Sex and the City is coming to Netflix and now is the time to watch it

I never intended to watch Sex and the City. Nothing I heard about the series particularly intrigued me. My greatest familiarity with it came from loosely participating in conversations in which friends assigned themselves characters, such as “a Miranda” or “a Carrie.” But one sleepy Friday evening my partner had turned it on to watch the cooking. Content to try something new, I plopped down on the couch with a chocolate martini in hand.

The fact that I would be biased Sex and the City isn’t all that surprising. In a 2013 essay for the New Yorker: Emily Nussbaum wrote about how even critics have excluded the show from the canon of television greats in the past and relegated it to the fringes of television. And his followers were not immune. She writes: “By the show’s fifteenth anniversary this year, we fans had become accustomed to downgrading the show to a guilty pleasure, mocking its puns and engaging in self-flagellating conversations about the blinders and the hidden. “Movies”, conversations that I have more or less absorbed over the years.

But after actually watching the show, Carrie’s quick tongue immediately captivated me into her world and I couldn’t stop watching her. I struggled with the toxic back-and-forth of her romance with Big and marveled at the absurdity of this depiction of life in New York City in the ’90s and ’00s. But more than anything else, the series contained a warmth that surprised me. Watching the series in modern times, where the premise of a woman being single and having sex in her thirties is supposedly less provocative, strips it of any “shock factor” that comes with sex. What struck me instead was a story steeped in the generosity and messiness of unconditional female friendships and love.

The four – you knowledge Even if you don’t know them, you can’t always get along with them. Miranda, in particular, has issues with Carrie’s tendency to pursue a man who doesn’t treat her well, and Charlotte may condemn Samantha’s constant sexual escapades.

Image: HBO

But instead of allowing these differences to tear these characters apart, we instead watch them wade through the chaos of it all together. Carrie may not listen to Miranda, but we can imagine the two supporting each other in other ways. In times of need, it is generally friends who fill the “gap” created by the lack of romantic partners. In the end, it’s clear that the relationships between these women, not sex or romance, drive the show. What matters to me isn’t so much whether Carrie ends up with Big, but rather whether she finds a way to see Miranda’s perspective, and vice versa. In this way, each woman reflects and transforms every action and the world around her in her own way to create a glittering diamond of a show.

This recommendation still comes with a big caveat. The series contains several instances where Carrie and her friends’ blatant homophobic, transphobic, and racist actions and beliefs ruin entire storylines. (At one point I just skipped an episode because one of the characters got too involved in an episode that played racist stereotypes for laughs.) And while we can say it was probably a “sign of the times,” reflected the series reflected and still reflects a sign of the times sensibility that fits the very limited subset of life it depicts (rich white ladies living in New York).

Despite these drawbacks, I still found the show worthwhile. Over the course of its six-year term Sex and the City finds surprising depth in each of its characters. At several points, the series refuses to give many of its characters the clean and idyllic ending they might have wanted at the beginning. A character like Charlotte may desire marriage and the idea of ​​the “perfect” man, but has to think – more than once – about what that looks like. The result is a show that feels raw and real at points, a central story of “second coming of age” except for women in their 20s and 30s defying society’s expectations. I may have been skeptical about the series, but looking back at my chocolate martini now, perhaps my inner Carrie was just waiting to emerge.

Sex and the City is now streaming on Netflix.