Sometimes the four women in Sex and the City rushed through it. Sometimes, in those all-gal pow wows over those endless brunches, they whined about it. Sometimes they reported that it was delightful. Sometimes they said it was, well, a letdown. The city, not the sex.
It was the city that was the constant companion on Sex and the City, the HBO series that is ending after six seasons of filming in Greenwich Village, on the Upper West Side, in SoHo, on Fifth Avenue.
The four main characters ran through men -- Samantha more than the others. Sometimes they swore off men -- Samantha less than the others. But they never swore off the city. One episode was actually titled "I Heart NY," and the cityscape was almost a character in Sex and the City.
"People have said it was the fifth character," said Michael Patrick King, one of the show's executive producers. "We've been East Side, West Side, all around the town, literally. We filmed so much in the city that I can walk down a street and say, in one block, `This is the place where Steve married Miranda,' or, `This is where Samantha met Mr. Cocky."'
Sex and the City became a kind of weekly Valentine to the city, from the bus that splashed Sarah Jessica Parker during the opening sequence to the close-ups in streets, stores, restaurants and parks. Remember that carriage ride with Mr. Big in Central Park, that brunch in Bryant Park? Remember the time Samantha showed up after finding, on the sidewalk, a pamphlet describing 1,001 sex positions? The things those women picked up on the sidewalks in the city of Sex and the City.
"If you make it into the show, you're somehow a staple of New York City life," said Julie Benavides, the general manager of Cafeteria, a diner on Seventh Avenue at 17th Street that made it into the show last summer. "Everybody said they saw us."
Sex and the City was anything but monogamous about restaurants, and as Benavides discovered, if a restaurant was good enough for Carrie Bradshaw, it was good enough for the show's fans. Consider what Sex and the City meant to Jefferson, the restaurant on West 10th Street where Samantha announced she had breast cancer during Miranda's wedding reception (not to make the plot twists of Sex and the City sound like those of a soap opera or anything).
"It put us on the map," said Simpson Wong, the chef and owner. "We're quote-unquote this fabulous place to be now."
Michel Boyer, the manager of Brasserie 8 1/2, at 9 West 57th Street, remembers the arrival of the Sex and the City crew 11 months ago. "The decor was what they were looking for," he said, sitting in one of the restaurant's off-white armchairs. Cosmopolitan-craving Sex and the City fans soon followed.
And of course there were the Manolo Blahnik shoes.
"It was amazing how the five seconds on the show took a whole day with 200 workers," said the manager, Abby Askari-Bennet of the Manolo Blahnik store, at 31 West 54th Street. "Manolo Blahnik became a household name."
And not just in the city. Sex and the City was, in the words of Robert Thompson, a professor of television and popular culture at Syracuse University, "the best New York cultural delivery system to come along in a long time."
"This truly is a show that is about a place and set in a place," he said. "The Mary Tyler Moore Show was set in Minneapolis, but with the exception of a couple of episodes, it was not about Minneapolis. But on Sex and the City, the best relationship in all the seasons of the show has been the relationship between these women and the city, not between these women and their various men friends."
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