Then Carrie begins her famous opening monologue, with reference to Edith Warton’s classic American novel: ‘Welcome to the age of un-innocence’. We see Carrie’s face for the first time, played with an almost bristling edginess by Sarah Jessica Parker, as she types at her desk, smoking, face lit by a neon sign outside. She continues: ‘No one has Breakfast at Tiffany’s, and no one has Affairs to Remember. Instead, we have breakfast at 7AM and affairs we try to forget as quickly as possible.’

In this opening, Sex and the City sets out its mission statement. It aims to deconstruct the idea of romance and to break down what is real and what is fantasy, what we tell ourselves we want and why we want it. In each episode, Carrie will try to unpack a new question using her own experience and that of her friends Charlotte, Samantha, and Miranda – all of whom often represent different schools of thought. Charlotte is more traditional, with a strong belief in love; Miranda is more level-headed and often cynical about what she’s supposed to want; and Samantha bucks all traditional ideas in favour of a life lived in pursuit of pleasure. Meanwhile Carrie, throughout the show’s run, oscillates between these positions, trying to make sense of a world that is getting crazier and crazier. 

It’s this dissection that gave the show its legacy. For six years, the four women sat around a table in a coffee shop or restaurant and discussed the pros and cons of giving head, what kind of power games are at play when it comes to anal sex, whether married couples see single people as a threat, and all other types of societal pressures. As someone who first watched Sex and the City in high school, as a queer person who was having no sex or romance, it took up a special place in my heart. I’ve had a practically unshakeable obsession with it ever since, and Carrie has always been at its centre. 

So, I got to thinking about Carrie Bradshaw. Over the past week or so, I have become obsessed with the on-set photos that kept emerging from the Sex and the City reboot, And Just Like That, which is currently filming in New York. Carrie, Charlotte and Miranda are back on the streets, meeting in coffee bars or outside museums to discuss the woes of their fifties. And I couldn’t help but wonder; where is Carrie now, and is she still a mess? 

I use “mess” in the most loving of ways because I am the same kind of mess. To me, the show’s protagonist is a stark reflection of all the hang-ups I have in terms of insecurity, vulnerability, and attitude. Not to mention, despite the ruthless “Carrie-Bashing” that’s become in vogue, I still see her as one of the greatest characters in American television history – a more realistic version of the anti-hero trope we hear about in relation to numerable male characters.

The more I re-watch the show the more I realise that Carrie’s arc – that of a woman broken down by the classic idea of love – is the best example of the show’s mission statement. Carrie is a cool, collected, and confident sex columnist who acts as a sexual anthropologist in that opening episode. She’s reached a point in her life where she’s emotionally stable, having sex with exes and getting her face plastered on the side of a bus, but when Mr Big enters the frame, that all begins to unravel. She finds herself changing, worrying he won’t like the person she is. Instead, she presents the ‘together Carrie’ that means her emotional outbursts, in response to his repression, come off as unhinged or left-field. The show to me is about how one woman loses herself by craving the love of a man she isn’t meant to be with. It is not, as some think, a great romance, but actually closer to a six season-long fuck-up.

What strikes me as most interesting is how the show’s finale, in which Mr Big and Carrie reunite in a classical romantic fashion in Paris, was not the original intention.  The show’s creator, Darren Star, who handed the series over to Michael Patrick King during its run, said the ending betrayed his original feminist vision, “which was that women don’t ultimately find happiness from marriage”. Elsewhere, Emily Nussbaum, whose interpretation of the show comes closest to my own, thought the ending didn’t work either. She wrote: 

“And then, in the final round, “Sex and the City” pulled its punches, and let Big rescue Carrie. It honored the wishes of its heroine, and at least half of the audience, and it gave us a very memorable dress, too. But it also showed a failure of nerve, an inability of the writers to imagine, or to trust themselves to portray, any other kind of ending—happy or not. And I can’t help but wonder: What would the show look like without that finale?”

This is not to say that the final season has no merit. In fact, it’s the opposite. Nussbaum points out that Carrie’s relationship with an emotionally cold Russian artist serves as an example of just how much the pursuit of a fairytale can leave you in the lurch. The fifteenth episode in season six, ‘Catch-38’, is one of the strongest, as Carrie reconciles the fact that the Russian doesn’t want kids and she isn’t sure she does either. Ultimately, her decision to forgo children remains radical today. 

