from the New York Times...I don't think I'll be watching the re-worked episodes on TBS. And it seems that Michael Patrick King - the executive producer is with me on that!

Will 'Sex and the City' Without the Sex Have Much Appeal?
By JULIE SALAMON

Published: June 9, 2004

Steven R. Koonin, the executive vice president of TBS, has a theory about "Sex and the City," the hit HBO series scheduled to make its debut on Tuesday on his basic cable channel.

"I don't think anyone watched it for sex and nudity," he said.

Mr. Koonin has to hope he is right, because the explicit sex and frontal nudity are precisely what have been edited out — along with a few select, and not infrequently used, words — as HBO's editors cleaned up the show for broadcast on TBS, which like HBO is a unit of Time Warner.

Still, the expurgated version will be frisky enough to be rated TV-14, meaning that the shows may contain "intense sexual situations, strong coarse language, or intensely suggestive dialogue," according to the TV Parental Guidelines Monitoring Board, which developed the television ratings. (Broadcast and basic cable networks use these guidelines to rate their programs.)

In the edited versions, Charlotte's gynecologist still prescribes an antidepressant for her vagina, and the sexually heroic Samantha still confronts a penis large enough to daunt even her. (In both the HBO and TBS versions, the penis in question remains off-camera.)

Judging from advance viewing of a few of the edited shows, the biggest disappointment to fans may be the absence of some of the clever verbal not-so-niceties that were the show's trademark.

These include the freshly minted compound word uttered by Carrie Bradshaw's heartthrob, Mr. Big, a word that opened and closed the series. Now, at least in the first episode, when Carrie asks Mr. Big if he has ever been in love, he simply says, "Absolutely." Missing entirely is a word that the editors elsewhere dub with a substitute.

" `Freaking' is our word of choice," Mr. Koonin said.

This is not the first time HBO has turned one of its mature-themed, expletive-undeleted series into fodder for syndication. Two years ago Bravo picked up "The Larry Sanders Show," the fake late-night talk show starring Garry Shandling that ran on HBO from 1992 to 1998.

But "Larry Sanders" was a cult favorite, not a phenomenon like "Sex and the City," which has become a cultural touchstone, intensifying the creative challenge of editing it for a wider audience.

The editing was an enormous project, requiring microsurgery on 94 episodes. The idea was to retain enough vulgarity to satisfy today's raunch-needy audiences, particularly the 18-to-49-year-old demographic that TBS is targeting, without overstepping the limits of TV-14.

Executives insist that the show remains essentially the same. "To me, the breakthrough of the show has been the reality of the emotion, and I don't think any editing can strike at the heart of that," Carolyn Strauss, HBO's president for original programming, said.

That seemed to imply that the unfiltered language and sex — trademarks of HBO shows — were not necessary, but Mr. Koonin was unprepared to go that far.

He said: "Necessary? That's arbitrary. I don't feel qualified to answer that. Truthfully, it's a pretty good question. I don't know. I don't know."

Ms. Strauss struggled with the question, as well.

"Oh, no, don't do that to me," she said, an articulate woman who became, momentarily, tongue-tied. Then she recovered and explained that the explicitness was necessary on HBO, for which cable customers pay a premium, but not on TBS, which relies on advertising.

"HBO is a very singular place that offers something that nobody else can really give you," she said.

Michael Patrick King, the show's executive producer, declined to comment on the TBS version, saying in a polite e-mail message that he had not viewed any of the edited programs.

Having the show available in various incarnations offers Time Warner new ways to profit from it. On HBO, which has 28 million subscribers, the sixth and final season of "Sex and the City" attracted 12.4 million viewers each week.

TBS, which reaches 88 million homes, will broadcast the program with commercials from companies including Mitsubishi Motors, which says that its sponsorship of the show is part of a strategy to reach "the more `young at heart' mindset."

Although commercials will interrupt the episodes, they will not curtail them. Mr. Koonin said the shows are not being edited for length. Episodes that run on average 24 to 30 minutes on HBO will run 35 to 40 minutes on TBS to include advertising.

Next week TBS will broadcast 10 shows from different seasons, to be shown two a night, back to back, on Tuesday through Saturday nights at 10.

After that, starting on June 22, the entire series will be broadcast in order, with two back-to-back episodes showing each Tuesday at 10 and repeated at the same hour on Wednesday.

TBS hopes that time slot will attract young adults looking for laughs when many competing networks are showing dramas, Mr. Koonin said.

Nelly Mecklenburg, a 14-year-old freshman at Stuyvesant High School in Manhattan, said she could not believe it when she heard that "Sex and the City," one of her favorite shows, was moving to TBS. "The idea was ridiculous and completely inappropriate," she said. "Then I heard it was going to be edited and figured that was even worse; it would be terrible."

But when Ms. Mecklenburg saw advance tapes of several edited episodes, she was pleasantly surprised. "I was very impressed," she said. "You couldn't tell when they edited certain words, and it actually still seemed like the same show."

Still, she said, people who see only the cleaned-up versions will be missing something.

"HBO makes it special, because the show can be raunchy," she said. "The language and sex aren't the most important part, but they add to it."