Let’s Carrie you back in time
IT’S SEX AND THE CITY WEEK
Spotlight on hit show.. 20 years after it first aired
IT WAS 1998 when four feisty dames in their thirties began navigating New York’s hazardous dating scene. They earned their own money, dissected their sex lives over brunch, then went shoe shopping.
At that time, most of the women on TV were cops, lawyers, nurses, ditzy twentysomethings, mothers or wives. These four were grown-ups in Manhattan having a high old time.
Sex And The City, made for US cable channel HBO and shown here on Channel 4, was a game changer.
Its female characters knew that, while men could be delightful, it was perfectly possible to live a fabulous life without one. All that was required was a beautifully curated wardrobe, hot and cold running cocktails and three great friends.
It was so dazzlingly funny and well dressed that no one minded when the microeconomics of how this might be achieved from writing the occasional column or working in an art gallery were never fully explained.
SATC was escapist entertainment, not a documentary.
Having made Beverly Hills 90210 and Melrose Place, writer and producer Darren Star yearned for a show “closer to the lives of people he knew”.
He thought of his friend Candace Bushnell, who documented her torrid love life in a column in the New York Observer. Instead of a portrait, her picture byline was a Manolo Blahnik shoe.
Star’s vision was for a 30-minute comedy serial, but one without ad breaks and a laughter track.
So instead of taking the show to the major networks, he made it for what was then a minority movie channel.
The early series were based on Bushnell’s columns, with every episode asking a question that Carrie would type onto her clunky laptop while wearing an unlikely outfit and looking winsome.
Sarah Jessica Parker was Star’s first choice to play Carrie. He felt she could play a sparky, independent, sexually active woman who the audience would warm to.
Having worked with Kristin Davis on Melrose Place, Star knew she would work as uptown princess Charlotte.
Kim Cattrall took some persuasion to play the older, sexually incontinent PR lady Samantha.
Once Star saw Cynthia Nixon with her blonde hair coloured red, he was convinced she was careerfocused S lawyer Miranda. ex And The City did not spring, fully formed and dressed in adorably mismatched vintage finery onto our screens. In the first series, Carrie worked some sweet looks – the tutu, the naked dress, her gold name necklace – but also wore some dreary items. The other three had some downright dowdy wardrobe.
The first two series also had distracting interjections from randoms talking about their own relationships. When they were dropped, and stylist Patricia Field began dressing all four characters, the show really hit its stride.
It went from must-watch to cultural phenomenon. Finally there was a television programme about women’s lives that put sex and shoes, rather than getting married, having babies or having a career, at its centre.
Female viewers enjoyed the fantasy of living in one of the world’s most exciting cities and dating a man with a car and driver.
Every woman in the country had an opinion, a favourite character and a theory about which one she resembled the most.
The show soon leaked off the screen and into real life. Cosmopolitans, a pink nasty containing vodka, triple sec, cranberry juice and lime, were the things to drink. Calling them “cosmos” was almost obligatory.
Picking an eye-popping outfit – cupcakes with the girls, then spending the afternoon combing second-hand stores for the perfect $15 dress to wear with a $400 pair of satin stilettos – became the perfect Saturday.
Vibrators – which featured in several episodes, including one in which Samantha uses hers to lull a baby to sleep – were officially an acceptable topic of conversation.
Even men began to name drop Manolo Blahnik.
It was 30 minutes a week in which disbelief could be suspended.
The most obvious plot hole was Carrie’s lush brownstone apartment. According to the script, her rent was $700 a month. In reality it would have cost about $2800 – an impossible dream for an underemployed freelance writer who was too busy pining over toxic bachelors to hustle for work.
But in a world where women eat desserts and drink sweet cocktails without considering the calories, then keep their bra on while having hot sex, everything was possible.
In series five, when Parker was pregnant, no one batted an eyelid when Carrie ditched her dinky shoulder bags in favour of enormous bump-hiding totes and started carrying vase-sized takeaway coffees in front of her stomach. t wasn’t all froth. Samantha went in for plastic surgery and came out with a diagnosis of breast cancer. Charlotte had an impotent husband and fertility issues.
Miranda’s on-off boyfriend Steve was diagnosed with testicular cancer and had one removed. This led indirectly to her getting pregnant and struggling as a single parent with a demanding job and a judgmental nanny.
The plot lines were fearless. Samantha dated an extremely short guy, invited the gay couple upstairs down for a threesome and briefly became a lesbian.
Charlotte dragged her friends to a tantric sex workshop and an art show where all the paintings were of vaginas. (Not in the same episode.)
In the last series, when Carrie moved to Paris with a Russian artist who buys her Oscar de la Renta, SATC was running out of steam. It had become a romcom rather than a comedy that made fun of romance.
But as a joyous celebration of friendship, fashion and being fabulous, it has yet to be bettered.