Last Week Tonight‘s most recent deep dive began with a Mickey Mouse joke for the books before swan-diving into the abyss of the ambulance crisis. That’s the John Oliver way, and if you thought that he would limit the evening’s lighthearted swings to matters of Disney, well, nope. The late-night HBO host also fired a shot at a property owned by his overlords, and that’s also Oliver’s way. He’s shown himself, on multiple occasions, to be fearless while criticizing HBO parent company AT&T, and now, Oliver’s calling out what he predicts to be a programming stumble.
This declaration also happened in the context of ambulance shortages, around the 9:00 minute mark in the above video. After showcasing how a locally run EMS provider found itself precariously close to shutting down due to staffing issues, Oliver pulled out an HBO Max analogy, which would be the decision to revive Sex And The City (under the And Just Like That… title) without Kim Cattrall’s Samantha character, a development that left many fans livid. Oliver is on board with that head-scratching furor.
“No workplace should be in danger of shutting down because it loses one person… unless that workplace is the Sex and the City reboot,” Oliver declared. “What are you thinking?!? It’s never going to work without Kim Cattrall!”
The host didn’t stop there while making it clear that he wasn’t making a target of Sarah Jessica Parker, Cynthia Nixon, or Kristin Davis. “It’s not that any of you are bad,” he insisted. “It’s that you only work together. I can’t appreciate my Puritan Charlotte if I don’t have my Naughty Samantha.” That’s a fair assessment, and even moreso: “And I live for Miranda Hobbs, but if she’s not serving side-eye while Samantha is using penne pasta to describe her new Italian lover’s d*ck, what is the point?”
Again, totally fair. Despite the franchise’s efforts to address a key criticism of the original series by adding several women of color, and the return of both Chris Noth’s Mr. Big and Evan Handler’s Harry, there’s one inevitable reality: there’s no void-filling replacement for Samantha Jones.
