Dean Winters
Role on Sex: Carrie's fuck buddy John McFadden. After her second massive break from big, Carrie attempts to make her fuck buddy John into a real boyfriend. This attempt fails miserably.
Where Is He Now: Since his hard time in Carrie, Dean Winters moved on to greener pastures: he has a recurring role as Liz Lemon's hilariously deadbeat boyfriend on 30 Rock, Dennis "the beeper king" Duffy. He also has a recurring role on Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles.

John Slattery
Role on Sex: Bill Kelley, an up-and-coming politician and total silver fox. His relationship with Carrie fizzles because he's obsessed with golden showers.
Where Is He Now: As silvery and foxy as ever, John plays slimy-yet-handsome ad exec Roger Sterling. He also had a recurring role on Desperate Housewives, but our hearts belong to Roger.

David Duchovny
Role on Sex: Carrie's erstwhile high school boyfriend Jeremy. He lives in Denver, but has taken a trip out East so he can go to a mental institution. His relationship with Carrie is a no-go because of his mental fragility, but that did not preclude them from knocking the boots a couple times.
Where Is He Now: We all know that David stars as a sex addict on the acclaimed Showtime dramedy Californication and also in his actual life. He was already a bona fide TV star before his time on Sex, but perhaps his time in Carrie-land inspired him to take the more emotionally complex role of Hank Moody on Californication.

Craig Bierko
Role on Sex: Creepy jazz-obsessed Ray King. Things do not work out with Carrie because he can barely hold a conversation that doesn't involve music.
Where Is He Now: earlier this year, Craig starred in a Fox sitcom called Unhitched with Rashida Jones. He played Jack 'Gator' Gately, a 35-year-old who recently divorced his college sweetheart. He is back in the dating scene and totally clueless. Even though it was produced by There's Something About Mary scribes Bobby and Peter Farrelly, the show was canceled after six episodes. However, we know that Carrie holds a leprauchan-ish pot of gold between those gams of hers, so we have high hopes that Craig's TV career will rebound in the near future!

11 West 47th Street has such tight security that each visitor must have not only her ID but also her fingerprint scanned on entry. “I guess that’s why they made such a big deal of asking me to bring my ID!” I said to the guard, smiling and trying to be cute, trying to get comfortable – I was nervous. He shrugged and directed me to the elevator that would take me to the 19th floor.

A uniformed cleaning lady sized me up as I got out of the elevator. “What you doing here?” she said, not unkindly. “Um, are there any … radio studios in this building?” I asked as two furry-hatted men passed us, speaking in Yiddish. “This diamond building only. You want diamonds, rubies, emeralds?” “No, I’m not in the market for any diamonds,” I told her as I edged back into the elevator, beginning to sweat.

Back on the street: “Ohh, you were supposed to go to 11 West FortySECOND street,” explained the PA who called to try to figure out why I was already 15 minutes late to an NPR interview that was meant to have started at 4. I hung up my cell phone and started sprinting down 5th avenue.

Almost everyone I passed was not from around here. Almost everyone I passed seemed to be thrilled to be soaking up the version of New York City that television had sold them, and why not? Look at these shiny buildings glittering! Look at the shiny hair of the women exiting the stores, glossed-paper bags in tow, twitching their tiny haunches, revolving their delineated shoulder blades as they flag down cabs! Who wouldn’t give everything to be any kind of cog in this perpetual-motion display of wealth and importance and efficiency? Who wouldn’t want to live inside this myth?


I’d been watching Sex and the City for three days straight by this point — yes, I finished them all — and so, as I rushed down the street I found my footsteps were keeping time with the jingle that was by then irretrievably lodged in my head. I couldn’t stop hearing that antic tinkle, that almost foreboding ending.

Darting through an intersection against the light, I thought about the show's opening credits sequence. Carrie Bradshaw, in a flesh-toned, nipple-revealing top and matching tutu, walks down the street, darts her eyes from side to side with a secret smug smile, tries to hail a cab, and is shamed when the bus, bearing an advertisement for her newspaper column— “Carrie Bradshaw knows good sex … and isn’t afraid to ask,”— whizzes by, splashing her and her tutu with gutter-water. These events are intercut with iconic images of The City: Sunlight glinting off the Chrysler building, the Empire State building, the Brooklyn Bridge. There had been a shot of the Twin Towers at one point, but it was replaced in post-2001 episodes.

