“Sex and the City” premiered on HBO on June 6, 1998, with four single women in their late thirties, living in New York City, chasing careers and talking about sex. Created by Darren Star and based on Candace Bushnell’s newspaper column and 1996 book, the series ran 94 episodes across six seasons before signing off on February 22, 2004. It is credited with helping to increase HBO’s popularity, won seven Primetime Emmy Awards, eight Golden Globe Awards and three Screen Actors Guild Awards, and was ranked fifth on Entertainment Weekly’s “New TV Classics” list.
The show also drew criticism alongside its acclaim, and that split is the fairest way to read it.
Trailer, via HBO.
Carrie Bradshaw and the Column
Sarah Jessica Parker plays Carrie Bradshaw, a streetwise newspaper columnist. The job is the show’s engine and its alibi. Carrie narrates, Carrie asks the questions, Carrie types the puns. Parker is the reason the thing works at all. She carries the voiceover, the wardrobe, the will-they-won’t-they, and she makes a character who is frequently selfish look merely confused.
Her friends get jobs with more texture. Miranda is a lawyer, Charlotte an art dealer, Samantha a PR professional. Carrie’s column is the frame the series hangs everything on.
That is a structural imbalance rather than a fatal one. “Sex and the City” is a friendship show wearing a workplace show’s coat.
Samantha Jones, Miranda Hobbes, Charlotte York
Each woman holds a position, and the arguments between them are the actual plot.
- Samantha Jones (Kim Cattrall), the sexually liberal PR professional
- Charlotte York (Kristin Davis), the more conservative art dealer
- Miranda Hobbes (Cynthia Nixon), the cynical lawyer
- Carrie Bradshaw (Sarah Jessica Parker), the streetwise columnist
Cattrall gets the funniest material and plays it without apology. Samantha is written as the show’s id, and Cattrall keeps her from becoming a punchline. Nixon has the hardest job — Miranda is the buzzkill, the one who says the practical thing — and she makes cynicism look like a survival strategy rather than a mood. Davis has the least room to move, because Charlotte’s conservatism is often the joke, and the writing does not always give her a way out of it.
The four of them together carry more weight than any of them alone. The best scenes are not dates or bed scenes but the booth, the brunch, the hallway.
What the Show Got Right About New York City
“Sex and the City” is credited with helping to increase HBO’s popularity. It is a New York City social-scene show before it is anything else. The city is a character with a casting budget, and the series treats the social scene as a maze the four friends are trying to survive.
That survival framing is the show’s real subject. Not sex. Not romance. The cost of staying in the room.
The series received both acclaim and criticism for its characters and themes. The criticism holds up. The show’s view of the world is narrow — affluent, white, New York City-shaped — and it presents that slice as the whole pie. It airs in syndication worldwide and has been cited as one of the best television series of all time, which means a lot of viewers met this version of New York City first and may never have questioned the frame.
The Box
- Premiere: June 6, 1998
- Finale: February 22, 2004
- Seasons: 6
- Episodes: 94
- Network: HBO
- Creator: Darren Star
- Source material: Candace Bushnell’s column and 1996 book
- Primetime Emmy Awards: 7
- Golden Globe Awards: 8
- Screen Actors Guild Awards: 3
- Entertainment Weekly “New TV Classics” rank: 5
- Metacritic: 64/100
- Critical score: 6.4/10
What Came After
The franchise kept going. “Sex and the City” was followed by the feature films “Sex and the City” (2008) and “Sex and the City 2” (2010), and by a prequel series commissioned by the CW, “The Carrie Diaries,” which ran from 2013 to 2014. A sequel series, “And Just Like That…,” premiered on HBO Max on December 9, 2021, without Cattrall.
That last detail is the tell. The show’s most durable asset was never the premise or the city or the column. It was the four-way chemistry, and the moment one leg came out, the whole table wobbled. “And Just Like That…” had to rebuild around an absence. The original never had to.
This is also where the 6.4 lands. The score is not a knock on influence. The show earned its place in the canon and its awards haul. But influence and quality are different ledgers, and “Sex and the City” has real drag: a narrator whose inner life crowds out her friends’, a social world with one skin tone, and a habit of resolving big questions with a voiceover instead of a scene.
What holds it up is the ensemble and the argument. Cattrall, Nixon, Davis and Parker built four distinct positions on how a woman should live, and the show let them fight about it for six seasons. That is rarer than it sounds. Most series give you one point of view and three sidekicks.
The parts that have aged best are the parts that were never about the men. The parts that have aged worst are the parts that were. “Sex and the City” is a landmark that is also a time capsule, and the gap between those two things is exactly the size of its score.
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