Like two roads diverging off of Madison Avenue, it seems Kim Cattrall’s absence from HBO Max’s coming Sex and the City revival won’t be explained away with an anecdote about Samantha dying a glamorous death in the throws of lovemaking; instead, we’ll evidently learn that like the actor who plays her, the sex-positive bombshell has simply gone her own way.
HBO Max’s chief content officer Casey Bloys told TVLine Wednesday that the Sex and the City follow-up And Just Like That… is aiming for a realistic potrayal of women in their 50s. To that end, he explained, “just as in real life, people come into your life, people leave.” In other words: though Cynthia Nixon’s Miranda, Kristin Davis’s Charlotte, and Sarah Jessica Parker’s Carrie are still close, it appears that they are no longer brunch-level friends with Cattrall’s Samantha.
“Friendships fade, and new friendships start. So I think it is all very indicative of the real stages, the actual stages of life… They’re trying to tell an honest story about being a woman in her 50s in New York,” Bloys continued. “So it should all feel somewhat organic, and the friends that you have when you’re 30, you may not have when you’re 50.”
The revival—produced by Parker and longtime SATC producer Michael Patrick King—will also aim for a more true-to-life portrayal of New York’s demographic diversity, Bloys said. For HBO Max, that means including Black voices like humorist Samantha Irby and Black Lightning’s Keli Goff in the show’s writers’ room. Perhaps the showrunners will also be taking Cattrall up on her suggestion to Piers Morgan in a 2017 interview to recast Samantha as Black or Hispanic—though maybe they’ll be too busy shepherding the girls through the pandemic and imagining a podcast for Carrie to have the time.
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