"Sex and the City" - Season 1

One approaches the complete series of "Sex and the City" with trepidation, even when it comes to you by way of an East Asian bootleg box, with its photoshopped, chronologically mismatched, delightfully un-chic packaging (Chinese bootleg DVDs always reminds you just how fetishistically overdesigned American packaging has become - dig that Criterion collection, with its clear-plastic slipcases, or the "Alien Quadrilogy" megapack, which unrolls into 9 DVDs like a xenomorph's vaguely phallic prehensile tail.) For nearly as long as I have been absorbing pop culture (I usually mark the date with the 1997 end-of-the-year issue of Entertainment Weekly, although the true frenzy didn't begin until 1999, when I started to save and reread every issue) "Sex and the City" has been a phenomenon. I was hermetically sealed off from it in a number of ways while it was still playing - I didn't have HBO, I didn't date, I went to an all-boys school and so never met or spoke to girls outside of speech tournaments and impressively awkward summer camps.

So it wasn't until the series finale, in February 2004, that I learned "Sex and the City" was some kind of rallying cry for young women everywhere. I was in a freshman dorm, and I magically suddenly knew all kinds of girls - hippie chicks with soft drug stashes, New York club kids with hard drug issues, type-A personas on the dance team and the student government, environmentalists, pre-meds, a softball superstar, a cheerleader, an heiress to software mega-fortune, and the daughter of a man who various sources claimed practically owned an entire African nation - and for a few days, they were all talking about "Sex and the City." This is how I knew Mr. Big's name was John, before I knew he was Mr. Big.

That's not quite true - I had skimmed enough articles on the show to be able to speak intelligently about its Emmy chances, or to point out that it had gotten less fun in the last few seasons. I knew Miranda had a baby, that Charlotte was the nice one, that Samantha had tons of sex and had briefly dated another woman (just the thought of that coupling was enough to make me incapable of following any classes for days.) I knew there was some guy named Aidan, and that Baryshnikov was in the show somewhere. Maybe I knew less - I didn't know much more.

It's all kind of jumbled up now, because in May, after over four years of putting it off, I watched the entire "Sex and the City" - all six and a half seasons, plus one movie. The cumulative effect of so much "Sex" - 94 episodes, spread over seven years, vividly portraying late-90s wandering and post-9/11 PTSD, steadily moving from standalone episodes into epic twisted love affairs, asking any number of questions about gender and sexuality and metropolitanism, teetering constantly between boundary-busting invention and perversely old-fashioned romance, refashioned and reconsidered but still defiantly retro. Like any great TV show, "Sex and the City" only seems like a glorious whole when you consider it from a distance.

Viewed all at once, it can feel like you're in the middle of a typhoon, as the show simultaneously drifts forward into its golden age and backward into its years of intriguing decline. That's true of nearly every great show that lasts long enough and becomes popular enough to attract new fans just as it's attracting a backlash - "The Simpsons," "The Sopranos," "The X-Files," "Seinfeld" and "Friends" all lasted (or, in the Simpsons' case, is still lasting) long enough to basically remake TV culture in their image, which simultaneously made them ill-fit to continue in a world that they themselves created. (Based on its lackluster recent season, "South Park" may be the most recent victim of this syndrome - last season's "Imagination Land" three-part masterpiece is looking more and more like a magnum opus series finale.)

The hot thing to do when talking about the complete series is to begin by pointing out how messy the first season is. True, Sarah Jessica Parker talking to the camera gets pretty old pretty fast, although it is kind of funny that her hubby Matthew Broderick got famous for doing exactly the same thing in "Ferris Bueller's Day Off." Still, it was funny how, whenever I told any woman that I was watching the whole series, they would always, like clockwork, point out that I really had to suffer through season 1 to get to the good stuff.

Actually, I enjoyed the first season. True, the episodes are more openly formulaic than they would be later in the series. Especially in the latter half of the season, it goes like this: Carrie and Big have an awkward moment which only Carrie seems to notice, at which point she talks to her three friends about the awkward moment and then embarks on a column which turns that moment into a question of high societal philosophy; the four women then embark on misadventures with men which all rotate around that question. Like dominos in a row, the subplots all wrap up in time for Carrie to suddenly express her frustration/anxiety/anger to Big, at which point he vaguely apologizes and they hug. (The exemplary episode of this structure of "Three's a Crowd," where the friends suffer through emotional, physical, psychological, and romantic 'threesomes.' This means that Carrie's narrated double entrendres are simultaneously soft-core lame and Time-Magazine meaningful.)

