If your life is even more of a drama-filled soap opera in your 50s (and, honestly, if your life is all that complicated in your 30s), you’re probably doing it wrong.
To be fair, if their lives were less complicated it wouldn’t make for very interesting TV. And therefore much lower salaries for the stars.
Honestly I’d like a low-stakes show every now and then. I could do with a show where the leads just sit on the couch with a beer or wine and talk about bullshit as long as the dialogue’s clever.Like, Letterkenny has even less stakes than stuff like Trailer Park Boys and it works very well because the continuity is much more apparent, when the show gets weird it flows a lot better because it never feels like jumping the shark and the overall mundanity of its “twists” hits a lot harder. They’ve turned their schtick of “dramatic season end cliffhanger that gets resolved in the most anti-climactic, sane way possible” into an art form – it works every single time, and not just because I’m so used to DRAMATIC SITCOM SHENANIGANS.Basically what I’m saying is I’d rather someone’d give me 4 seasons of Letterkenny per year instead of this dogshit that exists to fund Sarah Jessica Parker’s retirement. Like, I predict this thing’s biggest achievement will be giving Cynthia Nixon enough money to do some weird cool stuff like “A Quiet Passion”, or maybe get back to politics (which I don’t know if it’s a good thing honestly, I’m not American and I don’t know shit about your local politics).
You must not be a millennial if you think people in there 30s aren’t struggling more and less stable than any time since WWII.
Having seen some of the original show, I’m pretty sure the use of “complicated” in the press release indicates interpersonal drama and not financial instability.
It’s a little sexist to immediately assume this is some catfight. I’ve heard she dropped out to focus on her jazz career.(A little forced, but there’s never a bad reason to post this)
I like Cattrall’s idea of recasting the character as a woman of color if only because it would result in every episode consisting of the three white women engaging in nothing but the most banal of small talk while fidgeting and waiting for nu-Samantha to just leave the room. Of course the brilliant move would be to replace Samantha with a curiously similar but just slightly different character, played by Kirstie Alley, who turns out to be betray the others in the end.If only Alley wasn’t a cunt.
So they’re just making Sex and the City even more of a blatant The Golden Girls copycat? Well, in this case, I guess it would be more of a The Golden Palace copycat.
Sarah Jessica Parker is now FOUR years OLDER than Rue McClanahan was when the Golden Girls started.
I can see it now…“Picture it, New York, 1998…”
Shady Pines, Lando!
And if you had a partyInvited everyone you knewYou would seeThe biggest gift would be from meAnd the card attached would say“Fuck me badly once, shame on you. Fuck me badly twice, shame on me.”
It’s sad when cartoons do a better job of copying The Golden Girls.
Oh, and Kim Cattrall is is one year older than Betty White when The Golden Girls started. Maybe she’s taking long walks, waiting for the Mannequin reboot?
Andrew McCarthy is free.
Ready and willing!
And I’m HERE FOR IT
Sure, because the Carrie Diaries went over so well…
Good catch, everybody forgot that existed
Claudia O’Doherty is ready to assume the role.
Dammit, beat me to the same gag by 4 minutes!
So do no one even bother calling Claudia O’Doherty?!?
“I grew up with these characters”– just what actors over 50 love to hear from their new boss
It certainly makes me feel pretty old, but her statement clearly highlights the m.o . of all the young producers in Hollywood at the moment: “I grew up on this, I want it back! You do too, right?”
“I grew up with these characters” and “head of original content” are the “Dental Plan!”/”Lisa needs braces” of the HBO Max executive brain.
I suppose I could care less about a SATC revival but it’s hard to think how.
Is the least believable thing about this going to be that you can still live in Manhattan writing one column for a newspaper a week?
Carrie married rich, so that’s sorted out actually.
Ah… Did not know that. I’m not gonna say I never watched the show, but I certainly didn’t watch the movies, when I assume that happened.
