Sex and the City

The story

Full story — spoilers ahead.

Carrie Bradshaw writes a newspaper column about sex and dating and treats the city as both her beat and her boyfriend. Each episode used to end with a question she typed in voice-over. Over six seasons those questions grow a memory. Her friends are the rest of the thesis.

Miranda Hobbes is a lawyer who wants honesty and keeps getting men who cannot do it. She is the skeptic, the one who will say the ugly true thing at brunch. Samantha Jones is a publicist who treats desire like a job she is excellent at and refuses to apologize for wanting sex without a story attached. Charlotte York is an art dealer who wants a wedding, a child, and rules the other three keep breaking. She is not stupid. She is romantic on purpose, which the show sometimes punishes and sometimes rewards. They walk, brunch, fight, and compare notes. The voice-over is Carrie’s column trying to turn a weekend into a theory.

Season 1 is the premise: four women, a city, a question. Then the show grows attachments. Mr. Big is the man Carrie cannot quit — older, rich, emotionally cheap, and somehow the person she measures everyone else against. Aidan is the decent alternative, a furniture maker who wants a dog and a life that looks like a life. Carrie cheats, lies, and learns that being honest in a column is easier than being honest in a kitchen. The Big-versus-Aidan problem is not a love triangle so much as a personality test Carrie keeps failing and retaking.

Miranda’s long arc is the one that ages the series. She has a baby she did not plan with Steve, a bartender who is kinder than her defenses. She tries to treat motherhood as a logistics problem and discovers it is a personality change. Their marriage is negotiated, broken, and rebuilt by two people who are not each other’s fantasy and might be each other’s fact. Charlotte marries Trey, the man who looks like the painting, and the marriage fails in the bedroom and then everywhere else. She converts, starts over with Harry, and fights for a child through grief that the earlier seasons would have turned into a punchline. Samantha gets a diagnosis and refuses to become a lesson. Her cancer plot is vain, funny, and sincerely frightened. She keeps her hair, loses it, and will not let illness make her small.

Later seasons push Carrie toward a version of the fairy tale she has been mocking and chasing. A relationship with Aleksandr Petrovsky, an older artist, takes her to Paris and asks whether the city was the love story all along. Big arrives there not as a perfect man but as the unfinished sentence. The original series finale gives her a reunion that later years of television would argue about. Inside the show as it ended in 2004, the point is that Carrie chooses a person after years of choosing a persona.

The central relationships are the plot. Carrie and Big are addiction dressed as destiny. Carrie and Miranda are the friendship that can survive cruelty. Carrie and Charlotte are the argument about whether wanting a traditional life is cowardice. Carrie and Samantha are the argument about whether freedom is the same as never needing anyone. The four of them together are a closed system that works until someone gets what she asked for and the others have to adjust.

Sex and the City is funny, dated, sharp, and sometimes blind in ways the culture later argued about. It is also six seasons of four women talking their way through work, sex, money, and the fear of being alone in a place that keeps telling them they should be dazzling. If you have never watched it, the story is not every boyfriend. It is a group of friends using conversation as a survival tool, and a writer who keeps turning her life into copy until the life demands she put the laptop down.