Netflix has secured another hit HBO series. All six seasons of Sex and the City will debut on the streamer in early April.
The platform signed a deal with Warner Bros. Discovery to license all six seasons of the HBO dramedy, which totals 94 episodes, according to The New York Times and other reports. The series will be available to stream in the U.S. and several European markets, but this doesn’t include the franchise’s two feature films or the recent spin-off series And Just Like That, which is on Max, the reports said.
Netflix was not available for comment.
Sex and the City ran on HBO from 1998 through 2004 and stars Sarah Jessica Parker, Kristin Davis, Cynthia Nixon, and Kim Cattrall as a group of four close-knit friends navigating love and life in New York City. The series is based on a column published in The New York Observer by Candace Bushnell that was later compiled into a book. It was renowned for its positive portrayal of single women and working mothers with a strong value on female friendships during the characters’ many successes and pitfalls during the series’ run.
Warner Bros. Discovery licensed several older HBO series to Netflix last summer, including Band of Brothers, The Pacific, Six Feet Under, and Ballers. The platform added True Blood to its collection outside of the U.S.
The move for competitor streamers to share content sparked a trend with other platforms, including Disney. The streamer licensed 14 shows that had never streamed on another platform to Netflix, such as This is Us, Home Improvement, How I Met Your Mother, Lost, Prison Break, and The Wonder Years. In the same deal, Disney agreed to launch Grey’s Anatomy on Hulu as the series continues to stream on Netflix.
Most of Max’s content remains exclusive to the platform, but shows have begun to debut on other services as studios consider new ways to monetize their collections. Warner Bros. Discovery CEO David Zaslav said, “There’s a lot of content that’s not being consumed heavily on Max, and so those are the easy ones” to consider renting out.
Netflix’s co-CEO Ted Sarandos said the company wants to secure more licensing agreements for popular content.
“We’ve got a rich history of helping break some of TV’s biggest hits, like Breaking Bad and The Walking Dead, or even more recently, with Schitt’s Creek,” said Sarandos during Tuesday’s fourth-quarter earnings call. “Because of our recommendation, our reach, we can resurrect a show like Suits and turn it into a big pop-culture moment but also generate billions of hours of joy for our members.”
Suits, a legal drama starring Gabriel Macht and Patrick J. Adams that aired on USA more than a decade ago, saw a massive revival in popularity after joining Netflix’s catalog. The show clocked 3.14 billion minutes watched in a single week after its debut last June, a phenomenon known as The Netflix Effect. Six Feet Under, HBO’s best series ever, has also seen a resurgence in popularity since Netflix launched all five seasons last November.
The shows have helped Netflix boost subscription numbers to 260.3 million members by the end of 2023 amid rising costs and a strict crackdown on password sharing.
As Netflix heads into another wave of account changes by once again spiking subscription costs for its ad-free tier, a fresh wave of nostalgia-inducing shows could help reduce possible subscriber turnover as more people cut streaming services due to rising costs.