Original Sex And The City columnist Candace Bushnell denounces “Ponzi scheme” of the show’s rights

Netflix is getting Sex And The City, but the woman who inspired the show won't see any money from it

By Sam Barsanti | February 4, 2024 | 6:40pm

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Original Sex And The City columnist Candace Bushnell denounces “Ponzi scheme” of the show’s rights

Candace Bushnell Photo: Arturo Holmes

Netflix recently announced that it has made a deal with Warner Bros. Discovery to get the streaming rights to Sex And The City, the latest step in WBD’s apparent campaign to inexplicably devalue its own Max streaming service, but the new agreement has a big-name detractor: Writer Candace Bushnell, whose original Sex And The City newspaper column inspired the HBO series (the “Carrie” of the original column was a pseudonym she created for herself so he could tell her and her friends’ stories semi-anonymously). Though she probably doesn’t really care where the show ends up, Bushnell is taking the new licensing deal as an excuse to remind everyone how poorly she’s been served by the entertainment industry.

Bushnell told The Daily Mail last year that she got “just” $100,000 from HBO for the rights to Sex And The City, and in a new interview with The Times Of London, she noted that she’s not getting any money from HBO’s decision to license the show to Netlix. She also dismissed the whole thing as a “Ponzi scheme,” saying that “all of these men are in charge of things, they just keep moving these cards around to make money because every time they move the cards around somebody’s skimming.”

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That being said, it seems like she’s doing fine. She’s currently telling her own stories about sex and the city in a stage show called True Tales Of Success And Sex And The City, and she pointed out in the Daily Mail article that she is a “best selling novelist” and has made most of her money from books anyway. The article also points out that she was making the equivalent of $8,000 to $10,000 a month when she was writing for Vogue in the ‘90s, which is… more than what writers tend to make these days.