After all that, it seems that we might get a Sex and the City reboot after all? I’m sure this news pleases at least three people—Sarah Jessica Parker, Kristin Davis, and Cynthia Nixon—but for the rest of us out there, I’m not so sure.
Page Six reports that the possibility of a reboot is very real and that while the three stars mentioned above are interested, Kim Cattrall obviously will not be returning. I do not feel it necessary to recount the many ways Kim Cattrall has refused to participate in any further Sex and the City content, but please know that if this nightmare scenario happens, she will not be present.
What’s on the table is not quite a reboot, but a “revisit,” according to Sarah Jessica Parker, who said that she’d be interested in something of that nature in September of last year. HBO Max would be the home for this reboot and it would be a “limited series event” and not a full-on series. That is some small comfort to me, who has watched every episode of the show, seen the first movie, and feels like there is nothing more to say or do in this matter, thank you for asking.
Even though Samantha Jones was an irritating caricature of a woman’s libido, she is an intrinsic part of the iconic quartet and her absence will be felt in whatever reboot Darren Star manages to throw together. Furthermore, I have no idea what else there is to say or do with these women in the first place? How will they explain Samantha’s absence? Should the reboot open with the women in mourning dress genuflecting in front of a statue of Samantha’s naked body as she appeared in her nude photos from the 2001 episode “The Real Me” that also found Carrie tripping on her own feet on the runway only to be declared “fashion roadkill,” then sure, that’s fine. But that’s morbid and dark in a way that a Star production is not, so my guess is that Samantha’s absence will be a footnote, or, even worse, not mentioned at all.
Still, even if they deal with this, other questions persist. Is this going to touch the pandemic, and if it does, why? Do we want to see how Carrie handles Twitter? Does anyone want to think about Charlotte or her husband Harry engaging with the MLM community, which is exactly what I think she’d get up to? Do you think Mirandar finally divorced Steve? Even if the answers to these questions are, respectively, no, Jesus christ no, and I fucking hope so, that still doesn’t mean we NEED this on television or a streaming platform whose bounty I have only recently discovered because it finally ended its feud with Roku. Sometimes it’s okay to let cherished cultural institutions lie where they fell, for better or worse. Sex and the City was a nice show for its time, but its time is not now, much like the person you slept with maybe four years after the dissolution of your relationship. Leave it in the past! Move forward. Towanda your way through that pang of nostalgia and get free.