One of the strange things about the show, to me at least, is how it’s never mentioned that Carrie seems to be exclusively interested in rich guys. Of the guys she dates:- Aiden owns his own very successful furniture business. He’s clearly wealthy as he owns several properties in manhattan as well as a vacation home outside the city.- Mr. Big does something unspecified in finance and we’re told he’s extremely wealthy.- Petrovsky is a famous artist and owns homes all over the world. He constantly buys Carrie insane jewelry.- That politician guy clearly has money.The show kind of handles money and class issues poorly in general, so I don’t think it’s trying to make some comment about her being a social climber or something, but its still kind of odd that she’s always dating these men who are wildly more affluent than she is.
As someone who was on the periphery of the NYC journalism/media world for many years, the profile of the men she dated was actually the most realistic thing to me. Someone who wrote a sex or gossip column for the Post or Daily News would, while not being wealthy themselves, definitely hang out in wealthy circles, either for “work,” or because of he wealthy “friends” they made along the way. I also knew more than a few finance bros who were always dating artists or writers and the like. It’s a pretty common pairing, it seems.
I don’t recall the show very well but i think she had a couple of less-successfull flings, maybe Burger? Or that guy who lived at his mother’s? but they were not developped at all.
I think the moneyed men are definitly part of what made the show escapism. It’s selling the fantasy of dating rich.
Burger was at least rich enough to have a house in the Hamptons, while living in the city though, right? He wasn’t as rich some of the other guys, but he was doing fine.
Did he own a house in the Hamptons or rent?
He said that he was going to “my place in the Hamptons,” if I remember right. So if he rented, it was longterm.
Kim has the right idea. I was a Sex and the City apologist for a while, but the movies were where I drew the line. Both somehow managed to embody the worst aspects of the show and actually soured me on ever re-watching it.
Seriously, what is it with HBO and scorching the Earth after their shows end?
I never saw the films, although I did hear the best film review ever about the second one.But against my best intentions I actually enjoyed the series, even while hating with a passion all of the characters.
As immortalised in The Thick of It: ‘Fucking hell Kermode, your hands are massive!’
Was that Malcolm Tucker who said that to Mark Kermode?Because that totally sounds like some smartass crack Peter Capaldi would come up with for Malcolm to say about Mark Kermode.
Funnily enough, no. Ollie says it just while Kermode on TV. Kermode’s broadcasting partner, Simon Mayo, is also mentioned in the same episode, but in a different context.
this fella just articulated what felt so weird to me about the show (and why i could never watch it at length): it’s gay white men in drag.there’s nothing wrong with that if that’s what the show was about, but every time i tried to watch, i got this feeling like these writers hate women.
“i got this feeling like these writers hate women.”
And so do white women. That’s why the show was a hit.
Oh yeah, it’s in pure hatewatch territory now.
But that second movie…ugh, it’s so ignoble. So thoroughly hateful. It’s why the terrorists hate us, I swear.
And long. Don’t forget how unbelievably long it is. Nothing happens but there’s about an hour more than you’re expecting. My ex-girlfriend and I saw it at the cinema.
Ah, another Prime Kermodian Rant.The best part is, Mark prefaces it with “You’re not going to get a rant from me about this, because — it’s like being a parent, ‘I’m not angry, I’m disappointed….’” And for the next nine minutes, he goes off on this movie like it was The Director’s Cut of Jud S!
Michael Patrick King is the worst thing to happen to Sex and the City. And the movies were all him.
Showtime at least scorches the Earth while their shows are still on the air!
The nation – and the world – are not so desperate for content that we need a Sex and the City mishmash quasi reboot something or other without Kim Cattrall. Just… please. Trash this trash.
I mean, the last season had her diagnosed with cancer, right? So just have that be the answer: the cancer returned and she died. People die. It happens. (So it goes.)I’m more curious about how they are going to address the changes in the city — because the NYC of the early 2000s is not the same NYC of the 2020s. And the pandemic hit NYC hard.
The New York in SATC never existed in real life, so I doubt it’ll be much of an issue for them to dodge aspects of New York in the present.
yeah it’s not even the 2010s NYC of girls anymore.
Ngl I love Cattrall’s idea to just have Samantha be Black or Hispanic. Bet some chuds would be super angry about it, too.
They could just promote the City itself from 5th billing to 4th billing.