Here's the thing - I actually like these formula episodes. True, they're neither as funny, as groundbreaking, or as emotionally involving as later seasons, but these first twelve episodes have two things going for them ahead of the later seasons. On one hand, the show is not yet a phenomenon; there's an unhurried, unfussy looseness in the structure. Whereas later season would focus more attention on the friendship of the four women, here in Season 1 Carrie, Miranda, Samantha, and Charlotte are just friends who hang out and chit chat in between relationships. Their ongoing dialogue, over coffee and cosmos, would eventually turn into an era-defining Greek Chorus - here, though, the focus is a bit more on the action and less on their gab.

What I mean is that each girl seems to be in their own world - there isn't a whole lot of overlap in their storylines. It's as if they're all dating in their own individual parallel universe New Yorks (which, given the one-joke premise of many of their relationships - "the guy who films sex," "the guy who paints vaginas," "the angry guy on anti-depressants who can't keep it stiff anymore" - may actually form a genuine metaphysical thesis for the show.) The episode which violates this structure most is "The Baby Shower," which hints at the depths of the womens' friendship as surely as it hints (in the character of Laney, partygirl turned suburban mom) at the dark weirdness in store for the later years of the show, when one-night-stands were replaced by marriage and children and other necessary unfun early-middle-aged things.

At the same time, these early episodes strike me as being "Sex and the City" at its purest, and not just because it was all brand new. Because there were no real ongoing storylines besides Carrie and Big (remember, this was before TiVo, iTunes, and "24" made the world safe for serial narratives), each episode seems free to focus itself more on a topic than on a story - Season 1 feels most like the column which the show portrays, and least like a TV show. Because there are no long-term relationships (again, besides Big), there is a literal parade of men each episode, each one vaguely representative of something both sexually contemporary and classically boorish; you also get the funny cutaways to random New Yorkers, which probably played much worse before "Family Guy" and "Arrested Development" made cutaways popular and genius, respectively.

From reading about "Sex and the City," I figured I had a firm grasp of the characters - Carrie the thinker (or, among men talking, the whiny one), Charlotte the romantic one (or the uptight prude WASP), Samantha the sexual one (or the slut queen), and Miranda the working woman (or the "isn't she a lesbo in real life?" one.) And although I freely admit I grew obsessed with the tribulations of all of these characters over one month and six seasons, I don't think my initial impressions of any of them were remotely wrong.

Except for Miranda, who, right from the start, manages to explode every stereotype of women, even the ones "Sex and the City" created. Dry-witted yet desperate, unfussy yet neurotic, violently unstylish, a woman in the workplace who hates being treated differently yet who isn't below faking a lesbian romance in order to get invited to her bosses' couples parties, Miranda's weird duality is established right in the first episode. Watch her play off Skipper, the pre-nerd-chic loser with the whiny voice, and whiny glasses, and whiny hair. She completely cuts him down, like Samantha would so many men throughout the run, yet she also recognizes some inherent sweetness in the guy, like Charlotte. But whereas both of those characters always seem more like mouthpieces for two particular and often oppositional worldviews, Miranda is just a city gal who wants to get laid and maybe enjoy it, if she's lucky. She so often sleeps with the least attractive guys, like Skipper (or his bespectacled brother beta-male Steve) - not so much because she settles as because, in her alternate-universe New York, men look pretty much like they do in the real world - normal, if not ugly.

One final thought - near the end of the very first episode of the series, there's a moment which fascinated me the first time through and which beguiled me throughout the series. A guy who pops up throughout the first episode, first in cutaways and then on a chaste date with Charlotte, has found himself back in his room with Samantha. They make out, and he starts to take her clothes off. He tells her that he has to work early in the morning, so she can't stay the night. She says "Okay," with that lusty purr Kim Cattrall puts on practically every syllable. He takes off her top - I forget, but I think these might be the first pair of serious tits we see in the show. He moves out of the frame, and for just a second, a look passes over Samantha's face. What is it? Sadness? Frustration? Disappointment? It's only there for a moment, and then it turns back into a smile (clearly, the guy is doing some work below the camera), but much more than Carrie's narration, it seems express the show's essential ambiguity.

You're a working woman, you've just been brought home by a man, and he's just informed you that after you two are done fucking like overcaffeinated probably-inebriated potentially-drugged out thirtysomethings, you have to put your soiled clothes back on and take the walk of shame back home. Is this glamour? Is this the way things are supposed to be? Is anyone on this show happy?