“A reboot? After those movies? Honey, take it from me: never revisit a mistake you already made twice.”
When a long-speculated Sex and the City reboot was confirmed last night, thousands of fans were jubilant. Although I’ve watched the full series an uncountable number of times, determined a definitive top three ranking of Carrie’s love interests (Duchovny, Vaughn, piss politician, no further questions), and even make a passable Cosmopolitan, I could not share in the collective zsa zsa zsu. The limited series will see Sarah Jessica Parker, Cynthia Nixon, and Kristin Davis reprising their roles as Carrie, Miranda, and Charlotte, respectively, but will be limited in more than one sense: Kim Cattrall will not be returning as ruthlessly horny pun enthusiast Samantha Jones.
You know it, I know it, I get the sense that Darren Star knows it, too: Samantha is the beating heart of the show, providing some of its most iconic sex and, through her high-flying PR connections, a great deal of its “city” as well. Which is perhaps why the new series ditches the original title for the more staid And Just Like That... a string of words that doesn’t not sound like a slogan for some kind of menopausal lubricant. I couldn’t help but wonder: without the Sex OR the City, won’t it all feel a bit, “...and?”
Before we continue, I want it understood I love all four of these women like they are my deranged, wealthy aunts. It is a testament to the cast and creators of the show that its core characters have become a method of self-classification rivalled only by astrology – Miranda sun, Samantha rising, reporting for duty – but, like one of Carrie’s chaotic ensembles, the whole is greater than the sum of its parts. Each needs the others to make sense. And for me, at least, Samantha was the green belt on bare skin tying the whole thing together.
Think about it: Charlotte’s role is as a foil to the others. She’s more sexually conservative than Carrie, more romantic than Miranda, and more materialistic, in her own way, than Samantha. Stalwart Miranda is there to ground proceedings, sneering at romance and taking whatever the hair department had against her on the chin. And while Carrie’s romantic misadventures are the narrative spine of the series, she is, famously, complicated: a bi-phobic, kink-shaming serial monogamist, a sex columnist who can’t bring herself to say the word “anal”. Insecure, selfish, and quick to ditch her friends for a man, her wacky adventures are the protest behaviours of the insecurely attached. All I’m saying is, nobody ever shaved a lightning bolt into her pubes.
Which brings us, naturally, to Samantha. Sex and the City was about having sex without feeling bad about it, spending your rent money on clothing you couldn’t afford, blagging your way into an exclusive party to flirt with a gross famous guy, then ditching him to eat McDonald’s with your real soulmates: your friends. Who embodies this more than the overdressed PR executive giving out vibrator advice in an Upper East Side Sharper Image? When I revisit the show for the four hundredth time, it is not to watch an insecure woman fail to date a man in a pork pie hat. It is because I want to see someone actively doing kegels at the bar say something like, “Nipples are huge right now. Open any magazine.”
Like her clothing, Sam is loud, over the top, slutty, and peacefully divested from the concept of “age appropriate”. Most of the show’s best lines are delivered in her camp drawl. Whether the girls need a guest list spot, a non-judgemental ear, or someone to fish their diaphragm out of their vagina, Samantha is there. She stands up to Big when Carrie can’t, gives a long-awaited hair appointment to a post-natal Miranda, and gamely ignores Charlotte’s slut-shaming. Not only is she the most reliably good friend of the group (she’d never send her boyfriend to scoop you off your bathroom floor), she’s also the one having the most abundant, experimental sex, insistently focused around her own pleasure. Willing to try anything once, Samantha racks up 42 sexual partners over the series, open-mindedly experimenting with drugs, role play, sex toys, fetishes, and partners of different genders and races, while Carrie spends six years having sex with her bra on.
The most exciting thing about Samantha is her interest in a good time. What’s the point in being a new kind of woman if you’re not going to enjoy it? Whether she’s working, drinking, dressing, or fucking, Samantha has fun. While the rest of her friends are agonising over being chosen by the men in their lives, Samantha is throwing an “I don’t have a baby” shower and hanging an enormous nude photograph of herself in her hallway. She builds her PR business from the ground up, and seems to know everyone in New York. Her life is full, without a partner, because she’s invested fully in herself. When she does embark on serious relationships – with Richard, with Maria, with Smith – she does so with open eyes, and a willingness to end them when they no longer work. In many ways, Samantha breaking up with Smith Jerrod was the ending the series was leading towards: not a romantic rescue in Paris, but a woman choosing herself, and having a great time doing it.
Sex and the City was groundbreaking in its depiction of ageing women leading rich, raucous lives, free from the need to settle down. Of its four main characters, Samantha is most committed to living out that idea, while also making time to get nude in a fireman’s outfit, inside a fire station, during a fire. Though she’s far from a perfect character – her staunch apoliticism, unbothered capitalism and occasionally problematic quips might not sit easily in 2021 – any Sex and the City reboot will be weaker without her. Still, if there’s one thing Samantha knows, it’s when to leave a party.
I’ll love Sam Jones as long as I can breathe and kneel. Though she may be gone for good, whenever the wind whispers through trees I’ll hear it: Lawrence of… my Labia.
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