‘It was like having the highest-voltage cable you can imagine suddenly jammed into your back,” says Michael Patrick King. It sounds painful, but think electrifying. King is recalling the emotional first read-through for And Just Like That..., his sequel series to Sex and the City. King was the lead writer, director and executive producer on the original series and is the showrunner on this one. For the first time since the second spin-off film in 2010 (cringe) Sarah Jessica Parker, Cynthia Nixon and Kristin Davis were in character as Carrie Bradshaw, Miranda Hobbes and Charlotte York. Alongside them was a raft of new characters, but Kim Cattrall’s Samantha Jones was conspicuous by her absence.
Skip this paragraph if you want to avoid spoilers. We are speaking before previews of the show are available, but it will soon emerge that Bradshaw’s husband Mr Big dies from a heart attack and that Samantha has moved to London. Some early reviews have been negative but the show looks to have at least some of the wit of its predecessor. “Have you ever masturbated in public?” Carrie is asked. “Not since Barney’s closed,” she replies. After that first read-through King and Parker had a debrief. “I said, ‘I think it went pretty well,’ ” King, 67, says by Zoom from his home in New York. “And she goes, ‘Yeah, you sweated through your suit.’ ” He mimes her pointing under his arms. That speaks to the intensity of the occasion and the closeness of SJP and MPK, who have been working together since Sex and the City started in 1998.
You can see why he may have been nervous. The original show ran for six years and 94 episodes, won seven Emmys and eight Golden Globes, spawned two films written and directed by King and helped to define how a generation of women — and some men — saw sex, friendships, careers and singledom. “You think, ‘Are we going to risk this again?’ ” King says. “Is there anything new to tell?”
And how will they be permitted to tell it? The potential for offence now is “huge”, King says. “You have to use the writing room as a jury room and decide: is this funny? Is this offensive? One person thinks something’s the funniest thing they’ve ever heard. The other person is horrified. Then we discuss how to soften it or lose it depending on the amount of minefields we want to walk through.” He won’t say if anyone gets cancelled in this series, although someone does ask: “Was I just cancelled?”
The average urbanite’s concerns in 2021 are certainly different to those of their counterparts in 1998. Not that Carrie and co are average. “But they are average!” King says. “We all feel sad, happy, rejected, loved, unloved.” Yes, but not many of us do it while wearing Dior and living in a brownstone in Greenwich Village. He shakes his head. “Where they are in social status is not why this show is connecting with people.”
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That, King insists, is down to characters who are “complicated, dark, sometimes smart, flawed. It’s very rare to find characters in fiction who people connect to as though they’re real, and it’s really interesting to revisit characters. It’s rarely done in television, and when it is it’s sort of shamed and called a reboot. But in fiction it’s called another book. John Updike did many books about the Rabbit Run people. Stan Lee did many chapters of the Marvel characters.” Perhaps there is a reason for it being rare in television. Many still shudder at the sequel to This Life, although Twin Peaks and Cold Feet fared better.
Yet King is right about his characters being compelling. King remembers Carrie and Mr Big (Chris Noth) having an affair in the original series, Big cheating on his wife and Carrie doing the same to Aidan (John Corbett). “You were seeing a lead character make terrible choices, and that had never been seen on television.” At the heart of Sex and the City was society’s suspicion of single women in their thirties. “If you’re not married, you’re nobody,” King says. “And that was an easy thing to focus on, because so many people were not married.” Now what pits Carrie and friends against society is being in their fifties, as Parker, Nixon and Davis are. “What do you do about vanity?” King says. “If you’re not young, what are you? Just get in a kaftan and go to Florida!”
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Nixon, who had been in relationships with men, is now married to a woman. There are rumours that Miranda’s life may mirror hers in some way, but King stresses that “Cynthia’s not Miranda. Has there been a mandate by anyone to do anything based on their personal life? Absolutely not.” While Miranda has a teenage son and Charlotte has two children, one adopted, Carrie has none, which will be a theme of the series. Another is making new friends in your fifties. “You think, ‘Oh, I’m all tapped out. I have met everybody who’s gonna affect my life,’ ” King says. “And then all of a sudden somebody shows up.”
Which brings us to the new additions. “Of course it’s not about four white straight women any more,” says King, who has introduced characters of Indian, Latina and African-American heritage. Karen Pittman plays “a law professor who is brilliant and happily married, but challenged with another personal element in her life”; Nicole Ari Parker is “a Park Avenue mother of three who’s on the Vogue international best-dressed list but also a documentarian”; the British actress Sarita Choudhury is “a very successful businesswoman who’s never found the love of her life at the age of over 50”; and Sara Ramirez, a non-binary Mexican-American actor, plays a podcast host “who is fluid in many ways”.
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To afford the new characters decent screen time the episodes are, at 37-43 minutes, longer than the half-hour ones of Sex and the City. The writing room has been diversified too, with a range of ages, ethnicities and sexualities. You wonder how much of this drive for inclusivity stems from the second film, Sex and the City 2, getting such bad reviews, including accusations of racism, misogyny and Islamophobia. “Did it, Ed?” King says with mock surprise. “No, I don’t feel like I want to correct it in any way. I don’t know what that was all about. You take a big swing and you think maybe that’ll be fun. And apparently some people didn’t think it was fun. And that’s the risk you take as a creative being. Come on!”
It was in the run-up to the third film, which was later abandoned, that Cattrall parted company with the franchise. According to reports she objected to a storyline in which Miranda’s son, Brady, who would have been 14, sent Samantha nude pictures of himself. “I’m not going to respond to reports,” King says. Regardless of what may have been mooted, “we didn’t get to do it. One of the things about me as a writer is if something isn’t working, I remove it.” More persistent rumours speak of a froideur between Parker and Cattrall. “No comment,” he says. “All those rumours, it’s ridiculous for me to talk about them.” Has there been any recent contact with Cattrall? “No.”
She was never going to be involved with And Just Like That . . ., King stresses. “We never limped into this because we were missing Samantha. Just like in life, people come and go.” Cattrall’s departure hasn’t deterred the fans, many of whom are millennials who discovered Sex and the City via repeats. King talks about crowds of “30-year-old girls, waiting to see the characters” when they were shooting the new show in Manhattan. “I thought that was the most thrilling thing. The 30-year-olds still think Carrie is their girl because she was 30 when they were watching it.”
Darren Star, the creator of Sex and the City, is not involved with this show and nor is Candace Bushnell, on whose book the original series was based. “We’ll see what she says,” King says. “She’s never short of an opinion.” The new stars of the show, meanwhile, can’t believe their luck. King talks about Choudhury shooting a scene in which she has cocktails with Parker and co. “She said to me afterwards, ‘I wasn’t even present for the first three takes. I was out of my body and it was like grabbing on to a fast-moving train.’ ”
And Just Like That . . . is on Sky Comedy/Now, Thursdays at 9pm
