Darren Star Productions / HBO Entertainment
“Charlotte” in ‘Sex and the City’
An axed sequence involving peanut butter and a golden retriever would have been too bold — even for a premium cable channel that took on the motto “this isn’t network TV.”
During a retrospective of 20 years of “Sex and the City”published in , the person responsible for the series, Michael Patrick Kingrevealed that there was just two occasions in which HBO has censored the production over the years.
According to King, there was a “slight change” in the episode.Attack of the Five-Foot-Ten Woman‘, from the third season, in which Miranda gets into conflict with her cleaning lady, Magda, after this throw away your vibrators and condoms.
As originally filmed, the episode included a shot of a statue of Virgin Mary placed next to condoms of Miranda, as if he were watching them. Apparently, this it was too much for the censorsand the image was eventually removed.
If it seems reasonable to you that the network would have raised objections to this scene, wait until you know the sequence that truly created problems.
In the episode ‘The Monogamists‘, from the first season, Charlotte has a boyfriend, Michael, who is obsessed with receiving oral sex. Charlotte, however, doesn’t like doing this, which ends up leading the two to go their separate ways. The final scene between them, as it was eventually displayedcan be seen here.
But the sequel originally had something else…before those responsible at HBO intervened. Apparently, involved the golden retriever which appears at the end of the video.
In the version initially filmed, Charlotte did not simply move away from her boyfriend definitively: I decided to give him another chance and came back to his apartment — just to find the dog performing oral sex on him.
It goes without saying that fans never got to see this part of the storyand, to this day, the images were not even included as an extra in home video editions.
“It’s somehow horrible that we filmed that”, said the series producer in 2018, Amy B. Harris — according to which the original version also included a shot of Charlotte’s boyfriend putting her peanut butter on the penis before the scene.
“Charlotte enters again, as if thinking: ‘I’m being unreasonable‘, and then you see that… I can’t believe we even thought about doing it”, says Harris.
In fact, it was logic.”this is not open channel television” which helped pave the way for series such as Oz, Sex and the City, The Sopranos and Six Feet Under, titles that gave HBO the stamp of adult, authorial television without fear of pushing boundaries. The old slogan with which the cable channel was born, in 1972, said it all: “It’s not TV. It’s HBO”.
