'Sex and the City' women back for new chapter

Carrie, Miranda and Charlotte are 20 years older, and their beloved New York has been ravaged by Covid-19, but the sassy women are back -- without Samantha -- in HBO Max's "Sex and the City" revival, which premieres Thursday.

The hotly anticipated "And Just Like That..." picks up long after the landmark series and two so-so movies left off, with the forever friends taking on a new phase of life -- their 50s.

In the 10 new episodes, onetime sex and dating columnist Carrie Bradshaw (Sarah Jessica Parker) is married and learning to work with her podcast co-host (Sara Ramirez) -- one of several new characters created to widen the cast's diversity.

Miranda (Cynthia Nixon) is back in school for a new Master's degree and Charlotte (Kristin Davis) is the uber power mom - a far cry from the characters' amusing sexcapades that made the show must-see TV in the late 1990s and early 2000s.

"We don't try to make a point of: "Look, they're mature, they're better, they're smarter'," Parker told The New York Times.

"Sex and the City" broke ground with its frank portrayal of female friendships and sexual relationships, spawned fashion trends, and generated tours of locations made famous by the show. Can lightning strike again with this reimagining?

For journalist and author Candace Bushnell, whose columns for the New York Observer were the basis for the original show, the series is about empowerment.

"I think what 'Sex and the City' brought to women is really the message that I've been trying to give women since I was eight years old. And that's really a message of feminism, of behaving independently, of having your own money and of becoming your own Mr. Big as opposed to looking for a Mr. Big to marry," Bushnell told AFP.

Michael Patrick King, who worked on the original series, returns as a writer and director for the new episodes.

But one major contributor to the success of the original is missing this time -- Kim Cattrall, who played the sexed-up Samantha, announced after the second film that she would no longer portray the character.

"We did everything we could to make it be worth a trip back," King told The Hollywood Reporter.

"The city's different, the world's different and the conversations are different."