So who’s involved? Most of the key cast have taken to social media to announce their return. There’s Parker playing Bradshaw, Cynthia Nixon playing Miranda Hobbes, and Kristin Davis playing Charlotte York.
Wait, wait. Where’s Samantha? I knew you would ask that. Kim Cattrall won’t be appearing in the series. The reason involves a lengthy recap of what you might call the weirdest pop culture drama of late 2017 to early 2018.
Let me grab a cosmopolitan… Okay, I’m ready. Back in September 2017, Parker let slip that a proposed third film in the franchise had been cancelled despite the fact they had a “beautiful, funny, heartbreaking, joyful, very relatable script and story”. It was quickly revealed that Cattrall’s refusal to board the project – she thought the script, which saw Chris Noth’s Mr Big die of a heart attack, didn’t offer much for Samantha – was what killed the film.
Ugh, classic Samantha. In an interview with Piers Morgan at the time, Cattrall poured fire on the rumours saying she had no intention of ever doing the film and that she’d “never been friends” with her cast mates. In an Instagram post following the death of her brother in February 2018, she also called Parker a “hypocrite” and accused her of faking her “nice girl persona”.
Wow. Okay, yep that explains it. The franchise’s future seemed doomed, with Davis later stating “there’s a very odd narrative out there right now, and I don’t know how we’re going to fix it.”
So this revival’s quite a surprise then? In as much as any reboot of a once-beloved TV series can be considered a “surprise” these days (you do realise even Punky Brewster was resurrected recently?). The ever-igniting streaming wars have made such legacy TV franchises a valued commodity, so it was only a matter of time before HBO tapped into one of its defining hits.
So how will the series deal with Samantha’s absence? We’ll find out soon enough. Considering the public animosity surrounding the group’s split they’ll likely just write her out and it’ll probably be something pretty bleak, like she’ll die from herpes.
I mean, it’s not not believable? Poor Samantha.
