ON AN uncharacteristically doom-filled recent Zoom video chat with some of my female gal pals it occurred to me that we were all in desperate need of a bit of escapism.

Lockdown, mixed with ill, elderly parents, errant teenagers and increasingly elastic waistbands were all making us feel a bit rubbish. The answer to our gloom appeared this week out of nowhere – Sex In the City – that spicy cocktail of hedonism, glamour and women with attitudes as sharp as their 5 inch Manolo Blahniks was coming back. In our heads we relished the possibility of being taken out of ourselves once more as we were over 94 episodes from 1998 to 2004

But how will Carrie, Charlotte, Miranda and Samantha have developed and will the tone of the show that worked so successfully in the late 90s and early noughties really chime with the post pandemic, economically austere, some might say, woke 2020s? Worse still, are we the viewers of what was, at the time pretty out-there TV in that all four main characters were female, remembering the show with faux nostalgia?

The first major let-down is that Samantha will not be making an appearance which is disappointing. I was so ready for a 60-something feisty, hypersexual, uninhibited Samantha to rouse me from my self-imposed descent into little old ladydom. Samantha Jones, played by Kim Cattrall, was the kind of woman you couldn’t help but admire – an astute businesswoman, successful, beautiful and seemingly always poised to have exactly the sort of sex she wanted with whomever she wanted.

In Episode One the women decided to stop fretting about whether they would find the perfect man and start 'having sex like men’, ie selfishly and without commitment, but really Samantha was the only character who lived by that mantra.

Looking at the show now, like a wine that hasn’t aged particularly well, it strikes me that her behaviour was borderline predatory and, if it’s not okay for men to behave like that, it surely isn’t for women either.

The husky voice, the lascivious eyes, the sexual put-downs feel from a different era, (unless you are one soon-to-be ex-American President that is). Maybe it’s just as well the producers wont be revisiting that character – 2020s Samantha would have felt strangely out of place in the world of consent, Zoom dating, gender fluidity, and respect.

Carrie, played by Sarah Jessica Parker, was the slightly neurotic columnist who always seemed to me to be painfully unsure of herself which, of course, many 30 year olds were and are. She was feisty and opinionated one minute and then strangely meek and horribly vacuous the next. She cared more for designer brands and nails than she did about the state of the world.

Her palpable fear (she always had this ‘I’m worried I’m going to be single forever’ look on her face) of not meeting the perfect partner secretly struck the fear into most of us 30-something women forging ahead in our busy careers, muttering about not needing a man.

She felt like someone we should identify with for her chutzpah, independence and sense of style but when we looked closely we saw a fragility that we didn’t like to be reminded of. But 2020s Carrie would be a very dangerous – in a good way – woman.

She would be past the stage of caring what others think, she’d be more clued up about the world, probably still writing columns but also selling her now too-tiny size zero designer collections to raise money for New York’s homeless and taking long walks in nature.

She’d embrace the grey that having the hairdressers closed during lockdown would have resulted in and she’d be the first to sign up for Zoom yoga sessions. Carrie Bradshaw would be at the height of her powers, all traces of uncertainty and neuroses left firmly in the past.

One way in which the reboot could be very refreshing would be if they decide to fess up to the little talked about trials of the peri-menopausal and menopausal woman. Top law firm partner Miranda slipping around in her Louboutins having a hot flush as she fevers over her lap top. Homely Charlotte permanently in Spanx, raging uncontrollably at her teenagers for making the entire house reek of weed, yes even inside her closet.

And Carrie telling the world via Twitter of her vaginal atrophy problem for which her doctor had prescribed a sort of botox tablet for down there. You could imagine Samantha taking a keen interest in said pill, wondering if it could be crushed, mixed with a little oil and used around the eye and mouth area too. And, instead of pregnancy tests, they would be marching around Manhattan with their handbags full of Covid-19 lateral flow tests in case they wanted to pop into a cinema or go for cocktails.

So, maybe that’s the way forward for the Sex and the City brand in these times – instead of escapism, hedonism and consumerism maybe the producers just need to keep it real. I’d still watch.