And then there were three

Sex and the City fans couldn't help but wonder: What would a reboot of the popular HBO show look like? Seventeen years after the show concluded, we're about to get an answer: HBO Max recently announced that three of the four best friends would be getting back together for a 10-episode reboot called And Just Like That ...

What will it be without Kim Cattrall playing publicist Samantha Jones, the friend who was always pushing the rest of the crew to be more adventurous? Here's a big clue: Sex has vanished from the show's title.

Fans of the HBO hit, which ran from 1998 to 2004, expressed their displeasure on Twitter, responding with GIFs of Samantha saying “That's just stupid,” wondering what the point is in reviving the show without Samantha. For years, Cattrall has made clear she doesn't want to be part of a third movie or a reboot.

But for Jennifer Armstrong, author of Sex and the City and Us: How Four Single Women Changed the Way We Think, Live, and Love, the change makes sense. While Armstrong says a show without Samantha “is very hard to imagine,” she notes that “characters, people, humans move on all the time. Friendships end.”

The show's creators will account for Samantha's absence in some way, Armstrong says: Maybe she drifted apart from the other women; maybe Samantha stayed in Los Angeles, where she had moved in the first Sex and the City movie; or maybe she bought a farmhouse in Upstate New York during the COVID-19 exodus.

Armstrong also views Samantha as a symbol of her era. “So much of the transgressiveness of Sex and the City was her and the way she contributed to the discussions. She brought the dirtiest words and filthiest thoughts. She said things in a straightforward, unapologetic fashion. That was a huge part of what made the show sociologically a huge deal at the time.”

When the show ended in 2004, Carrie Bradshaw (Sarah Jessica Parker), Miranda Hobbes (Cynthia Nixon) and Charlotte York Goldenblatt (Kristin Davis), were in their late 30s. Seventeen years later, they'd be in their 50s.

Considering how the show demystified sex in the late 1990s and early 2000s, Armstrong thinks this reboot could do the same for issues women face in their 50s.

She could envision frank discussions about what menopause does to a woman's body and sex drive; and what it's like to date after divorce or the death of husband.

Filming is set to start in New York in the spring. Does that mean And Just Like That ... will take place in a world altered by COVID-19? Armstrong can imagine Carrie staying home all the time so she doesn't have to wear a mask. “It's not a glamorous time.”