Manhattan Tee
Manhattan Tee
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Are you a Carrie, Charlotte, Samantha, or Miranda? Sex and the City was such a popular television show that that question makes perfect sense to many women. Long before Carrie's first cosmo, Sex and the City got its start in 1994 as a New York Observer column penned by then-35-year-old journalist Candace Bushnell. When her writings became a book in 1996, producer Darren Star (Beverly Hills, 90210; Melrose Place) bought the rights— reportedly for a mere $50,000 — and took the idea to HBO. The show debuted June 6, 1998, to a modest 3.7 million viewers. But that audience — like the characters' wardrobes and list of exes — grew fast.
New York was, of course, the real fifth character of the series, and the poetry and cynicism of Manhattan were essential to making the series what it became. All the locations were chosen very carefully, often inspired by the real-life events of crew members. The show arrived at a pivotal moment in American culture — the post-feminist, Clinton-era boom years when women's sexual and economic independence had become a mainstream conversation rather than a radical one. Creator Darren Star and the show's writers, many of them women, transformed the half-hour comedy format into something new: a frank, sometimes graphic exploration of female desire told entirely from women's perspectives. For the first time on prestige television, four women talked about sex the way men always had on screen: casually, hungrily, and without shame.
The show's four protagonists Carrie, Miranda, Charlotte, and Samantha were deliberately constructed as archetypes, but archetypes that felt genuinely novel on television. They were educated, professionally ambitious, financially self-sufficient, and uninterested in organizing their lives around a man's needs. The series made the radical-for-TV argument that female friendship was itself a primary love story, the relationship that endured while romances came and went. This was a cultural shift that resonated deeply: women saw their own friendships mirrored back to them with a seriousness and warmth that popular culture had rarely afforded.
Sex and the City also functioned as a kind of love letter to New York City, and more specifically to a certain aspirational vision of Manhattan femininity. Carrie's improbable walk-in closet and Manolo Blahnik habit became cultural shorthand for a whole fantasy of urban womanhood that was sophisticated, stylish, and pleasurably excessive. Costume designer Patricia Field turned the show into a fashion phenomenon, making it one of the first television series to directly drive luxury retail trends. The show's relationship with consumer culture was complicated, simultaneously critiquing and glorifying the idea that the right shoes or the right apartment could make a woman whole.
The series drew genuine criticism alongside its acclaim, and those critiques have only sharpened over time. The New York it depicted was strikingly, almost aggressively white, erasing the city's actual diversity in favor of a narrow slice of upper-middle-class Manhattan life. Its treatment of gay men largely as witty accessories to the straight women's lives drew charges of reducing a community to a supporting role. Later seasons increasingly seemed to abandon Miranda and Samantha's sharper edges in favor of wedding plots and baby plots, suggesting that even this supposedly liberated show felt the gravitational pull of conventional female narrative arcs.
Yet Sex and the City's cultural legacy proved genuinely durable, reshaping what was possible for television about and by women. It paved the way for the golden age of female-centered prestige television from Girls to Fleabag to Insecure by proving that a show focused on women's interior lives, desires, and disappointments could be both an artistic and commercial triumph. Sex and the City gave a generation of women a vocabulary and a mythology for talking about their own lives, and that, whatever its flaws, is no small thing.
