Yahoo Finance All these years later, why do we still love 'Sex and the City' so much?
I first watched it when I wasn’t meant to. I think most of my generation did. Back then, Sex and the City was an illicit substance; late night TV that was scandalous, naughty and, of course, all the more enticing for it. The show represented everything I thought it meant to be a grown up: great outfits, endless cocktails with your friends, a new love interest every week. I idolised these women not so much for their Fendi Baguettes and Manolos, but because they seemed to me the very essence of freedom: the distilled allure of adulthood a far cry the video-combi TV in my childhood bedroom in North London.
Most women my age have a similar ‘origin story’ of how they got into Sex and the City. They will tell you it was the raunchy sex scenes – most watched pre the divesting of their virginities – that lured them in, or the snapshot into life in New York. Others will say it really was the fashion, the naked dress of season one, the infamous tutu, the teeny-tiny hot pants and strappy sandals combo Carrie inexplicably wears to chase after Aidan’s dog. But what was it that made us stay?
The enduring popularity of Sex and the City is truly a thing to be marvelled at. We have watched and re-watched the show for decades, hugging it close like a beloved teddy bear or safety blanket. My Sex and the City DVD boxset came with me to university, and, in those ancient pre-Netflix days, it was like having cigarettes in prison. Girls I had never met were coming up to me, having heard I was ‘the one with the boxset.’ Here we were, most of us away from home for the first time, and we needed our friends: Carrie, Charlotte, Samantha, and Miranda.
Of course, as it’s been said a million and one times, it is the friendships that keep us hooked. Whoever said they watched the show for Big or Aidan or even Smith is woefully mistaken. As Michiko Kakutani said of Carrie’s book; “single women rule, and the men are disposable”. For a show seemingly predicated on sex, its beating heart was always the relationship between these four women – each of them as nuanced as they were stark archetypes (The Career Woman, The Traditionalist, The One Who Has Sex Like A Man). There is no scene more important in the whole of Sex and the City’s entire arc than when Charlotte, the most earnestly co-dependent, says “Maybe we can be each other’s soulmates.” Cheesy? Sure. Accurate? Absolutely.
We can discuss what Sex and the City did for the sales of Jimmy Choos or Cosmopolitans, but what it did for single women is its most significant legacy. Its most central examination, which threads its way through every season, is what it means to be a single woman. This concept was quietly revolutionary in the 1990s when it began, and it bizarrely remains so. Culture, and the society it represents, still feels uncomfortable with the idea of an unmarried, unattached female. The show continually wrestled with this idea, interrogating the spectre of ‘the old maid’, the choice to remain childless, the fact that success – as a woman – is still measured by your marital status and not, as Miranda learns, by your ability to make partner at your firm and buy your own apartment.
Did the show bottle it by the end, in having all four women couple up? Absolutely, but Sex and the City is not without its faults. It lacked true representation, it made lazy – sometimes offensive – choices with its LGBTQ+ characters, it was staggeringly ineffective in the way it dealt with wealth, it made the second film. But the show is like Carrie: compelling, ridiculous and, at times, incredibly problematic. And, much like Carrie’s friends – even after she sent her boyfriend to do her job and brought the shitty bagels – we are still turning up at the diner for brunch.
It explains why we are all waiting with ‘breath that is bated’ for And Just Like That to premiere this week on HBO Max. We’ve already been gobbling up the drip-feed of fashion and casting announcements on Instagram over the past few months. And yet, we are also mildly terrified. What if the show can’t survive without Samantha? What if lacks the za-za-zoo? Or worse… what if it is as bad as the second film?
What And Just Like That needs to do is continue to mean something to us now. This means addressing its previous faults, something it at least appears to be attempting to tackle through its more diverse casting. But it is not just what our current climate demands, or even a capitulation to a fresh Gen-Z audience, there are other factors too. For the fans who have been there since the beginning, we want Sex and the City to continue to grow with us organically. It was there through the breakups of our twenties and thirties, the marriages and divorces, the feeling of your friends moving on without you, the panic of being with the right man who is all wrong for you. The show held our hand through all of this and many of us will need it to do it again; with issues like ageing, elderly parents, your children growing up and what sex really looks like in your fifties.
For a young girl watching it in her bedroom today, it will no-doubt still be an idealistic window into what adulthood looks like. For those of us who’ve been there all along, it will – hopefully – be like catching up with old friends.
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