Should there be a third Sex and the City movie, or perhaps a future revival of the HBO series? At least one former Sex and the City showrunner has a very definite opinion on the matter. Vulture caught up with Jenny Bicks in Beverly Hills Thursday, right after a TCA panel promoting her new very un-SATC-like Showtime comedy The Big C, starring Laura Linney. We first asked her what she thought of Sex and the City 2, which drew some decidedly harsh reviews, before getting into what The Big C and SATC have in common.
“I appreciate that some people were thrown by it being in a different locale,” Bicks told us. “But I completely enjoyed it. I was totally sucked in … I think the true fans love to see those girls no matter what.” Bicks said that she’s been away from the Sex universe long enough now that she can watch anything related to the show through the eyes of a fan, rather than as a former architect of the series. So she’s psyched for a third installment of the SATC movie series, right? “No, I think I’m done,” she says. “I would love it at first, but then I would probably watch it and go, ‘Oooooh, no, I wish I’d remembered the other ones.’ There comes a point where it stops being what it was. And I always want people to remember the series.”
As for her current project, Bicks says working on The Big C — which stars Laura Linney as a newly diagnosed stage IV melanoma patient coming to terms with her mortality — isn’t quite as radical of a departure from the universe of Carrie and Co. as you might think. “I actually feel like I’m re-flexing some of the muscles I got to flex on Sex,” says Bicks, a breast-cancer survivor. “There was definitely more of an aspirational quality to Sex and the City, and obviously no one aspires to have cancer. It is a little different. But when you think about what Sex and the City was about, it was about the truth of relationships and the truth of friendships. It was very honest and real, so in that way this show is similar. This is probably more unadorned, though. We don’t care a lot about the outfits.”
And while SATC has dragged on for more than a decade now, it’s likely The Big C will have a more limited shelf life owing to the series’ central premise. Assuming Showtime renews the series, producers plan to make each season of the show correspond to an actual phase of the equinox: Season one takes place in the summer; season two would occur in the fall. Viewers hoping Linney’s character will find a feel-good cure in the series finale, however, should remember that this is a Showtime series. “If it comes time that she goes, she goes,” Bicks says. “We’re not going to be afraid of that. We don’t have to sugarcoat the situation.”
