[Okay, just to get this out of the way: Carrie ends up with Mr. Big. This was front-page news during the earlier part of 2004, so I hope that wasn't a spoiler.]

I've been a faithful viewer of Sex and the City since I caught a couple of episodes from Season Three. It was a snappy, fun show that seemed to address modern romance in an honest, original way. Maybe I'm giving a TV show too much credit, but I really think that in its best moments, it deserved this compliment. Season Six doesn't maintain the quality of the show's best moments, but it wraps up the storylines of the four main characters in a more or less satisfactory way.

Carrie's Friends

Margaret Cho has a great joke which goes, "... and then there¡¯s the ho." Basically, whenever there's a TV show with three women, there's the smart one, the cute one, and then there's the ho. (Why is that, anyway?)

~ Miranda (The Smart One)

The way Miranda's story was wrapped up was really touching. After having been a consistently cynical, serious, and occasionally cold person - she was the only one who would tell Carrie, "What the fudge do you think you're doing?" while everyone else just cheered on her silly decisions - Miranda finally let her guard down. Miranda's no-nonsense attitude was epic: she banned all baby joy from the delivery room as she gave birth to her son, and wore a brown dress at her wedding. But underneath Robo-Miranda was a big ol' softie. If any moment in this show made me shed a genuine tear, it was for Miranda's touching moment in Season Six.

~ Charlotte (The Cute One)

Charlotte has her share of weepy moments, too. After unsuccessfully trying a round of fertility treatments yet again, her husband suggests that they try adoption. Unlike the other women, Charlotte openly wanted to be married with children and longed for it obsessively. The best part of Charlotte's story is her husband Harry, who was her lawyer when she divorced Trey, the handsome blueblood and whitebread doctor. Harry, on the other hand, is stocky, bald, and Jewish. But he is adorable. The actor who plays him (Evan Handler) is incredibly charming, and has good chemistry with Charlotte. You just like them, they are cute together!

~ Samantha (The Ho)

Samantha's relationship with Smith Jerrod is a bit more silly. Smith was a poor aspiring actor/waiter when Samantha stalked and pounced on him, and converted him into a bona-fide celebrity by the series' end, the kind that goes on TRL and makes teenage girls shriek. She accomplished this by using some voodoo called "PR," which is apparently how she makes her fabulous living - by doing fabulous PR and being her fabulous PR self. Hurray for PR!

I liked Samantha's character throughout the series - she basically had lots of casual sex, and didn't feel any compunction about enjoying herself. (That's why she's the ho!) This made her, in many ways, a completely original character on TV - a woman who didn't want romance, which she hilariously referred to as, "exhausting emotional chow-chow." So I felt a bit of disappointment when she got all goofy over Richard in Season Four, and resorted to high-school-girl tricks to get him to say "I love you." What happened to the ball-busting man-eater we know and love? It was like Samantha's carefree attitude about sex was all just a cover for her real, shmoopy self - and that's sad! So it was awesome when she finally dispatched Richard in Season Five, telling him, "I love you honey, but I love me more." You go, ho!

Anyway, Samantha ends up with Smith, who is basically like Samantha's little pet. (She even named him, for goodness' sake.) But Smith is hot, and he seems to really love her. And in the interest of seeing all the women paired up by the end, he will do.

Oh, and Carrie gets paired up, too.

Carrie, Carrie, Carrie

Although it was Big all along, this still leaves me with a nagging feeling because it sends a really bad message.

One of the latest zeitgeist messages to emerge from the show is, "He's just not that into you," a line uttered in Season Five by Carrie's then-boyfriend Berger to Miranda. You know how women sometimes over-analyze a guy's actions and try to read some meaning into every little thing? Well, that's what Miranda was doing after a date. With these words, Berger bluntly cuts off her fruitless speculation - If he doesn't call you, he's just not that into you. A guy who's interested would make the time to call. No, it's not because his mother is sick. Well!

And Miranda replied, "Thank you! I've been waiting my whole life for someone to tell me that! I have been wasting so much time!"

Recently, the writers who originally wrote that line released a book He's Just Not That Into You: The No-Excuses Truth to Understanding Guys. Although the same message has probably been echoed in every other dating book out there, I guess this is one more way to say it. I think it's probably a good message, because I do think that women can sometimes be like Miranda - analyze, analyze, then analyze some more while waiting by the phone.

The show itself has done its share to shatter this fantasy during its most incisive moments ... in fact, from its very first moments. The pilot episode began with a story of a young woman who was charmed and deluded by a seemingly ideal man, who led her to believe he was serious. But right when she began to give herself over to this relationship, he cruelly dumped her and changed his number, and she never knew what hit her. Cry cry cry. "End of love in New York." And during a later episode, one "hopeful" tale about a married man who eventually leaves his wife for his lover is derided as an urban myth. So the lesson here, besides the usual "Men suck!" and "Women are dumb!" is that fairy tales don't happen just because you wait around for some man to sweep you off your feet - women have to make themselves fulfilled and happy. This is a good message, although it does make the modern woman in general sound somewhat pathetic, while the men sound like a bunch of bastards. (The show coined the term, "Toxic Bachelor." Now if only the show stuck with it.

