As I’m swallowed by the jaws of finals, I distract myself with thoughts of the upcoming respite—the couch in my suburban living room, the red blanket, the black television. When I get home I will want to watch something comforting, a television series I’ve already seen. Dulled by my existing knowledge of the show’s plot, I’ll return to the first episode of one of my favorite series, letting its predictable warmth wash away academic stress. More than escapism or nostalgia though, I want to revisit a show that preserves a kind of human-interaction that now feels extinct.
There are inescapable television shows. The ones everyone has seen, the ones everyone talks about. Breaking Bad. The Office. Friends. Gilmore Girls. The Sopranos. They worm their way from the screen into the canon of everyday life. With contemporary shows like Stranger Things and Bridgerton saturating public discourse, from TikTok montages set to Drake songs to national news broadcasts dissecting what actors eat for breakfast, it is undeniable that popular television shows influence the ways we understand our lives—especially our romantic ones. It is a medium to understand love and coming-of-age, a portal through which we can examine our own relationships, separated only by screens and scripts. Most impressive, then, is when a TV show can transcend the era in which it was created, capitalizing on nostalgia while remaining timeless. This winter break, I will be rewatching Sex and the City. To honor the infamous catch phrase of the series’ protagonist, Carrie Bradshaw: I can’t help but wonder, why has this show endured?
I first encountered Sex and the City in the wake of my uncle’s wedding, when I was around nine. Relatives milled about the kitchen, drinking and talking. That side of my family is older than me by decades, which is to say I was bored. Beside the kitchen, in the bedroom I was not supposed to go in, I found a bookshelf. One spine stuck out to me. Fat and pink, it opened to not words, but pages of photography capturing four elaborately dressed women; the book was an anthology of the fashion from Sex and the City. The women perused a city I could not yet recognize. With its frantic crowds, smoky skyscrapers, and blur of lights, the cityscape seduced me into its busyness and sparkle. Even so, it would be a decade before I watched the first episode of Sex and the City.
The show is structured like most late 90s sitcoms, with self-contained episodes that follow a reliable three act arc, beginning with a cold open. It follows Carrie Bradshaw and her three best friends—Miranda, Samantha, and Charlotte—as they navigate their friendship and romantic relationships in New York City. They are glamorously independent: cabbing to new bars and gallery openings, wandering Central Park arm in arm, succeeding in their chosen careers while wearing beautifully blown-out hair and pretty heels. A typical episode opens with a teaser—a morally complex encounter with a man—which becomes the central focus of Carrie’s weekly newspaper column, itself an on-screen echo of Candace Bushnell’s real Sex and the City column in The New York Observer. From there, the episode weaves the four friends’s lives into a narrative that addresses the nuances of the episode’s proposed question—nuances that Carrie, Miranda, Samantha and Charlotte often discuss over brunch.
Sex and the City gives its audience a glimpse into a lost era of dating culture while reflecting the timelessness and universality of friendship. The episodes peak in their entertainment value when they capture the women’s spontaneous romantic encounters. Miranda catches the eye of a man at a bookstore, they smile as they thumb through pages, he asks her to go on a date. Samantha lingers at a restaurant long past her friend’s departure, suggesting to the waiter that it is not food she desires, but him. Charlotte trips when crossing a busy street, narrowly avoiding a speeding taxi-cab, landing in the arms of a handsome man whom she later marries. The four women entwine themselves with men in relationships that are not mediated through dating apps, text messages, or shy avoidance. I know that Sex and the City’s version of love is romanticized for the screen, but it illustrates an ease of communication inaccessible in our modern era. Sex and the City’s dating landscape feels impossibly distant, but deeply appealing. More than nostalgia for the early 2000s, it is yearning for an honest form of human interaction that now feels impossible for a generation burdened with technological communication. Watching the show eases us back in time, simulating this gratifying, uninhibited flirting.
That being said, as much as Sex and the City’s communication style entices, the relationships the women have to men do not. They are often shallow and, like the show’s structure, formulaic: a meet-cute followed by a glitzy series of dates ending in a spontaneous breakup. Men are prop-like, serving more to spark conversation between the woman than to offer real intimacy. Take the final arc of the show for example: Carrie moves abroad with her lover, a Russian artist, leaving behind her city, her job, and her friends. In one scene, she passes by a cafe window, looking in sadly on a group of four women as they laugh over coffee. She calls Miranda from a payphone, telling her friend that she is lonely, wondering if she made a mistake by moving to Paris. Back in New York, Miranda, Samantha, and Charlotte meet with Mr. Big—an old flame of Carrie’s who tells them he’s still in love with her—and they encourage him to find Carrie and to bring her back home to them. He does. Mr. Big’s real name, (spoiler alert) John, is not revealed until the final episode of the six season series. As such, his namelessness strips part of Big’s identity away, rendering him as a rough sketch of a terrible ex-boyfriend rather than a character with nuance and feeling. We can measure Carrie’s character development through her interactions with Big over the course of the show. He is more yardstick than human. Consequently, the show never quite depicts a real relationship, though I’ll give an honorable mention to Miranda and Steve. It doesn’t devote time to the mundanity of love, but instead to its loftiness, rendering the women’s final couplings a bit stale — less like organic conclusions and more like the show fulfilling a heteronormative script, where a relationship with a man is framed as the ultimate reward. The women supplement the lack of complexity they have with their partners, however, with their dynamic relationships to each other. The show concludes with Carrie encased in the show’s familiar structure, surrounded by her true loves: her friends. Cucooned on my couch in suburban Connecticut, I will linger on this feeling of rich platonic love — the part of Sex and the City that never ages.
