I never planned to watch Sex and the City. Nothing I heard about the series drew me to it in particular. My main familiarity with it involved being loosely a part of conversations where friends assigned themselves characters, like being “a Miranda” or “a Carrie.” However, on one sleepy Friday evening, my partner had turned it on to watch as they cooked. Content to try something new, I plopped myself down on the couch with a chocolate martini in hand.
The fact that I would prejudge Sex and the City isn’t all that surprising. In a 2013 essay for the New Yorker, Emily Nussbaum wrote about how even critics have historically excluded the show from the canon of television greats and relegated it to the sidelines of TV. And its supporters weren’t immune. She writes: “By the show’s fifteen-year anniversary, this year, we fans had trained ourselves to downgrade the show to a ‘guilty pleasure,’ to mock its puns, to get into self-flagellating conversations about those blinkered and blinged-out movies,” conversations that I had more or less absorbed over the years.
But after actually watching the show, Carrie’s quick tongue immediately ensnared me in her world and I could not stop watching. I grappled with the toxic push and pull of her romance with Big, and gawked at the absurdity of this portrayal of life in New York City in the ’90s and 2000s. But even more than any of this, the series contained a warmth that surprised me. Viewing the series in this day and age — when the premise of a woman being single and having sex in her 30s is ostensibly less provocative — strips it away of any sort of “shock” factor that comes with sex. Instead, what stood out to me was a story lined with the generosity and messiness of unconditional female friendships and love.
The four — you know them even if you don’t know them — don’t always get along. Miranda in particular takes issue with Carrie’s proclivity to chase after a man who doesn’t treat her well, and Charlotte might judge Samantha’s constant sexual escapades.
Image: HBO
But rather than let these differences rip these characters apart, we instead watch them wade through the messiness of it all together. Carrie might not listen to Miranda, but we can see the two support each other in other ways. In times of want, it’s generally the friends who step up fill in the “void” left by lack of romantic partners. In the end, it’s clear that the relationships between these women, rather than any sex or romance, drive the show. I don’t care as much whether Carrie ends up with Big as I do that she finds a way to see Miranda’s perspective, and vice versa. In this way, each woman reflects and bends each plot and the world around her in her own way to create a glittering diamond of a show.
This recommendation still comes with a major caveat. The series contains several instances where Carrie and her friends’ blatant homophobic, transphobic, and racist actions and beliefs ruin entire storylines. (At one point I just skipped an episode because one of the characters overcommitted to a bit that played racist stereotypes for laughs.) And while we can say it was likely a “sign of the times,” the series did and still does reflect a sensibility that matches its very narrow subsect of life it shows (rich white ladies living in New York).
I still found the show to be worthwhile despite these drawbacks. Over the course of its six-season run, Sex and the City finds a surprising depth in each of its characters. At several points, the series refuses to give many of its characters the neat and tidy idyllic ending that they might have wanted at the start. A character like Charlotte might want marriage and the idea of the “perfect” man, but have to reconsider — more than once — what that looks like. The result is a show that, at certain points, feels raw and real, a pivotal “second coming-of-age” story, except for women in their 20s and 30s who resist the expectations of society. I might have been skeptical of the series, but now, looking back on my chocolate martini, maybe my inner Carrie was just waiting to come out.
Sex and the City is now streaming on Netflix.