Remember the episode when Carrie shoots that bus ad? She’d had some worries about its suggestiveness, she explains via voiceover, as we see her lolling suggestively in her bed as a photographer shouts “Beautiful!” and “More!” But her worries were mitigated when she found out that she got to keep the dress.

Cut to another episode, much later in the series. Carrie is in the ladies’ room of some chic establishment or other when she encounters a woman who she at first thinks is a fan: “I read your column,” the woman says, and then interrupts Carrie’s standard aw-shucks routine by saying, “And I dated Aidan right after you.” Then she makes a face that says “and oh my god, you are a horrible, horrible person.” As the episode wears on, several other people who have been informed of Carrie’s horribleness by this woman—including Heather Graham, as herself—make the same face. “You’re Carrie Bradshaw, huh? Eeesh.(Intake of breath).” Like, “You’re Carrie Bradshaw, huh? Poor you.”

That was sort of how my radio interview went, once I finally made it to 11 West 42nd Street. The interviewer fake-congratulated me a tiny bit and then asked whether I was worried that people would think I was a narcissist, which was a cute way for her to tell me that she thought I was a narcissist. “Do YOU think I’m a narcissist?” I asked her, and she stuttered. Later, the interview was posted on the NPR website with this quote taken out of context, making it seem like I am such a narcissist that I go around asking people, unprompted, whether they think I am a narcissist.

Last week a writer for Salon asked Moe whether she thought Carrie Bradshaw was a narcissist. I guess this is a question that all people — well, women mostly — who write about their own experiences must answer, whether or not said people are fictional.

One of the things people like to write about when they’re writing about Sex and the City is whether the show Gets It Right vis a vis The City. Ways the show Gets It Wrong have been catalogued extensively elsewhere— the girls’ apartments, their clothes, their endless free time, the fact that a collection of previously published newspaper columns merits an enormous book party and a publicity tour, all, apparently, on the publisher’s tab!

But here is how the show Gets It Right. It captures that feeling you can get walking down the street here sometimes on a sunny spring day. You have clean hair and new shoes and for a moment, you can trick yourself into believing that the City is on the verge of opening all its doors for you. All you have to do is be yourself! Things will work out.

But what a TV show will not tell you, no matter how many episodes you watch in a row, is that the people you meet here will only like you or want to help you as long as they can believe themselves to be better — more talented or more successful or richer or smarter — than you. The people you meet here will pretend to be your friends as long as it’s convenient for them or as long as it’s consistent with the versions of themselves they’re performing every day. The people you meet here will never hesitate to say things about you in print that they’d never say to your face. They have made a bargain. They will do whatever it takes to stay here. You came here because you thought you had a lot in common with them, and the thing is, you do. But those things aren’t the things about yourself that you like.


And so, at the end of wondering, here is the City. Now will you do whatever it takes to stay here, with them? How many times are you willing to let that bus spray you as it passes before you stop standing on that corner in that tutu? Are those shining towers worth those showers of muddy bus-spray? And why did you ever agree to have your face on that motherfucking bus, anyway? It wasn’t even really such a great dress.

Earlier: 36 Straight Hours Of Sex (And The City): Season Three
36 Straight Hours Of Sex (And The City): The First Two Seasons

Well, here's the thing: Season 3 is the series' peak for many reasons. Like Carrie whirring up a batch of the Fanta grape soda and cough syrup and ice blender concoction Samantha's mother made for her as a child — "More cough syrup!" — by Season 3, the SATC crew had nailed the winning formula. For one thing, it's the prettiest season. Everyone's outfits, while, yes, often insane, are incredibly fun to look at. Everyone's hair is their best-case-scenario hair: Carrie's hair is roots-grown-out and curly, Miranda has finally stopped looking like a model in one of those 1001 Short Haircuts books in the suburban hair salon your Mom took you to in 1989, Samantha no longer has those tragic roots-bangs, and even "Do you think my hair is too shiny?" Charlotte has honed a signature predilection for headbands that prefigures Blair Waldorf's 'do. The characters have become the iconic versions of themselves. They're also a little bit, I guess, more real? Like, there aren't so many episodes that hinge on a "friend" character who appears out of the blue and, say, invites all the girls to her wedding ("She was a question to be answered/and his answer was, 'I do!'"). And there are actual plot arcs besides "Will he call?" Like: Cheating! Yup, things around here are finally getting watchable!

Just in time for my eyeballs to threaten to actually fall out of my freaking head, of course.

