For all of its obvious flaws, I still love Sex and the City

Seen through a 2023 lens, the problems with Sex and the City are endless: it’s a show about a hyper-local subset of wealthy white women, as imagined by a roomful of wealthy gay men. It is too thin, too rich and too aspirational, the love interests are too problematic (would you rather tie yourself to Aiden, the emotionally manipulative one, or Mr Big, the cold-hearted, emotionally unavailable one?) Carrie can be a cruel, judgmental friend, a bad writer and a spendthrift. Her three best friends — Miranda, Samantha and Charlotte — are crudely drawn archetypes; women written by men who — to quote the (monstrously fully-formed) Shiv Roy, “couldn’t hold a whole woman in [their] heads”.

And yet, on the eve of its 25th anniversary (the first ever episode aired on June 6, 1998), it remains one of the best-loved shows on television, inspiring a stream of podcasts and social media stan accounts — and spawning yet more sequels (season two of And Just Like That will air in June), to sate our appetites for Carrie et al. Even critics of the show often admit that it’s po-faced to criticise it; even I — despite this scathing intro — sort of continue to love it.

I discovered Sex and the City when I was 16, living in the frozen north (Yorkshire), and couldn’t help but fizz-up with excitement at these shiny women, and their shiny lives. The first series dealt with the big problems: what if you were dating a man who usually only dates models? How do you deal with a boyfriend who is keeping you a secret? Is being a lesbian better than dating all these awful men, even though you’re not really a lesbian? It was the epitome of escapist television, and even though none of the episodes would pass the Bechdel test, seeing a group of women having a nice time together, earning lots of money and being respected in their fields was nevertheless heartening. This was the post-Girl Power era, a time of size zero and ritual, tabloid shaming of women and it was slim pickings when it came to any kind of positive feedback about womanhood.

Now that I’m almost 35 it makes for painful viewing; a reminder of how low our expectations were back then. I feel sorry for my teenage self, who idolised these women despite the fact that they were not good for her self-esteem at all. Some argue that its particular brand of escapism is more sorely needed now than it ever was before but more than any other show, it highlights the fragility of modern morality — we know it’s not good for us or for the world but we welcome it into our lives anyway.