After 20 years, Sex and the City deserves credit for lasting TV impact By: Jen Zoratti Posted: 7:00 PM CDT Tuesday, Jun. 5, 2018

Opinion

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 04/06/2018 (2299 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

On June 6, 1998, a show debuted on HBO that altered the television landscape, and laid the blueprint for Prestige TV.

I’m not talking about The Sopranos, though that would be a fair assumption. I’m talking about Sex and the City.

Yes, it’s been 20 years since we first saw Carrie Bradshaw (Sarah Jessica Parker) in her whimsical little tutu get splashed by a New York City bus in those now-iconic opening credits. Two decades since we met her friends Samantha Jones (Kim Cattrall), Charlotte York (Kristin Davis) and Miranda Hobbes (Cynthia Nixon).

It was a revolutionary show, one that showed the lives of four single women in a way the world had never seen before.

I was 13 when Sex and the City debuted, but I watched the late-night unedited reruns on Bravo throughout my teens, usually while I was out babysitting, after the kids were put to bed. Armed with the baby monitor and a row of Oreos, I’d settle in to watch from the privacy afforded by someone else’s living room.

I couldn’t possibly watch such an in-your-face show at home — you know, where my parents lived. I mean, the word “sex” was right there in the title. But beyond the sex scenes, which I watched on mute because I am respectful, I found the show endlessly compelling: it offered a glimpse into a mature, glamorous world so far removed from my own.

In the intervening years, I’ve binge-watched the entire series several times now, and each watch reveals something new. Some of it does not hold up in 2018; for a sex columnist, Carrie Bradshaw sure has a time wrapping her mind around the concept of bisexuality, and the cast is as white as the driven snow.

Rewatching Sex and the City in my 30s, the same age as the women on the show, was also a bit of a trip. The characters I identified with — and rooted for — changed (Team Miranda all the way). The men of the show also look different through the lens of adulthood. Carrie’s nice-guy boyfriend Aiden (John Corbett) is actually a manipulative dirtbag in aw-shucks clothing. Mr. Big, the 40-something financier played by Chris Noth and his eyebrows, is the wild horse that can’t be tamed, not Carrie.

And how could I have missed that the best one all along was Harry, the divorce lawyer played by Evan Handler who Charlotte finally ends up with?

Sex and the City is often held up as a paean to singledom, although it should be noted that all the women pair off in the end. But it showed that being a single woman isn’t a tragedy, even if it doesn’t always feel fabulous.

In 2013, on the occasion of SATC’s 15th anniversary, the New Yorker’s Emily Nussbaum examined how Sex and the City’s reputation has faded over the years, going from groundbreaking to guilty pleasure at a fairly brisk clip.

Unlike The Sopranos, which debuted on HBO a year after SATC and whose place is firmly cemented in the upper echelon of quality, influential television, Sex and the City is not shown the same kind of respect, even though it was, as Nussbaum writes, “the peer of The Sopranos, albeit in a different tone and in a different milieu, deconstructing a different genre.”

That genre was the romantic comedy and, although it fell into some of the tropes it sought to subvert later on, it was a smarter show than people like to give it credit for.

“High-feminine instead of fetishistically masculine, glittery rather than gritty, and daring in its conception of character, Sex and the City was a brilliant and, in certain ways, radical show,” Nussbaum writes. “It also originated the unacknowledged first female antihero on television: ladies and gentlemen, Carrie Bradshaw.”

It’s easy to forget, in the hot-pink haze of Manolos, cosmos, designer clothes and the unmitigated trainwrecks that were the movies, that this show broke ground in other ways. Sex and the City was radical because it featured four women talking frankly and honestly about sex, forever changing brunch talk.

But Carrie “couldn’t help but wonder” about many other things that regular women also wondered about — money, power, singledom, friendship, romance. Her column, “Sex and the City,” was never just about sex, and neither was the show.

And indeed, Carrie was an anti-hero in that, even in her most unlikable moments, you still cared about what happened to her. Her life was messy. She made bad decisions. She hurt people she cared about. But then, they all did. Over the past 20 years, Carrie, Samantha, Charlotte and Miranda became flattened into archetypal answers on a personality quiz — “Are you a Carrie or a Miranda?” But when you rewatch the series, you quickly see that they were never that one-dimensional, and all four of them grew and evolved over the course of the series in significant, meaningful ways.

To that end, where the show might be most pioneering is in its realistic depiction of female friendship. The women cared about and challenged each other. They could be thoughtless, self-involved and deeply judgmental about each other’s life choices — but they were also supportive and compassionate. In other words, they were human, and when they fought, it felt real. Their friendships were not contingent on perfect behaviour.

Forget Carrie and Big: that’s the real love story at the heart of Sex and the City, the one between these friends.

At the end of the series, Carrie makes a disastrous and ill-advised move to Paris with the Russian (Mikhail Baryshnikov) and is rescued by Big. But on my latest rewatch, I found myself wishing it was Miranda who showed up in that Paris hotel lobby to take Carrie home.

jen.zoratti@freepress.mb.ca

Twitter: @JenZoratti

Jen Zoratti
Columnist

Jen Zoratti is a Winnipeg Free Press columnist and author of the newsletter, NEXT, a weekly look towards a post-pandemic future.

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