Seriously, look at my notes here:

"Is there significance to Carrie's STRAIGHT HAIR in 'The Caste System'"

"Will Arnett giving Miranda head in a cab!"

"Miranda's worst shirt. A black lady with blonde hair."

"'Was I addicted to the pain?'"

"Oh my god. My shrink has the same last name as Carrie's."

"The sex is VILE."

"She starts baring her navel a lot more. I love that they never show her going to the gym. [this of course is untrue, but she never really works out, she just like half-asses her way though some 'goddess workout.']"

"Bon Jovi"

"Why must they make Miranda wear such fug outfits? Seriously, the hat atop the hoodie?"

"They do such fake-ass yoga. 'Tantric headstands?'"

"And just like that, I was thrown back into my old pattern. Greasy Chinese, sleeping til noon, and feeling ... restless."

"I CANNOT HEAR THE WORDS 'IN NEW YORK, [BLAH]' ONE MORE TIME. NOT ONE MORE TIME."

"Oho, one of them has a family member! Charlotte has a brother? Oh, he's here to have sex with Samantha."

"'The new milennium won't be about sexual labels, it'll be about sexual expression.'"

"They are such assholes at the sex workshop"

"'I'd like to show HIM my lower Manhattan.'"

"'Luckily, Manhattan has spas where a woman can pay to feel good about herself.'"

"'And I don't do laundry sometimes for like ... two weeks, and my sponges smell, and you're gonna see all that!"

"'Get a room!' 'Get a dental dam!'"

"Sam has the fakest orgasms ever."

I'm sorry, Anna. I was going to try to write something cogent about how off-puttingly unrealistic all of the sex on Sex is, especially Samantha's aria-orgasms, and how the only sex that seems like it might be remotely good is Miranda's because she is always flushed and unafraid to look totally ugly while doing it. And how Samantha and Miranda always come from what looks like penetration alone.

But right now, the girls are in LA and Samantha is having sex with a dildo model and Charlotte is wrapping paper around Trey's ween to see whether he is impotent and Carrie is sticking her feet in the pool and when the cute guy asks "Are you sure you want to be alone" she says "Yeah" and thinks "As soon as I said it aloud, I realized that it was just what I wanted, and needed," and really, three days in? It's all I can do to watch.

Watching TV all day — watching any TV show all day — will do that to you. But you know, there is something especially mindfucky about SATC. There's something about Carrie! (Ugh, something that encourages terrible, terrible puns! I promise to try to not to make any more of them.) And, actually, let me also dispense with a couple of other things right up front.

I am not interested in making qualitative judgments about this TV show. Maybe it's groundbreaking, and documentary-realistic about New York City, and it gave women permission to speak frankly about men and sex and dating mores in a way that they hadn't before! Or maybe it's hilariously dreadful — full of schlocky metaphors and over-the-top untruths about New York City, and stunningly, feminism-hobblingly retrogressive portrayals of womens' priorities and desires!

In this clip, Miranda sums up my feelings. Basically she's like, "Why do you only ever talk about penises? There is other stuff to talk about!" Unfortunately they don't listen to her and the show continues for another four seasons.

I don't know anymore. I change my mind every five minutes. This minute, on my TV screen, Carrie and friends are watching Big come down the stairs of Denial in slow motion and a huge grin is lighting up her face — he does care about her friends, after all! — and Miranda is running out into the street after Steve — she will give him a chance, after all! — to kiss him in the rain. And I'm thinking the answer might be that everything everyone's ever said about Sex and the City, both good and bad, is somewhat true. All that matters is that it's already been said, so I won't waste time saying it again here, and neither should you. Instead I want to talk about the kind of insight that can only be gleaned by watching many, many episodes of a TV show in a row.

Such as: there is a LOT of rollerblading going on in Seasons 1 and 2. A whole lot.

There are other stand-out un-modern touches, of course. Just to get it out of the way: oh my god their CLOTHES, their HAIR! The fact that their cellphones are the same (enormous) size as the Rabbit Pearl vibrator Charlotte gets "addicted" to in episode 9 ("It's pink! For girls!") And of course there's the unfortunate fact that, thanks to increasing budgets and the increasing social acceptability of facial muscle microparalysis via injected botulinim toxin, the gals seem to have grown younger, not older, as the series wore on.

Also, remember the HBO Real Sex-style Man on the Street interviews and Carrie's turn-to-the-camera confessionals? Those were weird.

