Sex and the City redux

In twitterpated anticipation of the upcoming release of the "Sex and the City" movie, I've been re-watching the last few seasons of the series with my HBO On Demand (gotta love expensive cable). I wasn't quite sure what to expect of the series on re-viewing. It's easily been four years since I last saw an episode, and I had forgotten a lot of the story arcs that made up the show's final episodes. I had also been influenced by several editorials I had seen which suggested that the show's frothy storylines didn't hold up well in the harsh light of terrorism, war, environmental concerns and economic crisis. With all this in mind, I was prepared to find the show all a bit childish - a favorite of adolescence that I'd sadly outgrown.

It was perhaps more of a shock to realize how much of my life - a life I hadn't yet lived when it went off the air - the show represented. Charlotte's struggles with infertility. Miranda's difficult acceptance of a parent's declining health. Carrie's efforts to find her place in a foreign country. Having lived through these same experiences in the interim between the show's finale and the upcoming movie, I was struck by how true to life the show actually was. The key to that show was not the shoes or the clothes or the sex or even New York - it was the relationships between the show's four powerful, opinionated, complicated female characters. They may have had a lot of sex, but that's not why women watched (although it may have been why their boyfriends watched). Women watched because it was one of the few places of television at the time that they could see their lives - full of sex and fashion and men, but also full of infertility and cancer and heartbreak - played out in all its difficult beauty.

Economic crisis or not, that sort of thing never goes out of style. Although I did have to sell my Manolos to put gas in the car last week.