So the show, during its entire six-year run, has actively put the kibosh on the notion that men always mean their sweet-talk. Women should be more wise and wary, and not settle for a man who isn't worthwhile - this was the consistent message of the entire show. For perhaps that very reason, women in particular have embraced this show as a kind of relationship how-to, despite the fact that none of the characters or plot really reflected anyone's reality. (A funny bit from The Simpsons features Patty and Selma saying, "This is just like our lives!" after viewing an episode of Sex.) The show's sometimes atrocious fashions were replicated all across the country immediately after a new episode aired: the show sometimes felt like a long ad for Jimmy Choo and Manolo Blahnik shoes. And when Carrie derided hair-scrunchies as tacky, the sale of scrunchies plummeted drastically. (Okay, I don't know if that really happened. But you know it probably did.) So whenever Carrie opens her drawer full of carefully arranged Nars cosmetics or flashes her Swarovski encrusted cell phone, women start buying. They just do.

Carrie Bradshaw Knows Bad Sex

The iconic bus-billboard advertisement for Carrie's column features the slogan "Carrie Bradshaw Knows Good Sex." It's sort of clever, but far from true - Carrie's relationships were all pretty terrible. She sabotages her relationship with nice-guy Aidan twice. Okay, maybe Aidan wasn't the right guy for her, and that happens. But after it ended the first time, she chased after him, and begged him for another chance, at which point, well ... there can be no more excuses. And then there was Berger, with whom she had the most painfully banal banter in the world, and he was an insecure prick to boot. Bye! And the rest is just a series of who not to do: the immature young guy, the immature older guy who lived with his parents, the European playboy, the creepy politician with sex fetish, the bi-sexual guy, etc. She sure knows how to pick 'em. Yikes.

But she had good sex once. With Big. And she loved him. When she breaks up with her latest paramour, The Russian Guy (Mikhail Baryshnikov), she gives a speech about how she's a "woman looking for passionate love." Okay, so we're back to the not settling for second-best.

So I do generally like the spirit of the message: don't settle for less than the best or get married just because society expects you to, and wait for the right man. But the problem is that the "right man" was the wrong man for the past five years: Big took Carrie for granted repeatedly, left her twice to go live in another country or state without discussing it with her, married another woman, and then treated her like a hooker as that marriage fell apart. Even though he relied on her while feeling lonely and vulnerable before a medical procedure, once he got better, it was back to "See ya around, kid." At every step of the way, the man treated her like a fuck-toy. So the lesson of this tale is that even when a man treats you like garbage, he might really love you somewhere deep inside, so stick around and be available! And don't forget to abuse and ruin any other nice men you date in the meantime! Oh, that's a very bad message. What happened to "He's just not that into you"? When a man marries another woman ... he's just not that into you! I'm no relationship expert, but I'm pretty sure about that one.

And it's hard to care about Carrie's imaginary problems, most of which is her own fault, when her friends all have real ones: Charlotte's infertility problems, Miranda taking care of an elderly parent, and Samantha's cancer. That's right, cancer. And Samantha deals with it like the trouper that she is, while Carrie's all, "Gee, sorry about your cancer. Now let's talk about my new boyfriend!" And I'm totally not kidding about that one: Samantha's sitting in a hospital gown after having her breast sliced open, and Carrie won't stop blabbering about her love life. It is truly unbelievable that Carrie doesn't get slapped at some point. Oh wait, she does. But it's totally a fake-out. Boo!

All this wouldn't bother me so much if women realized that this was just fiction, and not a source of relationship advice. And I certainly shouldn't expect a TV show to impart true wisdom and educate the masses. But this show is about an advice columnist and the show supposedly teleports said advice to the audience. And hey, it was a veritable cultural phenomenon, and one has to wonder what this message means for the throngs of women who bought nameplate necklaces (and then wore them as an earring!) as they tossed their scrunchies. After they buy the shoes, they "buy" the advice! (Corny, huh? That was so Carrie Bradshaw of me, right there.)

For what it's worth, Carrie's Big-induced masochism is balanced out by her three girlfriends. Miranda eventually pairs up with Steve, the man she previously dumped at least twice because he was a poor slob, while she was rich and anal. Samantha ends up with Smith, who she also treated like crap (she had sex with an ex, and he forgave her immediately). So the tables are turned: if the man isn't treating the woman like a plaything, it's the women who are whipping the men. If you repeatedly shit on a man, and he still sticks around, he's a keeper, ladies! And all this, I have to admit, adds up to a pretty damn entertaining TV show. The only woman who didn't have this crapper v. crapped-on dynamic in her relationships was Charlotte, and that was why she was the most boring one.

That's right, I said "damn entertaining TV show." Drama fomented by emotionally retarded behavior is fun! Perhaps the true genius of this show is that like for Patty and Selma, it successfully tricks women into believing that the adventures of Carrie and Co. are a reflection of our own lives, when in fact, they're not. At all.

Conclusion

Despite all my bitching, I really like this show. I do recommend it. The show has some really sharp, well-observed moments. The dialogue does get pretty stale by Season Six - when Carrie queried, "Why are women 'should-ing' all over themselves?" I groaned out loud - but the best part is seeing the characters you enjoyed and sending them off into the sunset. I think Miranda had the best ending: her character actually grew, and she embraced a new phase of her life. Charlotte had a nice sugary ending, too, in her very Charlotte-y way. And Samantha finds love without compromising herself, so ... not bad. And as much as I don't like the implications of Big the Toxic-est Bachelor of Them All suddenly transforming into Big the Emotionally Mature Dreamboat, I have to admit that Carrie and Big's great chemistry together cannot be denied. And that's what the viewers wanted. So there you have it. It's been fun.


Recommended:
Yes

Viewing Format: DVD
Video Occasion: Good for Groups
Suitability For Children: Not suitable for Children of any age