How 'Sex and the City' Reboot 'And Just Like That' Explains Where Samantha Jones Is

And Just Like That... on HBO Max sees Carrie (played by Sarah Jessica Parker), Charlotte (Kristin Davis) and Miranda (Cynthia Nixon) return to our screens—but Samantha (Kim Cattrall) is not with them.

After years of reports about a feud between Cattrall and the rest of the women, the actor declined to appear in the Sex and the City reboot. This started a whole other set of reports about how the show would deal with her not being there.

The biggest fan theory was that the show would reveal that the character had died in the time between now and the last time we saw her throwing condoms in an Abu Dhabi street in Sex and the City 2.

With so much speculation about what happened to Samantha, the HBO Max show wastes no time in explaining where she is.

Where's Samantha in And Just Like That?

Right at the start of Episode 1, Carrie, Charlotte and Miranda meet Bitsy von Muffling (Julie Halston) outside a restaurant—and she asks straight away about what happened to the other member of their classic foursome.

The HBO Max show cannot resist playing with viewers who have been speculating about Samantha's death. Charlotte tells Bitsy, "she's no longer with us."

However, what she means (as she explains) is that she is not dead but is no longer with them—because she has moved out of New York. Miranda then provides more detail, telling us Samantha has moved to London for work.

Just as Cattrall and Parker have had a very public feud in real life, in And Just Like That the pair have fallen out too.

In the second scene, Miranda and Carrie are walking through New York, and the former says of Samantha: "It is kinda like she's dead. We never talk about her."

Carrie then explains what has happened between the two of them. Apparently, a downturn in the book market led Carrie to drop Samantha as a publicist. Since then, Samantha has not returned any of her calls.

Miranda is then given the very pointed line, "I always thought the four of us would be friends forever," while Carrie expresses disappointment that, in her view, her friend did not see her as more than a paycheck.

Cattrall had previously said of her cast mates to Piers Morgan: "We've never been friends. We've been colleagues and in some ways it's a very healthy place to be because then you have a clear line between your professional life and relationship and your personal."

She also called her decision not to return to Sex and the City for another film or series "an empowered decision in my life to end one chapter and start another."

And Just Like That airs Thursdays on HBO Max.