Sanitizing Sex’
When Carrie asked Mr. Big if he’d like to come up to her apartment in the “Sex and the City” finale, he answered with a phrase that fans recognized from the very first episode.
His affirmative reply — which contained two extra, unprintable syllables — was delivered with a wide grin.
But when the rerun appears on TBS, Big will simply say: “Absolutely.”
If you’re a longtime “Sex and the City” fan, the cut may appear ruinous, robbing the show of the spunk that made it special. But if you’ve never seen it before, you’d never notice.
Those little instances will pop up hundreds of times when the Emmy-winning HBO series begins its run on TBS tonight. It’s a landmark moment in television, the first time a pay cable series has been sold in syndication to a basic cable station and must be sanitized to meet stricter language and content standards.
For HBO, selling “Sex” to TBS is obviously a financial windfall. But the network also hopes it acts as a calling card, letting people who don’t have HBO know about the quality of its series, said Caroline Strauss, president of HBO original programming.
There’s a potentially large, untapped market. Most television viewers have seen, or at least had access to, “Friends” or “Seinfeld,” but HBO subscribers are still in the minority. TBS estimates more than 60 million viewers haven’t had access to “Sex and the City.”
Promoting “five nights of great sex,” TBS will air two of the series’ best episodes each evening tonight through Saturday, starting at 10 p.m.
Then, starting next week, the network will begin showing all 94 episodes in order, with two episodes airing each Tuesday at 10 p.m. and repeating on Wednesday.
Getting all those episodes ready for regular cable has been a big job for TBS’ editors.
In many cases, HBO did the work for them. All along, producers filmed alternate scenes and recorded alternate dialogue, both with an eye toward a future syndication sale and because HBO needed a tamer version of the show for some international markets.
For instance, during a scene in which Samantha is seen on a swing with a lover, HBO filmed scenes where the swing is visible but not the entangled bodies.
The cast has even helped out in recent months by recording new dialogue to replace swear words, said Steve Koonin, TBS’ chief executive. One new TBS term is “sex buddy,” to replace a more colorful, widely used phrase.
Mere editing wouldn’t always do. TV Guide, which compared some of the original episodes with the TBS versions, said most of Margaret Cho’s dialogue was cut out during her guest appearance as a fashion designer.
TV Guide said it showed the TBS episodes to several fans of the show and someone who hadn’t seen it before and “all agreed that there’s still enough sizzle to keep them satisfied.”
Yet critic David Bianculli of the New York Daily News wrote that something is clearly missing.
“The gist of each story line is there, but some of the edgiest observations and funniest jokes are gone, and Kim Cattrall’s catty character, Samantha, has had her claws trimmed way back, if not removed entirely,” Bianculli wrote.
TBS’ Koonin thinks the criticism is not only unfair, but inaccurate. “The only thing I can say is watch,” he said.
None of the stories, nothing of what made the show great, was fiddled with, he said.
“It’s really easy for people to write about what’s taken out of the show,” Koonin said. “People are going to like what’s in the show, and that’s the heart and soul of ‘Sex and the City.’ As the show got older, it was less about nudity than it was the trials and tribulations of women who were getting older.”
The shock value in the series was that women were talking so bluntly about sex, not necessarily the words they were saying, added HBO’s Strauss.
It’s hard to know what the people of “Sex and the City” think about the new versions. The show’s executive producer, Michael Patrick King, wasn’t giving interviews, HBO said.
The stars weren’t available, although they’ve been helping TBS with some promotion.
“I’ve sort of studiously avoided engaging in that debate,” Strauss said. “From the mass of people I’ve spoken to, people seem pleased by the results. Let the viewers decide.”