Our complicated relationship with Sex and the City (part 1)

Are you a Carrie, a Miranda, a Samantha, or a Charlotte? 

There’s a good chance you’ve heard this question before or are at least familiar with it as shorthand for a person’s personality type. Indeed, HBO’s Sex and the City (SATC) has ascended to such a level of widespread recognition as to have attained one-name status: you have Elvis, Britney, Leo, and Kylie, and you have Carrie, Miranda, Samantha, and Charlotte. 

The series, which follows four single women in their 30s as they navigate love and life in New York City premiered in 1998 to mixed reviews. The show, said one critic, was “wearisome, whiny and annoying”, while another complained that Sarah Jessica Parker looked “like a walking flea market” with her “scraggly hair and jutty jaw.”

And really, this early dismissal of a series which centred women’s experiences is no surprise. While shows about groups of women are fairly commonplace today (Broad City; Girls; Big Little Lies; Orange is the New Black), in 1998, this was largely unchartered territory. There were comedies about friends, most of them starring men (Seinfeld; Frasier; Friends; Cheers) and there were plenty of shows about family (The Fresh Prince of Bel Air; Roseanne; Family Matters; Married with Children; Everybody Loves Raymond). But for the most part, there was little to no representation of women in their 30s who weren’t housewives, mothers, or ‘one of the guys’. There were some exceptions, like Living Single, which followed six friends living in Brooklyn, and which a 2013 VIBE article posits was “the under-acknowledged blueprint” for SATC, arguably overlooked for its focus on Black women. 

However, not all of SATC’s criticisms are tied to misogynistic ideas. Many critics (including fans of the show) justifiably interrogate SATC’s deep-rooted flaws: its focus on white women (and men) at the expense of the representation of People of Colour and its whitewashing of 1990s/2000s New York in general), its heteronormative gaze, where queer characters and perspectives are always on the periphery, and the classism inherent to its focus on an overrepresented and inaccessible slice of socioeconomic life (Carrie might preach a humble lifestyle but the woman owned $40,000 worth of shoes).

To be continued.