The return of Kim Cattrall to the Sex and the City universe was confirmed a few hours after I hit the midpoint of my rewatch of the original series. Her character, the flamboyant PR guru and walking penis euphemism Samantha Jones, had just been instructed by a hunky farmhand how best to milk a cow. “Does anything else need milking?” Samantha enquired lustily to the poor boy, her eyebrow raised so high that it actually departed from Cattrall’s face. The next we see her, she’s rutting around in a pile of hay yelping with orgiastic pleasure.
When Cattrall announced in 2017 that she would no longer play Samantha in future Sex and the City projects, primarily due to her rumoured loathing of her co-star Sarah Jessica Parker, this kind of scene vanished from the show with her. It made the eventual sequel series And Just Like That – a surreal cacophony of baffling creative choices that somehow remained compulsively watchable – intriguingly un-fun. Sex and the City could exist without Samantha, but it couldn’t thrive or sizzle. Instead, it flapped about listlessly, like a fish on dry land. Cattrall’s return, reportedly a tiny cameo in the show’s forthcoming second season that was filmed separately from her former castmates, seems to admit And Just Like That knows it.