Now, perhaps, with the reboot, the writers are beginning to course correct. According to Page Six, rumour has it that the new show will see Carrie and Mr Big in the (POTENTIAL SPOILER ALERT!) throes of a divorce, perhaps realising what half the audience already knew; they’re not right for each other. Maybe now we’ll see the show – under its new name – return to its original intention after getting slightly lost in the glitz and glamour of the movies. 

This might all just be my wishful thinking. The idea of Carrie, presented as “the last single girl”, has always been meaningful to me, and the idea that she might now be facing the ramifications of her poor decisions when it comes to Big – much like me, who is still very much fucked up by my first love – would place a beloved character I care for back in my orbit. Either way, am I ready for more Carrie Bradshaw in any capacity? Abso-fucking-lutely.

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So, I’ve started to rewatch a lot of TV. Texting with a friend recently, I remarked that movies, in this current climate, don’t do it for me. They’re too fleeting, too 90-minutes-and-done. A TV show, however, episode-upon-episode, has the potential to offer a week’s worth of entertainment, or maybe even more. It has familiar characters who can stand in as friends when my actual friends are separated from me by a two-metre distance. It offers romances when I can’t date, sex scenes when I can’t… well, you know. It can give me all that I’m craving without pushing me too far. At times, it felt like rewatching was all I could handle. I didn’t want any surprises, any twists, anything shocking. 

The benefits of rewatching are twofold. Firstly, you know where you are. In these times which are ‘uncertain’ or ‘unprecedented’ (or however you allude to the current hellscape in your work emails), I don’t think I want the stress of something new. Instead, I want comfort, and I want security, but who can offer that these days? Well, Derry Girls, Ru Paul’s Drag Race, The Office, Parks and Recreation, I May Destroy You, and many more – that’s who. These shows, some of which I know by heart, offer me what feels like normalcy on these long locked-down nights. 

That feeling of close-to-normal is the second major benefit. These shows are nostalgic and remind me of the days when I would choose to spend an entire evening watching the first series of Sex and the City in one sitting, as opposed to doing so because the government mandated that I must. Nostalgia, though, is a complicated thing to reckon with. The word’s origins – the Ancient Greek translating to something along the lines of “pain for a journey home” – highlights its darker uses: we feel pain for time passed, for places and people we can no longer return to. This isn’t just felt on a personal level, but it appears routinely in political rhetoric; returning to a simpler time, making a country “great” again. 

The media psychologist Pamala Rutledge said in an interview with NPR last year that “we actually are craving time with our friends, and so these become kind of a proxy for that experience.” This was in response to the news that Friends and The Office had been the most-watched shows during quarantine.

We’re basically exhausted all the time because we’re under the stress of uncertainty. So what do I want to watch that will give me some comfort and some rewards that’s easy, that doesn’t drain my energy but gives me some back? And that makes shows like “The Office” or “Friends” a very good choice.

Pamela Rutledge

This yearning for nostalgia and ease doesn’t feel specific to the pandemic, however. In recent years, nostalgia has been the driving force behind television. Show after show was brought back from the dead, most of them shocked into existence on streaming sites. Will and Grace, Prison Break, Queer Eye, Saved by the Bell, Tales of the City, Full House, The X-Files, and so many more came back to varying degrees of success. Even to the untrained eye, it was clear the past decade had brought on a soft spot for days-gone-by. Most recently, Sex and the City was announced as the latest to make a comeback (with a new name and sans Samantha) and it became one of around 30 rebooted shows currently in development. As a fan of the show, and its new diverse writing staff, I was excited. Yet, I did hear, somewhere deep inside me, a quiet ‘why’ when I read the news before I quickly silenced it and got excited for something that might upset me (can you tell I’m a Carrie?). 

It’s hard not to see the connection between my current rewatching craze and this wider cultural mode of production whose mantra seems to be in the vein of a 90’s era S Club 7 – ‘bring it all back’. In fact, it’s somewhat stunning. I had seen, in recent years, that political craving for nostalgia and had fought ardently against it; things were never great, and the only way is forward. 

During a year that has made comfort paramount, even more so than in previous years, was I more open to the return of familiar faces because, I’m hoping, I’ll soon be able to see my actual friends? As things open up and new shows premiere, I’ll have to apply that to what I’m watching too. I’ll have to shake it off, leave this hibernation, and walk once again amongst original and exciting things. I just hope I haven’t become too comfortable.

Also Read: How Film Changed Me: On It’s A Sin

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