By Mike Hughes
Gannett News Service

After six years in the unfettered, uncensored world of HBO, Sex and the City is ready to go basic.

Basic cable, that is. It's a place where most bodies are clothed and some words are unsaid. Sex reruns, slightly scrubbed, debut there in syndication on Tuesday.

"We did the whole first season before it aired," says Cynthia Nixon, who played Miranda. "We didn't know how big it would be."

They also didn't know the show would ever go beyond HBO. Just in case, however, the cast was asked each year to tape alternate dialogue.

With Sex, TBS continues its shift toward a comedic image. The key pieces of which are reruns of Friends, Seinfeld and now Sex and the City.

TBS will air the Sex episodes with only mild changes. One episode, for instance, still has frequent repetition of a word from the female anatomy.

"That's partly because of us and partly because of The Vagina Monologues," says Nixon, 38. "I guess people are used to it now."

They've become used to many things since Sex first aired in 1998. The show still feels brash and outspoken but not outrageously so.

Nixon recalls her first impressions of the show. "I thought it was very grown up," she says. "These were women of a certain age, talking in a very real, very funny and bawdy way."

At first, they may have seemed like exaggerations. But soon viewers cared about Carrie (Sarah Jessica Parker), Miranda (Nixon), Samantha (Kim Cattrall) and Charlotte (Kristin Davis).

"Provocation aside and titillation aside ... caring, deep relationships hold an audience," Parker says.

Basic broadcastsTBS will first air what it calls "10 memorable episodes" of Sex at 10 p.m. and 10:30 p.m. Tuesday through June 19.

A week later, on June 22, it will start rerunning the show chronologically. There will be episodes at 10 p.m. and 10:30 p.m. Tuesdays, rerunning on Wednesdays.