Sarah Jessica Parker has become forever linked with the iconic portrayal of Carrie Bradshaw in Sex and the City. Even those who never really watched the series and its spinoffs haven’t been able to escape its cultural impact. The original show ran for six seasons before spinning off into two movies and a reboot TV series.
Through all of those adventures, fans grew to love the characters of Carrie, Samantha, Charlotte, and Miranda. It’s funny to think that none of it might have come to be if it wasn’t for Candace Bushnell’s original newspaper column, a work that cataloged her own adventures with sex and love in New York City.
Candace Bushnell wrote ‘Sex and the City’ as a newspaper column
Candace Bushnell began penning her now-famous column back in 1994 in The New York Observer, according to Mic. Much like her onscreen fictionalized counterpart, Bushnell spent her column days trying some experiences for the sake of firsthand journalism and then brought the observations back to her readers.
From the very beginning, she was dishing out key one-liners that became a signature of the show’s snappy ethos. In her very first column, Bushnell and her date for the night made their way to a “couples-only sex club” expecting an “edgy and titillating” experience. Instead, they were met with disappointment and “pale, pudgy sex zombies.” Bushnell ultimately concluded, “I had learned that when it comes to sex, there’s no place like home.”
These and other meaningful insights on the ins and outs of dating kept readers engaged from 1994 to 1996 and then became a collection that inspired the series.
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Sarah Jessica Parker was a fan of the column
Speaking with the Awards Chatter podcast, Sarah Jessica Parker revealed that she was a fan of the original column that would eventually change her life. Parker says, “I remember the column.” And then the book that collected the articles was sent to her by a publisher for “some unknown reason.”
“I actually read it sometimes,” Parker recalls. She sometimes grabbed the Observer — which stood out because it was pink — before hopping on the subway. All that meant that Parker was already “familiar” with the concept of the column and its stories when she was approached to star in the series. At that point, though, Parker couldn’t understand how the disconnected stories would translate to the screen or how she fit into the vision.
Eventually, though, she gave it a chance after both her brother and her long-time partner Matthew Broderick looked at the script and told her she had to do it.
‘Sex and the City’ would go far beyond the column’s original stories
By the time that Sex and the City became a series on HBO, Bushnell’s work had undergone significant transformation. It’s important to remember that the source material doesn’t feature a series of friends as an anchor point, and the show outlived the column’s original run by several years.
As Rachel Tashjian writes for Garage, the collection of columns “was dark and cynical and weird. Samantha Jones is a casual acquaintance and a big shot film producer, Miranda is a coke-loving cable executive, and Charlotte…doesn’t seem to make an appearance. Everyone is mean, and selfish, and complicated, and many of them are not rich, and most of them have wardrobes that go unmentioned.”
Tashjian remembers being drawn to the allure of maturity that Bushnell promised in her original work: “What’s most compelling about Bushnell’s work is the ennui that hangs over Carrie’s life.” While certainly some of that ennui made its way to particular episodes of the TV shows and movies that followed, that version is far more focused on a tale with a beginning, middle, and end — one that fans just can’t seem to get enough of!
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