IN CARRIE’S FOOTSTEPS
Sex and the City’s legacy, 20 years on
A tutu-clad Carrie Bradshaw stumbled into our lives 20 years ago this month, and we’ve never really been the same. Sex and the City ushered in a new era of television shows that took a frank approach to sex and relationships, while also deftly capturing the more elusive love of a place — namely, New York City.
Two decades later, show creators are still finding ways to evoke SATC. So we got to thinking about how — and whether — they pulled it off.
GIRLFRIENDS (2000)
For all of its merits, Sex and the City was woefully lacking when it came to diversity (don’t even get us started on the episode that featured Samantha dating a black man). Enter Girlfriends, which followed four black women navigating friendship, relationships and successful careers in their 30s. The beloved UPN turned CW comedy was often referred to as the black Sex and the City, but it was so much more than that.
As creator Mara Brock Akil told Yahoo Entertainment, Girlfriends tapped into themes of SATC, while zeroing in on the often-overlooked experience of black women.
ENTOURAGE (2004)
The Adrian Grenier-led dramedy, which premiered in 2004, was a lot like SATC in several ways — it followed a group of four friends living often ( but not always) glamorous lives. But we didn’t really need a bro version of Sex and the City, and Entourage stands on its own merits — for better and for worse.
GREY’S ANATOMY (2005)
Shonda Rhimes’s longrunning medical drama takes place in Seattle, not New York City. But it premiered just over a year after SATC went off the air, and not even Rhimes was immune to casting parallels to her own show’s strong female friendships and steamy sex scenes. Rhimes said in a seminar for Masterclass that she had informally and (grudgingly) pitched the show as Sex in the Surgery.
Fourteen seasons (not to mention, multiple spinoffs) later, we think of Meredith Grey as her own kind of heroine.
GOSSIP GIRL (2007)
Some (ahem, Parents Television Council) might argue that there was a little too much sex in CW’s soapy drama about a group of rich and beautiful high school students running wild through Manhattan’s Upper East Side. Nevertheless, Gossip Girl channelled the romance and fashion of its predecessor, while also feeling like it couldn’t have taken place elsewhere.
Incidentally, the show paid homage to SATC in its final episode, which featured Florence and the Machine’s cover of Candi Stanton’s You’ve Got the Love. Eight years earlier, SATC had featured Stanton’s song in the final scenes of its last episode.
GIRLS (2012)
When Lena Dunham’s dramedy about a group of young New York women premiered in 2012, the comparisons were swift and plentiful.
“It was practically a mantra on set that Girls is not the new Sex and the City,” Emily Nussbaum noted in New York magazine. Mantras notwithstanding, Nussbaum asserted that Girls was “a post-Sex and the City show, albeit one with an esthetic that’s raw and bruised, not aspirational.”
Dunham, meanwhile, said her show’s focus on 20-somethings helped fill the gap between Carrie Bradshaw et al. and Gossip Girl’s overprivileged teenagers.
THE CARRIE DIARIES (2013)
As Hannah Horvath settled in at HBO, CW tried to further the SATC/Gossip Girl connections with The Carrie Diaries, a shortlived SATC prequel that counted alums of both shows among its executive producers.
The show, which focused on a high school-era Carrie Bradshaw, earned praise for spot-on casting (namely, AnnaSophia Robb as Carrie and Lindsey Gort as Samantha). But The Carrie Diaries couldn’t quite capture the magic of HBO’s version, and was cancelled after two seasons.
GIRLFRIENDS’ GUIDE TO DIVORCE (2014)
Another drama, another group of close girlfriends. Like SATC, this Bravo series follows an introspective writer (Lisa Edelstein) with relationship struggles. If Carrie Bradshaw were an L.A.based divorcee, it might look something like this. Fun fact: Edelstein could have starred as Carrie Bradshaw.
YOUNGER (2015)
Sex and the City creator Darren Star managed to strike gold again with this surprisingly delightful gem about a 40-year-old woman (Sutton Foster) posing as a 26-year-old in Manhattan’s cutthroat publishing world. Like Star’s original hit, Younger doesn’t shy away from talking about sex, and Patricia Field, the designer behind the memorable attire of SATC’s leading ladies, helps create the show’s bold, character-driven fashion.
As a bonus, Younger is quirkier and, for what it’s worth, has more Aidans than Mr. Bigs.
INSECURE (2016)
If Insecure is like Sex and the City, it’s more so in its subtle appreciation of a city. In this case, it’s often overlooked areas of Los Angeles that are in the show’s DNA.
Girlfriends, not Sex and the City, is the true forebear of Issa Rae’s HBO comedy, which counts Girlfriends alum Prentice Penny as its showrunner.
Both Girlfriends and Insecure are revolutionary in their authentic and sexy approach to telling stories about black women and their friendships.
Insecure takes it a step further with its muted portrayal of black millennial life — from intimate relationships to racial microaggressions in the workplace.
DIVORCE (2016)
When Sarah Jessica Parker returned to HBO in 2016 — to star in this dreary dramedy about a newly separated middle-aged couple — the comparisons were inevitable. The verdict? Decidedly not the new Sex and the City.