Sarah Jessica Parker has been in many roles throughout her decades-spanning acting career, but none has been as memorable and iconic as that of Carrie Bradshaw on Sex and the City. In a time before binge-watching and streaming had entered the entertainment picture, HBO’s edgy show about four best friends living in New York captured a generation. What was it about the original series that was so appealing to so many? And how has it been able to remain captivating enough to sustain multiple movies and a reboot?
Its lead star has a theory.
‘Sex and the City’ has been popular for decades
Sex and the City premiered on HBO in 1998. It focused on Carrie Bradshaw as a columnist writing about love and relationships in NYC and drew from source material by Candace Bushnell’s column of the same name. Carrie (Parker), Samantha (Kim Cattrall), Miranda (Cynthia Nixon), and Charlotte (Kristin Davis) became the imaginary BFFs of viewers across the world. The series originally ran for six seasons and wrapped up in 2004 after thrilling viewers with nearly 100 episodes of sex, love, friendship, and drama.
After the original wrapped up, fans had questions about several long-running plot points and were willing to line up for tickets to the big screen to see them answered. In 2008, Sex and the City (the film version) released and brought all of the main characters and many of the side characters back. It was well-received by fans and offered a satisfying conclusion to several plot points. Two years later, a sequel was released that — unfortunately for fans — did not live up to the hype of the beloved series. With a storyline that felt unnecessary and unclear to many as well as the untying of several of the bows that had wrapped up the previous movie, fans were not impressed, and critics agreed with them. The movie gets only a 15% on Rotten Tomatoes.
That poor reception was not enough to tank the franchise, however. Instead, fans were eager to support yet another reboot, this time back on the small screen. In 2021, And Just Like That . . . saw Carrie, Miranda, and Charlotte return older and (sometimes) wiser with more life lessons to give.
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Sarah Jessica Parker knows what made ‘Sex and the City’ so successful
Speaking on the podcast Awards Chatter, Parker reflected on her role as Carrie and the story’s impact on so many people. The host mentions historical context for the series’ original premiere, including that it released in the midst of the Bill Clinton-Monica Lewinsky scandal and in pre-9/11 New York as a way to understand its reception.
Parker first deflects and says she tries to leave these kind of “legacy” questions to those who have been looking at the story from a larger perspective, but when “forced” she does have an answer. She talks about its “candor and intimacy” and the “brand new” approach of bringing fashion in as part of the story. Ultimately, though, she points to this idea of “someone looking for home. What is home? What is love? How am I going to find my way to that, and what does it mean?”
“It always comes down to story, story, story, story, story,” Parker adds.
‘Sex and the City’ offered a window into real friendships
Not everything in the show was designed to feel deep and real, and some of the characters end up performing stock roles in order to move the plot forward. Even in Bushnell’s original, “Mr. Big” was “more of an archetype—the driven business power broker who jumps from relationship to relationship without ever getting too attached—than a single character,” according to Emily Martin writing for the Audible Blog.
Still, something very real left an impact on viewers, and it was the way the four friends connected with and related to one another. The conversations, the tensions, and the love for one another carried through decades. Parker remembered being stopped on the street by fans who shared the same message: Sex and the City captured something about themselves. “That’s me or that’s how I live or that’s how I want to live or those are the friendships that I want,” Paker recalls so many sharing.
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