Nixon’s Retreat

Cynthia Nixon has caved on the one issue where she’d been a truly pleasant surprise: New York’s obscene subsidies for Hollywood film and TV production.

Soon after announcing her left-wing challenge to Gov. Cuomo, she slammed his $420 million-a-year tax giveaway to the entertainment moguls as corporate welfare — “massive tax breaks to corporations and the super-rich.”

“The Tonight Show,” “The Late Show,” “The Good Wife,” “Law and Order: SVU” and other programs get the handout, as do films like “Sex and the City.”

The “SatC” TV series wrapped before the subsidies began. But it still filmed here, as did other productions — proving Nixon’s point to the Buffalo News last month: “I don’t think there’s any real truth that that enormous expenditure of money is making a significant enough difference in production to justify it.’’

But it has made a difference for Cuomo: In e-mails revealed by the Sony hack, studio execs urged donations to the gov’s campaign because he’s a “strong protector of the film incentive.”

Naturally, the big money moved to hit Nixon — even recruiting workers from her old show to denounce her reform stance.

And, sigh, it worked: She now says she’s merely “proposing” to “examine reforming the program so that the money is actually going toward creating good New York salaries, not just lining the pockets of big film studios in Los Angeles.”

Retreating in the face of the first special interest to hit back hard? That looks less like the principled reformer Nixon claims to be, and more like another political hack.