The time has come to bid farewell to Carrie Bradshaw, the patron saint of looking for love in all the wrong places. The final episode of And Just Like That... brings to a close the reboot, which viewers balk at yet somehow can't look away.
Since first gracing our screens in 1998 in the very first episode of Sex and the City, Carrie's (Sarah Jessica Parker) place in popular culture has been firmly cemented as the complex, romantic, independent, vulnerable, and at times infuriating single gal about town. Despite the shortcomings of both Sex and the City and And Just Like That..., it feels emotional to be saying goodbye to Carrie (well, again). Over the years, she's been a dependable companion to us single gals, those finding themselves in the Wild West that is modern dating, the diehard romantics, the unlucky-in-loves, and people who've had their heart broken.
Several generations of viewers (myself included) have looked to the four female leads of SATC as an alternative Myers-Briggs personality test — "I'm such a Carrie!" "I'm Charlotte-coded, but a Samantha at heart." 27 years since that first episode, Carrie Bradshaw's impact is still being felt. Sex and the City discourse is alive and well on TikTok, resuscitated by a new wave of Gen-Z viewers streaming the show on HBO Max. In mainstream pop culture, the SATC references have been ever-present; in the last year, Gen Z icon Olivia Rodrigo wore a bejewelled top with the words "Carrie Bradshaw AF" while performing at Madison Square Garden, and in "Nissan Altima," our Grammy-winning Swamp Princess, Doechii, rapped, "I'm like Carrie Bradshaw with a back brace on."
As Carrie's final ever on-screen appearance (until the next reboot at least) arrived, I couldn't help but wonder: What is the enduring appeal of this character?
As a millennial 30-something looking for love, Carrie Bradshaw has long occupied a space in my heart. Growing up in the 2000s, I watched SATC in my bedroom on terrestrial TV (remember that?) before I'd even so much as kissed a boy for the first time. Is this how my thirties were going to be? I wondered as a teen. Not having a boyfriend had never looked so glitteringly fabulous.
As a millennial 30-something looking for love, Carrie Bradshaw has long occupied a space in my heart.
Like many women, this show continues to stay with me as I grow older. In my twenties, I visited New York and did a Sex and the City tour of Manhattan, posing for photos outside Carrie's apartment building at 245 East 73rd Street (although the actual brownstone is in the West Village), stopping for cupcakes at Magnolia Bakery, and sipping a Cosmopolitan at Scout, the bar Steve (David Eigenberg) and Aidan (John Corbett) owned together. The SATC fan pilgrimage was rendered all the more poignant because I was going through a heartbreaking chapter of my own, being ghosted by a man I had feelings for, and mulling over whether or not to send the dreaded paragraph to him (I did in the end).
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When I'm going through heartbreak or even just a confusing dating experience, I turn to this show for comfort, for answers, for validation. Even now in my mid-thirties, I see myself in Carrie in her refusal to settle for a relationship that's lacking in the kind of love she deserves. "I'm looking for love," Carrie declared in the final episode of Sex and the City. "Real love Ridiculous, inconvenient, consuming, can't-live-without-each-other love."
Let's not ignore Sex and the City's problematic moments
Despite her importance to fans, it's impossible to gloss over the fact that Carrie is a deeply flawed character. She's self-involved, lacking in accountability, selfish, and has a habit of flaking on her friends, even in their time of need. But there's a larger problem.
Like many sitcoms from the '90s and '00s, there are aspects of Sex and the City that do not hold up through a modern lens. The lack of diversity is one of the most glaring downfalls of the series. The four protagonists are white, privileged, cisgender, and their experiences (at least in the original show) are centred around dating and sleeping with men. Racist, reductive stereotypes rear their ugly head throughout the series. In a rare inclusion of Black characters, Season 3, episode 5 sees Samantha (Kim Cattrall) date record label executive Chivon (Asio Highsmith) in a portrayal that has not aged well at all. All in the space of one episode we get hypersexualised discussion of Chivon's penis, references to Black culture as "urban," and the depiction of Chivon's sister Adeena (Sundra Oakley) as a controlling "angry Black woman". It is a mess of an episode.
Again, in Season 3, episode 18, titled "Cock-a-Doodle-Do," deals with two sets of noisy neighbours for Carrie, but in doing so, appears to liken Black trans sex workers lives as akin to those of caged chickens. Throw in Carrie putting on an AAVE accent at the end of the episode, and I got to thinking: were any Black or trans writers present in the writing room? (There weren't.)
