Sex And The City is back — but without Samantha. This is kind of like having intercourse but without orgasm. What’s the point?
So although it’s all many women my age can talk about, I won’t be switching on the reboot of the show, And Just Like That…, when it is screened next week.
The original series was unflinching in its portrayal of four women’s love lives and friendships. It transfixed my generation from the late 1990s to the mid-2000s — and changed the way we talked about sex irrevocably.
Now it’s back. Teaser trailer features Carrie and Miranda in mid-50s reliving their stories in New York. Sarah Jessica Parker as Carrie squeals while waiting for a table at the restaurant. Kristin Davis’s Charlotte runs a finger over some flowers in her Park Avenue flat. As career-driven Miranda, Cynthia Nixon’s hair is more epic than ever.
Emily Hill shares her reasons for not watching Sex and The City’s new season. Kim Cattrall, who plays Samantha in the series (pictured), confirms she will not be returning to the show.
On YouTube it has been viewed almost nine and a half million times but earned only 12,000 likes, which suggests I’m not the only one who’s turned off. ‘This feels like being introduced to your father’s new girlfriend,’ one comment reads. ‘Smile. Please be polite. Hold off judgment until you can officially confirm you hate her.’
What’s missing, of course, is the fourth friend: the independent and uninhibited Samantha. Kim Cattrall, the Liverpool-born actress who played the character through six seasons and two films, has confirmed she won’t be returning after an explosive falling-out with her co-stars.
Most of us assumed her character would be killed off, but instead reports say ‘Sam’ has been sent to London in a plotline which was ‘the perfect way to keep her alive and explain her absence. Viewers will learn she is thriving in England even though she has fallen out with Carrie’.
As someone who’s always falling out with everyone, I raise a Cosmopolitan to Kim for putting her kitten heel down on the subject of playing Samantha again — considering what they did to her character in the films.
Sex And The City first aired in 1998. Carrie announces that love in Manhattan is dead. Samantha, on the other hand, is not as obsessed with getting married or having children.
She’s the oldest at past 40, a publicist, and her approach is if you can’t beat the culture, enjoy it: ‘Sweetheart, this is the first time in the history of Manhattan that women have had as much money and power as men, plus the equal luxury of treating men like sex objects.’
As a young virgin, I started the series at age 15. I did not have much sympathy with this strategy, but I had read lots of books and wanted to marry Darcy Willoughby. Clearly.
Samantha was funny to me, but her personal life is hard for me. I didn’t think anyone should be treated like a sex object.
Emily watched Sex And The City three times more than once and said Samantha was the show’s true heroine. Pictured from left: Cynthia Nixon, Sarah Jessica Parker and Kristin Davis
But in lockdown, aged 38, still single and so defeated after 20 years on the dating frontline that I’m waving the white flag of surrender, I watched the whole of Sex And The City again — twice.
Once out of sheer loneliness and then a second time because I was suddenly struck by what I’d missed the first time around. Which is that the true heroine of the show, and the only one who really grows up, is not Carrie (who cheats on nice guy Aidan and ends up with the man she cheats on him with — Big); Charlotte, who marries money (sure, he’s bald, but she gets to keep that apartment); or Miranda, the second-wave feminist who finds herself with a husband, child and housekeeper.
Samantha is the most kind and human of all. She’s the one who tells Big to stop messing Carrie around. She even hates children and babysits Miranda.
She defends Charlotte, who longs to be a mum, when a pregnant friend steals the name she made up for her yet-to-be-conceived baby (this is my favourite bit of the whole 47 hours of SATC; Samantha yells ‘You b****!’ at the mum- to-be, puts her arm around Charlotte and escorts her from the baby shower). All this despite the fact she is constantly horribly used and abused by men who have no human rights.
Like her, I’m so fed up with being used by men. I’m Team Sam all the way
In a world of dating apps, which have now brought about the death of love in London as well as Manhattan, I don’t just sympathise, but bang my fist on the table and cry: ‘Je suis Samantha!’
Sam is once again smothered by Richard’s evil intentions. In response, she staples pictures of him to lamp posts to alert other women and gets stopped by a policewoman who tells her it’s a crime. Sam reveals what he did and is told ‘Carry on, ma’am’.
It’s hilarious — but it also has to be the most heartbreaking moment of the series. As someone who now knows what it is like to have her own heart incinerated, I feel the pain of this in a way I can’t with the other break-ups in the show.
Anyone who has ever loved Sex And The City identifies with one of them — I’ve always said I’m a writer like Carrie, as cynical as Miranda and a Pollyanna like Charlotte. I watched the series over again after getting so tired of being used as a man, and decided to be Team Sam.
Emily would love Samantha to have gone off with Smith and made it into the sunset in series 6. Pictured from left: Cynthia Nixon as Miranda Hobbes, Sarah Jessica Parker as Carrie Bradshaw, Kim Cattrall as Samantha Jones and Kristin Davis as Charlotte York
Did she choose a life full of endless sex or did she pretend to desire it because she didn’t see herself as a victim. This feels so relevant to modern dating that I’m thinking of printing T-shirts with her epic line: ‘The right guy is an illusion. Start living your lives!’
Samantha, despite telling people she wants only sex with men, has been involved in three serious relationships. When she finally finds a decent, beautiful man, Smith, it’s like watching my mother’s love advice proven right on screen. (‘It’ll happen when you least expect it,’ she says.)
When Sam starts dating Smith, she is so shocked that he’s trying to hold her hand in public that she falls down a flight of stairs and breaks her foot.
What’s crucial is not her cosmic libido but her human heart
Yet, he gradually wins her trust. He uses his work connections and transforms himself from a waiter in a restaurant to a Hollywood star. It’s proof that what’s most crucial to Samantha Jones is not her cosmic libido, but her human heart.
What I hate (hate, hate!) The only thing I hate about these films is the way they destroyed this happy ending. The film’s first features her as an ill-equipped housewife who makes Smith sushi with her naked body and then sends her to LA. (‘How,’ I screamed, ‘does Sam have nothing to do but sit at home and wait for him? She’s a publicist — in LA.’)
It’s also implied that Sam has let herself go, so why would he make time for her anyway? ‘Mother of God, what’s with the gut?’ a friend asks her when she returns to New York looking thinner than I am.
By the second film, fifty-ish Samantha’s menopause had become a two-hour-long joke. It culminated in her taking off her clothes in a souk because she’s sweating so much, then throwing condoms in the air and shouting ‘I have sex!’ at all the offended Muslim men surrounding her.
Who knows what godawful thing they’d have done to her in this new series. Kim Cattrall has received a lot of criticism for refusing to reprise the role, first when a Sex And The City 3 was proposed (‘I remember getting a lot of grief on social media,’ she said) and now for the reboot.
Personallly, I wish Smith had gone off into the sunset with Sam Jones and never returned. Because if Sam Jones can’t get out of the dating game with her dignity intact, what hope is there for the rest of us?
Bad Romance was written by Emily Hill. Her novel Love In Late Capitalism is published on Valentine’s Day.