Plan to Clean Up Sex and the City Fails

February 5 -- There's some bad news for viewers who wanted to see HBO's saucy, hot series Sex and the City without subscribing to the pay cable network.

HBO has scrapped its plans to sell a sanitized-rerun version of its bawdy series, which stars Sarah Jessica Parker as a sex columnist in Manhattan, N.Y., to basic cable, Variety reports.

Apparently, HBO president Jeff Bewkes decided not to water down the award-winning half-hour comedy after all, although his decision was perhaps prompted by the cable network's difficulty in finding a taker at the $750,000-per-episode asking price.

HBO Enterprises had carefully edited six separate half-hour episodes, excising the nudity and four-letter words, to prove to potential buyers that a cleaned-up Sex and the City would work just as well as the raunchy original.

According to Variety, only one of the basic-cable networks offered the series chose to bite, but Bewkes elected not to follow through with the deal. He apparently feared that syndication would devalue Sex, which currently ranks as one of HBO's best-rated original series.