First things first. Sex and the City (SATC) is not about sex, though this would be an easy assumption to make about America's most successful cable TV show, given that it focuses on the lives of four hip, sassy, exuberantly styled thirtysomething females who discuss anal sex and vibrator preferences with the same degree of experiential insight as shopping for shoes.
But still I insist that the show is not primarily about sex. Each episode is a pithy tiptoe through the tulip-strewn minefield of modern love, relationships, friendship and growing-up, a comedy of manners set against the backdrop of New York at its most urbane and seductive.
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Its many critics claim it's trite, cartoony and irritatingly fluffy and girly, but they are probably either sneery blokes or women who don't like the idea that postfeminism might encompass a struggle to reconcile the need for emotional and spiritual fulfilment with the desire for expensive accessories.
Sex and the City started life in 1994 as a tongue-in-cheek column about modern sexual mores written by Candace Bushnell in the New York Observer. Warner Books put the columns between hard covers in 1996, and, two years later, Darren Star, the creator of Beverly Hills 90210 for Fox TV, mined them for television gold.
Given its provocative remit, not to mention title, SATC was never going to make it on to a mainstream US network. It was developed specifically for HBO, the aggressively innovative cable channel which also gave us The Sopranos. It has since won three Emmy awards, including one for Outstanding Comedy Series in 2001 and attracts upwards of seven million US viewers per episode. That might not sound like a lot until you know that this is out of a total 30 million HBO subscribers.
The first series, starring Sarah Jessica Parker, Kim Cattrall, Cynthia Nixon and Kristin Davis as Carrie, Samantha, Miranda and Charlotte, aired in the States in 1998 but was not immediately the worldwide hit it became. There is an old, though unsubstantiated, rumor that HBO was considering cancelling it after the first series, and even Parker, who has had a producer credit since day one, initially wondered "if people will find it saucy and smart, or if they're going to say, `This is completely inappropriate.' "
The critics were divided: Some thought SATC racy, others considered it vulgar. When it first aired on British TV in 1999 I described it as "A brilliant comedic despatch from the frontline of modern singledom. If Friends is an afternoon spent rollerblading in Central Park, then SATC is a bungee jump from the World Trade Centre."
Given a second chance, the show hit its stride after dumping some of its more contrived dramatic devices, such as Carrie (the Bushnell character and lynchpin of the show) addressing the camera directly.
Instead, she was given a weekly scene in which she indulges in an interior monologue while smoking herself toxic in front of her laptop.
Aside from the sex, one of SATC's biggest taboo-busters has been its commitment to nicotine consumption, no mean accomplishment given that it is marginally easier to make it from the chorus to the spotlight on Broadway than to spark up a cigarette outside a New York theater.
By the second season, three of the four principal players had been been fleshed out, while Samantha, the rapacious sexual predator who avoids relationships in favour of serial sexual encounters (just like a guy), has consistently remained a two-dimensional character.
As a drag queen tragically trapped in the body of a woman, Cattrall, the least versatile actor of the four, plays PR executive Samantha as a shrill one-note caricature. But rumors of a very dark and potentially interestingly plot line in the new series should see Cattrall stretched to her limit. Fingers -- and legs -- crossed.
That leaves Carrie (glittering career but a long-running doomed affair with "Big,"played by Chris Noth), Miranda (successful power-suited corporate lawyer turned single mother and also the most British character: dry, self-deprecating, sardonic-yet-sweet) and Charlotte (Episcopalian Park Avenue princess who dreams of a WASP Mr Right even as she dates her Jewish divorce lawyer).
All three have grown up at the same time as they've failed to ease up on their cosmopolitan cocktail-consuming, Manolo Blahnik shoes-buying, Fendi "Baguette" bag-toting, dating, dining, lunching, dancing, larger-than-New-York-itself lifestyles.
There are plenty of men in SATC but not since The Mary Tyler Moore Show and, more recently, The Golden Girls has a hit TV show ensured its male characters are the supporting act.
"I'm single, and a lot of the other writers are, too," Cindy Chupack, an executive producer and writer for the show, has observed.
"What we say about love and relationships is hitting a universal chord. Sometimes, it's lonely and hard and disappointing. Sometimes, it's romantic and fun and hopeful. We've done nothing but be honest about the dark and the light of it."
Nicola Shindler is the 34-year-old founder of Red, one of the UK's top independent TV production companies. She says, "I'm such a cliche, but Sex and the City is my favorite TV series ever. And even though it's so uninhibited about sex, it's not just about sex. The format is simple but there's nothing trivial about it; from the very beginning, it's been about women's search for love, and it annoys me when people can't see that."
Shindler says the show could never be made here: "Part of that is down to the magic of New York, which doesn't translate, and part to money. They have a phenomenal per-episode budget, and it shows. I'm a sucker for the glamor, the shoes and the clothes."
Proving it's not only a girl-thing, Julian Linley, deputy editor of Heat, the gossipy, celebrity-led magazine, admits, "I bloody love Sex and the City and it's as important to Heat as, say, Big Brother or Pop Idol. It sums up our cocky, irreverent spirit. It shifts magazines. The characters' ages don't reflect the demographic of our readers, but they are completely aspirational. Our style pages breathe Sex and the City."
There can be up to 50 outfit changes for the girls per show, and the big challenge for celebrated costumier Patricia Field in the last series was dressing a heavily pregnant Sarah Jessica Parker as a very unpregnant Carrie.
Field says of the SATC women: "They're a little more put-together, a little more self-conscious (than real New York women).
It's hyper-reality."
The tone of the fifth series was considerably darker than its predecessors. The Twin Towers, which had a sparkling cameo in the opening titles, were removed in time for episode 13 of the fourth series, and by the next series the SATC writers, while avoiding direct reference to 11 September, has introduced many not-so-subtle acknowledgments of the mood of the times. In the first episode, Anchors Away, the arrival of the US fleet prompted the girls to do their bit for forces morale: "God bless America," breathed Samantha, ostensibly at the sight of hundreds of men in uniform at a big naval party -- but I think we got the real message loud and clear.
The final series promises to be the raunchiest yet. On-set pictures of Samantha working her way through the Kama Sutra have already oozed on to the pages of Heat and the tabloids, though you'd expect nothing less from the character whose up-close and very personal lesbian encounter grabbed the headlines last year.
It will be interesting to see how the need for ratings-grabbing action will be reconciled with plot developments that reflect the characters' newfound maturity. Will Carrie finally capture -- or even set free -- Big? (Maybe.)
Will Miranda recognize that sweet Steve, the father of her son, might just be the perfect permanent partner? (Highly likely.)
Could Charlotte convert to Judaism to keep hairy-Harry-the-lawyer? (Yes.)
Will Samantha decide that a monogamous relationship might just suit a woman in her forties? (You can't rule it out.)
And might one of the girls ever get around to dating a black guy? (Very likely.)
Of all the characters' endings, Carrie's is the one that's not defined yet. Parker told the Chicago Tribune: "She is approaching her life in much the way the city feels right now; it's recovering and, similarly, Carrie feels optimistic. But it's possible that just when she's gotten comfortable with that, something big will happen." Or should that be "Big"?
With the imminent demise of Friends, next year will see the end of two of the most internationally successful series in US television history, but plans are under way, within NBC at least, for a zeitgeisty potential replacement. Hailed as "network TV's raciest series ever", Coupling is based on a BBC hit that was conceived as a British Friends.
What goes around comes around, as Carrie might say.
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