Kim Cattrall’s Sex and the City return as Samantha is an admission of defeat

By returning to the show after making a high-profile exit amid a feud with Sarah Jessica Parker, Cattrall has proven what none of its stars wanted to admit, writes Adam White: ‘And Just Like That’ desperately needed Samantha

Kim Cattrall is being stapled haphazardly into the new season of ‘And Just Like That’ (HBO/Sky/Getty)

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.

It is unclear (money) what convinced Cattrall (money) to return to the show (money) after she went scorched earth on its leading lady. Ever a professional hater, she has never deleted her still shockingly blunt 2018 Instagram post lambasting Parker, or her sharing of a New York Post article that stated, via anonymous sources, that Parker spearheaded a “mean girls culture” on the set of the original show that left Cattrall feeling isolated. That article remains hilariously one-sided in its approach, painting Cattrall as a helpless victim ostracised for being too funny and brilliant and Parker as a jealous ghoul, but the narrative has largely stuck in the years since its publication.

So how on earth has this comeback happened? Perhaps Cattrall and Parker have privately made up, but that doesn’t explain why Cattrall’s Instagram post is still there. Nor does that chime with claims by Variety that her scene was filmed separately from not only the three stars of the series (Parker, Cynthia Nixon and Kristin Davis), but also its showrunner, Michael Patrick King. Cattrall was even dressed for the scene by former Sex and the City costume designer Patricia Field, who didn’t return for And Just Like That, either.

Indirectly, it all adds up to the feeling that this was a move chiefly born by TV maestro Casey Bloys, chairman and CEO of Max, the show’s US broadcaster, as a last-ditch effort to salvage a series that has only sparingly met creative expectations. The fact that such a shocking cameo appearance – for the final episode in the season, no less – has been confirmed before the show’s second run has even begun further suggests that this is a promotional play and nothing more. Samantha-esque in its PR brazenness, even.

Similarly, Cattrall emerges as the only real winner here. Inviting her to rejoin the party – I hesitate to use the word “begging” – is an admission of creative defeat, and only exacerbates the speculation about a cast feud that Parker, Nixon and Davis have spent years attempting to downplay. Just as Cattrall’s absence became the story in the build-up to And Just Like That’s launch in 2021, so her return will be the only thing anyone wants to talk about this time around, too. I smell shenanigans. I can’t help but wonder if the show’s main cast even had a say in it…

I’m happy to have Samantha back, even if just for a few seconds, as sapping the pun-making, delivery-guy-blowing, man-milking outrageousness from Sex and the City turned the show into a lethargic slog. But if And Just Like That wanted to detach itself from real-life drama and carve out an identity of its own, this is the very worst thing it could have done.

‘And Just Like That’ season two arrives on Sky Comedy and Now on 22 June