HBO Made 'Sex and the City' Cut This "Horrifying" Scene

HBO made the producers of Sex and the City cut a "horrifying" scene of a golden retriever giving oral sex to a man.

Dog, Mammal, Vertebrate, Canidae, Dog breed, Carnivore, Companion dog, Grass, Sporting Group, Fun,
(Image credit: HBO)

Sex and the City turns 20 this year and some of the show's content is still racy today, two decades later. The show's producers pushed the envelope a lot and, for the most part, HBO was happy to let them do it. There were a couple of instances, however, where the network stepped in and put the brakes on an idea.

One such instance was in Season 1, in the episode "The Monogamists." In the episode, Charlotte was dating a guy named Michael (played by Jack Koenig), who kept pushing her head down to give him a blowjob. What you might not remember about Michael is that he also had a golden retriever named Butterscotch, who was always around.

"In the final scene, she basically let him have it about being offended by his insistence on just wanting a blow job," Sex and the City creator Darren Star told Vanity Fair of the episode. "She accused him of only liking her for that and kind of stormed out."

The version of the episode we saw ended here, but there was originally more to Michael's story.

"And then she walked back in and saw that his golden retriever was going down on him," Star explained.

Yeah, seriously. That was the original plan.

"It’s sort of horrifying that we shot that," producer and writer Amy B. Harris added. "We shot him putting peanut butter on his penis, and Charlotte walks back in like, 'Oh, I’m being unreasonable,' and then she sees that...I can’t believe we even thought about doing it."

Same. SAME.

Kayleigh Roberts
Weekend Editor

Kayleigh Roberts is a freelance writer and editor with more than 10 years of professional experience. Her byline has appeared in Marie Claire, Cosmopolitan, ELLE, Harper’s Bazaar, The Atlantic, Allure, Entertainment Weekly, MTV, Bustle, Refinery29, Girls’ Life Magazine, Just Jared, and Tiger Beat, among other publications. She's a graduate of the Medill School of Journalism at Northwestern University.