No “Big” In HBO Sex and the City Revival? Here’s How they Should Fill the Void

No “Big” In HBO Sex and the City Revival? Here’s How they Should Fill the Void

While she was never a super fan of Sex and the City, Calico did have a compelling reason to watch the series: A long term celebrity-crush on Chris Noth, the actor who played “Big”, Carrie’s on-and-off love interest.

With the news that Noth and Big will not be featured in HBO’s upcoming reboot of the series, And Just Like That, Calico suddenly found herself less interested in watching — and wondered how many others among the show’s viewers felt the same way. Then, because she’s such a positive, solutions-oriented person, Calico sat down to come up with suggestions for how the show’s creators could fill the hole left behind by Noth and Big.

What sort of man should Carrie take up with next? Will the show get around the issue by acting like Big is still present in her life, just physically absent? Will they kill him off? With modern digital technology, can they keep the character going without the actor? Speaking of digital trickery, how about using a different Noth character as Carrie’s love interest?

Get the scoop on all Calico’s helpful suggestions for HBO in her new post “No “Big” In Sex and the City Revival? Here’s How they Should Fill the Void”

by Calico Rudasill, Sssh.com HBO Style Sex Movies For Women

Read on…

It’s not exactly a “confession,” since I’ve copped to it before (including, I believe, admitting it to my now-husband on our first date), but I’ve long had a crush on Chris Noth, going back to his days playing Detective Mike Logan on the original Law & Order.

In the 10 years between when the Logan character was written out of the original and resurfaced on the spinoff series, Law & Order: Criminal Intent, I might have forgotten all about my Chris Noth crush, were it not for his role as “Mr. Big” on Sex and the City, Carrie’s on-and-off boyfriend, who later became her husband in Sex and the City: The Movie.

A ‘Big’ Void to Fill

It has recently emerged that Big will not be a part of the upcoming Sex and the City reboot, And Just Like That, a fact that makes it even less likely that I’ll tune in to the reboot, in which my interest was already quite limited, owing in large part to the fact that Kim Cattrall and her wonderful, fan-favorite character Samantha Jones also will not be included in the new series.

But you know me: Even if I’m not planning to watch the show, I want to be part of the solution rather than part of the problem – or too at least be a part of making sarcastic, uninvited, never to be appreciated suggestions of a solution, since that’s a lot easier than getting a meeting with an HBO executive or one of the show’s writers.

This irresistible drive to help has led me to come up with the following suggestions for how the show might fill the void left by Big – although, as you’ll see in a moment, some of these ideas will still require the show’s creators to work with Noth, in a sense. The good news for HBO is, they’d be working with Noth and capitalizing on his popularity in a way that won’t require cutting him a check or satisfying any crazy requests for what to stock in his on-set trailer, so senior management should readily greenlight the idea.

Replace Big with Mike Logan

I’m sure there’d be some work for HBO’s lawyers to do to get permission from NBC, or Sam Waterston, or whomever it is who owns the Law & Order-related intellectual property rights, but the best way to replace Big on Sex and the City is to do it via some digital trickery along the lines of that old ad where Fred Astaire danced around with the Dirt Devil, only less folksie vacuum salesman and more grizzled NYPD homicide detective.

Just imagine how much more dramatic and tense Carrie’s fights with her boyfriend will be when instead of whining at her, he breaks a pool cue in half and says to her “I’m a rage-a-holic cop who took a swing at a city councilman. Everybody thinks that I’m a ticking bomb. Maybe today’s the day I blow, I don’t know…. It’s up to you.”

I mean sure, they’ll need to follow it up with a joke to relieve the tension and/or make sure the audience knowns Carrie and Big had terrific makeup sex right after that bit of threatened domestic violence, but I’m sure the writers can come up with something that will do the trick.

HBO – Replace Big with Don Ackerman

If Mike Logan doesn’t feel like a good fit for the Sex and the City universe, HBO could explore another option that wouldn’t even require shifting out of the law enforcement realm and would introduce a real-life figure into their fictional world – something which would be truly revolutionary, I think.

The basic concept here is the same as digitally importing Mike Logan into And Just Like That, only instead of Logan, the character is Don Ackerman, who Noth played in the (truly excellent) Manhunt: Unabomber miniseries.

This move would also address one of my occasional complaints about Sex and the City, which is the mundane, self-centered nature of the conversations between Big and Carrie. It’s always a game of competing Me-Me-Me! perspectives between those two, never anything of substance. Well, if instead of dating Big, Carrie is dating the former head of the Unabomber task force, who these days works at a major risk management firm, I’d like to think those days of trivial conversation will be a thing of the past.

The HBO Ratings Would be YUGE!

Since not all my ideas for replacing Big should involve digitally importing other characters played by Chris Noth, I decided to go an entirely different direction with this last one.

I see that HBO content director Casey Bloys recently said that with the Sex and the City reboot, the writer/director “didn’t want to tell a story with all-white writers or an all-white cast” because to do so would not be “reflective of New York,” adding that the show is “being very, very conscious about understanding that New York has to reflect the way New York looks today.”

Let’s see, a non-white person whose very visage just says “New York”, eh? I have a question here: Does orange count as non-white?

Oh wait, that’s right: They took away his SAG card. Oh well. Back to the drawing board until I come up with an official Big Option Three, I guess.

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