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Sex and the City is an American cable television program based on the book of the same name. The show, set in New York City, focuses on the love lives of four female best friends who are reaching their forties. A sitcom with soap opera elements, the show often tackles socially relevant issues such as the status of women in society. Produced by the HBO network, the series premiered on June 6, 1998, and the last original episode aired on February 22, 2004.
Overview
The show's narrator is sex and love columnist Carrie Bradshaw (Sarah Jessica Parker). Her best friends are Charlotte York (Kristin Davis), a traditional and relatively conservative woman, Miranda Hobbes (Cynthia Nixon), a cynical, career-minded lawyer, and Samantha Jones (Kim Cattrall), a wild-living, fun-loving woman who stops at nothing to get the men she wants.
As time progressed, so did the characters and situations. The show consistently achieved both critical and popular acclaim. By the fourth season, many elements of the series, such as the overall tone and the characters, diverged considerably from the book. The girl talk, dating games, and fashion attracted much attention from the audiences. The fancy clothes and shoes (mostly Patricia Fields, Jimmy Choos and Manolo Blahniks) that Carrie wears made her a fashion icon in many fashion magazines.
In the first season, every episode featured a short montage of interviews that Carrie supposedly conducted while researching her column. These continued through the second season, then were phased out.
Season one of Sex and the City aired on HBO from June to August 1998. The second season was broadcast from June until October 1999. Season three aired from June until October 2000. The fourth season was broadcast in two parts: from June until August 2001, and then in January and February 2002. A fifth season, truncated due to Parker's pregnancy, aired on HBO during the summer of 2002. The 20 episodes of the final season, season six, aired in two parts: from June until September 2003 and during January and February 2004.
Characters
Main characters
- Carrie Bradshaw (Sarah Jessica Parker) writes a weekly sex column titled Sex and the City for a newspaper. She provides the show's narration, which is structured around her train of thought while writing the column.
- Charlotte York (Kristin Davis) is an art dealer with a blue-blooded upbringing. She is the most conservative and traditional of the group, and is always searching for her "knight in shining armor".
- Miranda Hobbes (Cynthia Nixon) is a career-minded lawyer with extremely cynical views on relationships. She is Carrie's confidante.
- Samantha Jones (Kim Cattrall), the oldest of the group, is an independent publicist whose relationship pattern could be considered stereotypically male. She is a seductress who primarily engages in relationships purely for sex, avoiding emotional involvement at all costs.
Recurring characters
Friends
- Stanford Blatch (Willie Garson), a gay fashionista, is Carrie's best friend outside the group and often attends parties with her.
- Anthony Marentino (Mario Cantone) is Charlotte's wedding planner who then becomes her best friend outside the group. When she is down, he often tries to motivate her to get out there and date again.
Boyfriends
All the boyfriends listed below were the focus of a significant story arc spanning multiple episodes. Additionally, the four main characters all went on dates or had sex when they were single – often with male characters (and in Samantha's case, one female character) who appeared in only one, two, or at most three episodes of the program.
Carrie's boyfriends
- Mr. Big (Chris Noth) plagues Carrie through the run of the show, as she always believes he is the man for her. They meet in the first episode, and soon begin a serious relationship. Carrie breaks up with Big at the end of season 1 because he refuses to open up his life for her. This pattern repeats itself in season 2, but when they break up again, Big marries a young model. He stays in Carrie's life as a close friend and they have a short affair, but he then moves to California. After divorcing the model, he returns to New York for an angioplasty and opens his heart to her, but soon closes his emotions again. Finally, at the very end of the series, Big returns to Carrie.
- Aidan Shaw (John Corbett) is one of Carrie's few long-term boyfriends. They break up after her affair with Big, but rekindle the relationship. He eventually proposes to her, but she realizes that he wants to tie her down more than she can accept and breaks off the engagement.
- Jack Berger (Ron Livingston) is a writer who Carrie dates in season 6. At first, they seem like the perfect couple, but their relationship came to a screeching halt when Carrie's career heated up just as Berger's cooled down, something he was never able to deal with. He snuck out in the middle of the night and broke up with her on a Post-it note.
- Aleksandr Petrovsky (Mikhail Baryshnikov) is a famous artist who becomes Carrie's lover in season 6. Eventually, she wants the relationship to be deeper than storybook romance. She accepts Petrovsky's invitation to move to Paris with him, but after spending some time there, she realizes he will never reciprocate her emotional involvement, and she can't keep her mind off Mr. Big.