When And Just Like That... launched in 2021, viewers got the sense that those criticisms surrounding diversity had been heard. Co-creator Michael Patrick King brought in a more diverse writers room, including writers Samantha Irby, Keli Goff, and Rachna Fruchbom. Irby told Vogue in 2021, “I was a huge fan of Sex and the City back in the day. But there were some moments where I was like, If there had been a Black writer in the room, this would have probably played differently." Goff told Deadline that King was "open to really listening" to the writers.
New friends Seema Patel (Sarita Choudhury), Lisa Todd Wexley (Nicole Ari Parker), Che Diaz (Sara Ramirez), and Dr. Nya Wallace (Karen Pittman) were added to the girl gang in an attempt to fill the chasm that Samantha's absence left behind. One storyline running across all three seasons is Charlotte's child Rock's (Alexa Swinton) gender identity. Miranda (Cynthia Nixon) leaves Steve and begins exploring her queer identity. But, despite clear efforts to make the show more inclusive, the show overall felt jarring for many viewers who wanted more from the reboot.
Sex and the 'complicated single girl' representation
What was it about Carrie that captured the collective attention of viewers in the late '90s and 2000s?
Over the past few decades, "single girl" representation has come a long way, bringing complex, sometimes problematic, relatable, and realistic single women to our screens. Hannah, Jessa, Marnie, and Shoshanna from Girls, Issa Dee in Insecure, Abbie and Ilana in Broad City, Mindy in The Mindy Project, to name a few.
The "sad single girl" trope doesn't really have a place on our screens anymore, but we've also lost our cultural fixation on the need for our single girls to be likeable, palatable to male viewers, role models to women. They can just be. But it hasn't always been that way.
The New Yorker's Emily Nussbaum wrote a piece in 2013 examining the complicated legacy of Sex and the City, and highlighted the new era of complicated single woman representation that the show ushered in. Nussbaum argued that our four SATC heroines were markedly different from the "you-go-girl types" such as That Girl, Mary Tyler Moore, and Molly Dodd.
"In contrast, Carrie and her friends — Miranda, Samantha, and Charlotte — were odder birds by far, jagged, aggressive, and sometimes frightening figures, like a makeup mirror lit up in neon," wrote Nussbaum.
"And, with the exception of Charlotte (Kristin Davis), men didn’t find them likable: there were endless cruel jokes about Samantha (Kim Cattrall), Miranda (Cynthia Nixon), and Carrie as sluts, man-haters, or gold-diggers. To me, as a single woman, it felt like a definite sign of progress: since the elemental representation of single life at the time was the comic strip “Cathy” (ack! chocolate!), better that one’s life should be viewed as glamorously threatening than as sad and lonely."
What will become of Carrie Bradshaw's legacy?
Where do we go from here? Will Carrie's legacy live on beyond the show, the movies, and the reboot? While we might not be getting any new episodes of And Just Like That..., Carrie won't be disappearing from our screens. Sex and the City and And Just Like That... are shows that viewers will return to time and time again. Diehard fans embrace the totality of her character, flaws and all — they don't embellish or pretend she's perfect.
Dylan B Jones, co-host of So I Got To Thinking podcast, tells Mashable that Carrie embodies a desire "that lurks inside all of us — the freedom to live and behave like an absolute dickhead and somehow get away with it."
"She taps cigarette ash onto pristine carpets, slops martinis onto beautiful floors, turns up late on no sleep to fashion shoots, cheats and lies her way through relationships and somehow still comes out of it beloved by all who behold her. She embodies selfish oblivion, and that, for many of us, is the unattainable 21st century dream," says Jones.
Maiia Krylova, founder of @carriebradshaws_outfits, an Instagram account dedicated to Carrie's enviable wardrobe, says Carrie's legacy will endure "because she represented more than fashion, she was the voice of freedom, imperfection, and the magic of being a woman."
"She gave us permission to embrace contradictions: to be vulnerable yet strong, romantic yet independent, glamorous yet relatable. Through her, women saw that life doesn’t have to be perfect to be extraordinary and that our stories, with all their flaws and detours, are worth telling," Krylova tells Mashable.
Carrie as a character will stay with us, I think, because she holds an at-times unflattering mirror up to us. When she's on good form, we gleefully declare we're "such a Carrie," but when she fucks up (which she so often does), we feel a keen disappointment. And yet, we carry on watching. She's like a friend we can't help but forgive.
As Big once said: "You're worth a million bucks, Bradshaw." It was one of the rare occasions that I actually agreed with him.