But yes, seriously, really I wanted to mention something about the early seasons of SATC that — I think, at least! I haven't read everyone's grad school theses — hasn't already been discussed to death. It has to do with Carrie's job.

As the first episode opens, we hear Carrie narrating, in voiceover, the story of another woman's love and loss. We don't even see Carrie onscreen for a few minutes — instead, we learn about Elizabeth, a young British woman who came to New York and met a charmer who talked marriage and babies, then completely disappeared. Remember? It's the monologue that ends, "Welcome to the age of un-Innocence. No one has breakfast at Tiffany's and no one has affairs to remember." We're then given to understand that this voiceover, like alllllll the voiceovers that will follow it, is an excerpt from one of Carrie's columns. She is a sex columnist for a New York newspaper. "This is my work," she later tells a man she's just met when he asks what she does besides going out every night. "I'm sort of a sexual anthropologist." "You mean like a hooker?" he (it's Big!) asks—his joke-or-is-it? quasimysogny, established here, continues throughout the series and is meant to be, I guess, realistic and endearing.

"No. I write a column called 'Sex and the City.' Right now I'm researching an article about women who have sex like men. You know, they have sex and then afterwards they feel nothing," Carrie says. So this is the premise for the show: her life is research for her column. All the things that happen on the show — everything that makes Carrie have "to wonder," to announce that she "had a thought," to conclude that "the truth was," to sum things up with "and just like that," — these are all things that Carrie is sharing with a public. She's a little bit famous. "I'm a huge fan of your column," random characters say throughout the series. "I'm sort of somebody and she's definitely sort of somebody," Samantha tells an indifferent gatekeeper at a fancy restaurant.

So as Carrie and her friends navigate the many pitfalls that can imperil romance in New York — modelizers, married people, lesbians, twentysomethings, butt sex, vibrator addiction, pregnancy, flatulence and Catholicism in the first season alone — they're doing so in front of an audience. Not just the people who are unfortunate enough to be seated around them at brunch or at so-hot-right-now restaurants — no, Carrie and co. are figuring out whether nice girls do anal in front of all the people who read Carrie's column. You have to wonder whether this scrutiny is affecting their relationships — well, you have to wonder, but Carrie never does. It's the one thing she never wonders about.

Carrie's column is the elephant in the room for a reason — what if Big and Carrie had ever argued over how he was portrayed in her column? It's like wondering what Friends would have been like if Rachel had married that dentist — which is to say, probably nonexistent. And of all the credulity-straining things about SATC — you know, the 'how can she afford those shoes/that apartment?' factors — this is, to me, the most egregious. As I watched my 17th episode of the day, I HAD TO WONDER: How does Carrie constantly, publicly pontificate about her personal life and still manage to, you know, have one?

Also, why does Miranda always talk with her mouth full?

More things to WONDER about in this season one highlight reel: are women "things?" Is Big calling Carrie ugly? Is Carrie good at dumping people? And is Charlotte, in fact, a hole?

Earlier: 36 Straight Hours Of Sex (And The City)

Editor's note: Remember how I said I was going to watch every episode of 'Sex and the City' between April 1 and the May 23 premiere of the film? Well, for reasons of time, energy, and impending marriage, I didn't do it. What I did do, however, is pawn the task off on someone else: Emily Gould, Jezebel contributor and coiner of my favorite 'SATC'-related phrase, "Scary Sadshaws". Between today and Thursday, Emily will be watching all 94 episodes of the HBO series — that's 36 hours' worth! — and report back with her findings. A stunt? Yes. Insane? Probably. Wish her luck.

Last night, Anna and I were sitting in a chic little winebar in Queens sipping adorably-pink glasses of rosé when she announced that she had a present for me. The present was pink, too! And it came in a case made of sensuous faux-suede!

We marveled over its size and heft and giggled before I discreetly slipped it into my purse. On my way home, I had to wonder. Would I be able to handle it — all of it? I only had a few days, and it was so, so... BIG.

As you can tell, my brain has already been warped by this project. But over the next few days, I'll be soaking up all the pontification, all the scary reverse-aging, all the 90s eye makeup mysteries, all the saxophone solos ... God, the saxophone solos alone are going to drive me insane and I'm only on episode 2 ("Models and Mortals")!! What will happen to my brain? Well, I'll be keeping you updated. As a certain cigar-smoking, receding-hairlined lothario says in episode one, "What are you waiting for? Get in!"

Earlier: Maybe It's Time To Stop Hating On America's Scary Sadshaws