Charlotte's boyfriends
- Trey MacDougal (Kyle MacLachlan) fits Charlotte's knight in shining armor archetype to a tee, and eventually she marries him. They have marital problems from the beginning, and things escalate when Charlotte finds out it would be very difficult for her to have a baby, which she deeply desires. Eventually, they separate and divorce.
- Harry Goldenblatt (Evan Handler) is Charlotte's divorce lawyer. Although he is not even in the ballpark of Charlotte's ideal man, they fall in love. Harry refuses to marry a non-Jew, so Charlotte converts to Judaism. After this, they have a falling out and break up. Eventually, Harry returns and proposes to Charlotte, and they marry.
Miranda's boyfriends
- Skipper Johnson (Ben Weber) is a geeky, sensitive twentysomething who is friends with Carrie, then becomes Miranda's boyfriend in season 1. The realtionship doesn't last because Miranda does not want the same level of commitment.
- Steve Brady (David Eigenberg) is a bartender Miranda has what appears to be a one-night stand with after a bad breakup. He falls for Miranda, and the one-night stand morphs into a relationship. The difference in income between the two becomes a serious issue, and they break up. In season 4, he is diagnosed with testicular cancer and must have one testicle removed. He and Miranda have sex in what Samantha calls "a mercy fuck", and Miranda gets pregnant. They decide to raise the baby together, but separated. In season 6, they get back together, then marry in an extremely small, casual ceremony.
Samantha's boyfriends
- Richard Wright (James Remar) is a extremely wealthy hotel magnate who becomes Samantha's prey. He seduces her, and they have a no-strings sexual realtionship. Their relationship eventually escalates, and both parties struggle to keep their emotional distance. Eventually, both profess their love for each other, and they try to have a monogamous relationship. Samantha's heart is broken when she catches him having an affair.
- Smith Jerrod (Jason Lewis) is a young waiter Samantha seduces in a trendy restaurant. She finds out he is an actor and becomes his publicist. Her first advice is to change the awkward name "Jerry Jerrod" to "Smith Jerrod". After posing nude for an Absolut ad, his career takes off. When Samantha is diagnosed with breast cancer, Smith sticks by her side, shaving his signature long hair as a sign of solidarity. At the end of the series, Samantha and Smith are still together.
Quotes
The following are quotes from the TV special, Sex And The City: A Farewell, that aired introducing the final episode:
Michael Patrick King, Executive Producer: "People thought, oh it's just about sex or it's just about fashion. And then slowly over the years people start to see it's really about love ... and relationships ... and sex ... and basically the battlefield of trying to be in love – whether it be with another person or with yourself."
Sarah Jessica Parker: "What the show has to have, and has had to have in order to survive six years, is a soul."
Kim Cattrall: "The show is a valentine to being single."
David Eigenberg: "They were honest about sex, they were honest about the humor of sex."
Kim Cattrall: "Being single used to mean that nobody wanted you, now it means you're pretty sexy and you're taking your time deciding how you want your life to be ... and who you want to spend it with."
Broadcasters
In the United Kingdom, Channel 4 and its digital sister channel E4 broadcast episodes of Sex and the City, while older episodes are rerun on the Paramount Comedy Channel. In Canada, the show airs on Bravo! Canada and Citytv Toronto, and in Germany it is shown on Pro7. In the Netherlands, the show is aired by Net 5, and in Sweden it is aired by TV3 and ZTV. In Italy the show airs on La7. In Australia it was broadcast on the Nine Network. Sex and the City was banned in Singapore until July 2004, when the government allowed the television series to be aired on cable after being censored.
In the USA, Sex and the City is run in syndication on TBS Superstation. To avoid bleeped profanities and blurred nudity, alternate versions of those scenes were filmed during the initial production of each episode to be aired in stricter environments than premium cable.
There have been several parodies of the show. The most famous two are Opposite Sex and the City (instead of women the main characters are men) and MTV's Sex and the Matrix.
Criticism
Some commentators have criticized the television show as promoting immorality by encouraging a hedonistic lifestyle and treating women as sexual objects. Additionally, they argued that it is at times mere pornography with a superficial plot. The characters are also wealthy and unabashedly elitist, which raises further questions about the morality of the show.
Others claim in response that Sex and the City is an attempt to realistically – yet artistically – portray sexual behavior in the urban United States.
Sex and the City was heavily advertised – even on highways – which offended some Americans.
When Sex and the City was run in syndication on TBS, some viewers organized boycotts of the station, arguing that this would put the program within access of young children.
External links
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