Sex and the City

People who worked on the show liked to say New York was the fifth character, and for once the cliche did some work. The Manhattan of the series was a specific, glossy version — the meatpacking district before it was a mall, the West Village brownstone, the rooftop parties, the restaurants you had to know about. The city wasn't a backdrop so much as a proof of the premise: a place where a woman could build a whole life out of friends, work, and appetite, and not feel she was missing the real one somewhere in the suburbs.

That vision came with a famous piece of fiction. Carrie was a weekly newspaper columnist who lived alone in a rent-controlled-feeling Upper East Side apartment and owned a closet of Manolo Blahniks that the actual salary would never have covered. The show knew this and mostly winked at it; in one episode Carrie calculates she has spent something like forty thousand dollars on shoes and has no savings and nowhere to live. The fantasy of consumption was part of the appeal and part of what would later date badly — the freedom looked a lot like money.

The freedom the show sold had a very particular passport. Its New York was almost entirely white, and startlingly so for a series set in one of the most mixed cities on earth. Characters of color appeared mostly as boyfriends, service staff, or one-episode lessons — Samantha's brief relationship with a Black record executive in season three leaned on tired scripts about race and family, and the show seemed unsure what to do with anyone outside its core four's social world. The city was a fantasy that quietly excluded most of the people who actually lived in it.

Money worked the same way. The women's problems were real to them but bounded by a floor of comfort the show never questioned: no one worried about rent in a way that threatened the apartment, about health insurance, about a job that wasn't glamorous. Miranda, the corporate lawyer, came closest to a life with friction, and her working-motherhood was one of the show's more honest threads. But the default was aspirational, and aspiration has a way of narrowing who gets to be the subject.

What the show really did was establish that single female desire could carry a series on its own — not as a phase before marriage, not as a cautionary tale, but as the subject. That sounds modest until you notice how much television since has been built on the permission it granted. Girls, Insecure, Fleabag, Broad City, Sex Education, and a decade of streaming comedies all assume, as a starting condition, that a woman's messy wanting is enough to hang a story on. The premise stopped being a dare and became furniture. Much of that furniture was arranged by carpenters reacting to what this show got wrong.

Because the same series that opened the door also drew a very tight frame around who got to walk through it. The generation of shows that followed reads partly as a rolling correction: Insecure putting Black women's friendships and sex lives at the center; Girls trading the glamour for broke, unflattering twenty-somethings; Fleabag turning the confessional voiceover, that direct address the earlier show pioneered, into something self-lacerating rather than reassuring. Each borrowed the template and argued with it. The influence is legible precisely in the pushback.

Twenty-six years after four women first ordered brunch and started talking, the strange thing is how alive the argument stays. The column that became a cast turned single womanhood into something a series could be about rather than something a series had to resolve, and that shift did not undo itself when the shoes went out of style. The four at the table are still the durable relationship the whole thing was built to notice, and that part reads truer now than the romances ever did.