Samantha Jones Is BACK! As Ted Lasso Leaves Us.

Plus two old dudes have babies and Dawson Leery turns political analyst.

Sorry to Ted Lasso, but we have breaking news that has to get the top spot: Yesterday, Variety landed the exclusive that Kim Cattrall is reprising the role of Samantha Jones… for ONE scene in ONE episode of And Just Like That…, a delicious and confusing development given that the situation there is not so much “bad blood” as it is “Red Wedding-levels of being submerged in plasma.”

Before we get to the new juicy details, here’s the background: All these people hate each other, the end. The beef started — or more accurately, became public — when Cattrall refused to sign onto Sex and the City 3, because a) she correctly realized we did not need any more of those terrible movies, why God why, and b) the proposed story for Samantha allegedly involved Samantha receiving dick pics from Miranda’s 14-year old son, and Cattrall AGAIN CORRECTLY thought that was awful, because IT IS, WHY GOD WHY: THE SEQUEL. This supposedly killed the project, though Sarah Jessica Parker’s and Michael Patrick King’s joint persistence eventually turned it into the spinoff series And Just Like That…, which, WHY GOD WHY, AGAIN, PART 3: MAKE IT STOP. (At least there were no genital JPEGs in this iteration. Yet.) Once the third movie was off the table, the gossip floodgates opened: Page Six came out with a piece about the “Mean Girl” culture on the Sex and the City set, which sided largely with Cattrall (its source was a “friend” of hers), claiming that she was always the scapegoat when any movie negotiations stalled and painted to look like a demanding diva who didn’t care about anyone else’s livelihoods, when in reality she simply wasn’t sure another movie was right for her or even for Samantha. (And again…where is the lie?) Cattrall herself then spoke up to Piers Morgan (sigh) about how SJP “could have been nicer,” whereas SJP maintained the stance that she IS perfectly nice and that this was all news to her. Next, after Cattrall’s brother passed away and SJP offered public condolences while telling Entertainment Tonight that she had sent private ones, Kim snapped:

In case this is hard to read, the caption says, “My Mom asked me today ‘When will that @sarahjessicaparker, that hypocrite, leave you alone?’ Your continuous reaching out is a painful reminder of how cruel you really were then and now. Let me make this VERY clear. (If I haven’t already) You are not my family. You are not my friend. So I’m writing to tell you one last time to stop exploiting our tragedy in order to restore your ‘nice girl’ persona.”

HOO BOY. Both women gave interviews in 2022, Parker to The Hollywood Reporter and Cattrall to Variety, in which they further planted their flags: SJP affirmed nobody has ever talked about her professionally this way before, and that they did not approach Cattrall about AJLT because it was pretty freaking obvious what the answer would be, and Cattrall made clear that she felt Samantha was hard done by, plot-wise. Both of them make good arguments, and I would imagine they are both right in a lot of ways. Samantha’s stories in the movies are godawful, and absolutely do read like revenge plots concocted because someone did not care for her (like, her storyline in the first movie is that she… is unhappy in L.A. and gains weight, and they’re all horrified by her fattitude?!? Yikes), but SJP also has an excellent reputation as far as I know, and it is quite clear that Cattrall would have said a giant all-caps NO to the idea of rebooting the foursome. To me, the better question is why SJP couldn’t move on from Carrie Bradshaw completely, which was the best answer for everyone involved, Carrie included. Instead, they revived the show without Samantha, about which SJP said this:

'Samantha's not gone. Samantha's present, and I think was handled with such respect and elegance. She wasn't villainized.

This is, if you’ve watched the show, TOTAL LIES. In the first episode, Carrie recaps for us that the book business tapering off meant Carrie didn’t need a publicist anymore, and so Samantha — with wounded pride (over THIS?) — packed up and moved to France and ghosted them all. Quite apart from the fact that if Samantha’s business INEXPLICABLY relied on Carrie’s rando small-potatoes book PR, Big could’ve paid that tab forever without even noticing, this is unrealistic and character-stabbing in myriad ways. You can read my LENGTHY rant in my GFY recap of the episode, but it ends with:

[T]his rang SO inauthentic that it honestly felt to me like SJP and the producers made an excuse to have a meta conversation about Kim Cattrall where they could cast themselves as the good guys: “Whoops, well, we reached out, we tried, but she’s deranged!!!”

The new details are curious and, as noted, JUICY. Observe: