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| My Sex and the City memorabilia. And yes, those are VHS tapes. My obsession with this show began long before I had a DVD player. |
Someday I swear I'll do one of these that isn't about a TV show, but today is not that day. So we're throwing back to the turn of the century to discuss Sex and the City! In case you've been living under a rock for the past 15 years, Sex and the City was an HBO series based on a book of the same name by Candace Bushnell. It followed the lives of four single ladies living in New York City, focusing primarily on their romantic entanglements.
The show premiered when I was 14, and I loved it from the start. Carrie Bradshaw really personified what I wanted from my adult life: a writer who lives in New York City who is super fashionable and does fun things with her awesome girlfriends while dating every type of dude under the sun? That's the stuff teenage dreams are made of. I also liked that the lives of the four women (Carrie, Samantha, Miranda and Charlotte) were so intertwined. They were always there for each other, whether it was meeting for a boozy brunch or supporting each other after a breakup. And I loved how frank the ladies were about sex; women talking about sex without being ashamed or secretive was a pretty novel concept to me at that age.
Fans of the show would often discuss which character they most identified with: "I'm a Carrie" or "I'm a Samantha." When I was younger, I thought was a Carrie (as most ladies did, let's be real), but my strongest match is definitely Miranda: she's practical, honest, and a little bit cynical, but she softens after her life takes some turns she didn't necessarily expect. And she got to make out with Blair Underwood, who is the definition of good looking, so not a bad match on the whole.
By the time the show ended in 2004, I was in college and my views on life and dating were a little more down-to-earth. I still wanted to move to New York and be a writer, but I was very no-nonsense in my dating life. The ladies' constant analysis of how to behave with their men and whether they had done the right thing kinda drove me nuts. If you're wondering what your partner is thinking, just ask them. I'm way too straightforward to play those kind of games. But the friendship between the four women kept me sucked in, and I hoped that I would develop a group of lifelong gal pals like those ladies.
Carrie and co. have appeared in a few places since the show wrapped. The first Sex and the City movie came out in 2008, and I enjoyed it. I thought it tied everything up and put a nice little bow on the series. The second one, though, was pretty terrible. Like I-didn't-finish-it bad. It was so campy and over-the-top, it seemed like they lost the heart that had grounded it as a TV series. Totally unnecessary. Last year, I started watching The Carrie Diaries (a CW series based on other Candace Bushnell books about Carrie's high school years) and I kinda like it. Especially this season, as they've introduced Samantha to spice things up a bit. But the tone is not similar to that of the original show.
I still have a lot of love for this show, but not enough to compel me to rewatch it. I think it was really important to me at a certain point in my life, and it's better to leave it that way than tarnish my opinion of it by revisiting it now. But if you don't have these fond memories and want to watch it, Amazon has the complete series for less than $90. There's also a de-sexed version in syndication, but I think you should see it in its full (frontal?) glory.
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