There’s layers to how awfull the idea of an African-American Samantha Jones or a Hispanic Samantha Jones is. In one swoop Catttrall undermines the relevancy of the revival, makes herself look like the bigger person, and sets a trap for the revival. (Rich White Women The Show? In the middle of a pandemic? Recast my character as a POC if you dare, that won’t backfire)
Anybody who really think, “great idea, let’s make the hyper-sexual character a POC next to the three other archetypes, is Leslie Jones avalaible? ” is not keeping in touch with The Discourse™.
The movie would be virtually raked over the coals by critics for “enforcing white supremacy” by “presenting the sexuality of dark-skinned people as rapacious and out of the norm in contrast to the purity of three married white women in commited relashionships, which is a colonial stereotypes that was used for century to justify the dehumanization of non-white people and the exploitation of brown bodies ect ect…”
Of course i am in favor of more representation, just not convinced they can make this particular configuration non-offensive.
“In one swoop Catttrall undermines the relevancy of the revival, makes herself look like the bigger person, and sets a trap for the revival.”
She said that in 2017. That isn’t a recent quote.
I’m not convinced this post wasn’t terrible.
¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Sold, honestly!
Have BIPoC Samantha in a committed relationship.
She’s in her flipping Fifties — by then, we’re either paired up or largely accepting we’re not sociable enough to be in a committed relationship.
Oh god this makes an Entourage revival that much more likely.
The first few seasons were good fun, with a mix of cheap laughs and some razor-sharp writing. Once Michael Patrick King and SJP seemed to get more of a voice, it became a much more tedious, ponderous, suffocating show, with endless purple prose monologues pushed straight through SJP’s nose, and the incredibly dull plight of Carrie having to learn the same fucking lesson over and over and over as an overaged ingenue. I have no interest in seeing this again. The only ones I cared about most of the time were Charlotte and Miranda, and I don’t really want to see what the show will do with either of them at this point.
If I remember right, the earlier seasons had more plots based on the book. The book itself is really weird. It’s kind of nihilistic? Or, at least, it seemed pretty self-aware that the life the main characters are leading is vapid and empty.The chapter about the woman who is a sort of courtesan is just incredibly sad. It addresses how her life will grow more and more difficult as she ages.
I never did read the book, but some of the stories from the early seasons fit the vibe you mention. I remember one with Samantha where she fell in love with a man who was wonderful and charming and romantic, “the one,” but then she realized he had a small penis, and much as she tried, she just couldn’t feel satisfied. They went to therapy because she hadn’t let him know what the problem was, and when she told him, he blew up at her, suggesting it was really her problem because she’d had sex with a lot of other men, and so on. End of relationship. In description this sounds pretty bad, but it did fit the coarser but somewhat layered comic tone of the first two seasons. Later on the show started trying to have it both ways and became needlessly maudlin and phony, leading to silliness like how noble we were supposed to see Carrie as being because she refused to have sex with a Navy guy who made disparaging comments about NYC.
Ah Kim will be fine, she’s on that successful Fox show ‘Filthy Rich.’ She don’t need none of that HBO Max money.
What Parker actually meant to say is. I haven’t had much success since the show ended so why not do a reboot.
Can we just get another season of Divorce instead? D:
Just get that one woman’s cat to play the part.
My wife and me used to watch the show long ago and I just showed her this article. Her face lit up for a second then the dread of no Cattrall set in, she was the best part of the show. Well there went that interest real quick.
They are just saving Kim for the season finale. She’s gonna appear like Luke in ‘The Mandalorian’ CGI and all.
I mean, I’m going to watch it, because I have HBO Max and there is still some fondness for those Sunday nights spent with my friends in college, drinking cheap-ass vodka cosmos while laughing that Carrie has her shit less together than a bunch of college juniors. But I don’t see how SatC starts filming in New York during COVID. The show is about New York, more than it’s about these four three women. How are they going to film street scenes? Where will Carrie forlornly throw away her cell phone when she’s pissed at Big?
Good Lord. Instead of watching this drivel, listen to the Worst Idea of All Time podcast, on which our intrepid hosts watched “Sex and City 2: Something, Something Boogaloo” once a week for a year. You will thank me.