Sex and the City - The Complete First Season (1998) review on movielords.com

Now Reading: Sex and the City - The Complete First Season (1998)

Today is May 16, 2008

Sex and the City - The Complete First Season (1998)

Carrie Bradshaw begins exploring "Sex and the City"

Now that the "Six and the City" girls are living happily ever after and we know how their stories end, going back and revisiting the complete first season reminds us of their respective starting points. In the beginning, at a thirty-something birthday party for Miranda Hobbs (Cynthia Nixon), the birthday girl, Carrie Bradshaw (Sarah Jessica Parker) and Samantha Jones (Kim Cattrall) decide that they are going to start having sex like men (i.e., without feeling), an idea that Charlotte York (Kristin Davis) rejects. By the end of that first episode it becomes clear that each of the quartet has their respective roles, which establishes a series of key oppositional pairs.

Miranda is the pessimist, while Charlotte is the eternal optimist. Charlotte is interested in falling in love and having it all, while Samantha is only interested in really great sex. The impulsive Samantha is interested in trying just about anything as soon as it pops into her mind, while the analytical Carrie has to think things through (and turn them into a newspaper column) before she can determine the proper course of action. Carrie is willing to try and make things happen, while Miranda is just watching life pass her by. There are more oppositional pairs to work out, but you get the idea how "Sex in the City" is always positioned to look at everything from at least two sides. In fact, it does not seem right if we do not discover that what is happening to each of the four characters in a particular episode does not touch upon a common theme. For example, in "The Drought," if Carrie's relationship with Mr. Big (Chris Noth) is entering a less physical stage then it will turn out that the man Charlotte is dating is not interested in having sex, that Samantha discovers not having sex is erotic, and Miranda has not been having sex for months.

The recurring element for "Sex and the City: The Complete First Season" is the process of elimination by which Carrie and her friends come to terms with what they want in a man. Specific episodes help them decide that they do not want a "modelizer" or a "twenty-something" guy. Even in the early stages of her relationship with Mr. Big, Carrie focuses more on what she does not want (e.g., not to be a "secret lover" and not to be told that he is not interested in every getting married again) than on what she does. I want to reconceptualize the entire six season run of the show as one of those logic games where you are told things like the person who drinks coffee lives next to the blue house and you have to figure out which person lives in the green house and which person eats pancakes.

The other interesting thing is that at the start the other three women are all more Carrie's friends than they are each other's. Charlotte might invite Samantha over to spend the night, but their views on the world are not exactly compatible. The constant thread from the first episode to the last is obviously Carrie's tortured relationship with Big, but while we are watching those fight the inevitability of their feelings for one another, Carrie's friends start to strengthen the ties that bind them to each other. Still, notice how often Carrie serves as a buffer between them and how long it takes for some of these dyads to reach the point where they can exist on their own.

The only serious flaw with these first season episodes was when Carrie had to deal with faux issues such as a fake marriage to Stanford Blatch (Willie Garson) or a pregnancy scare, but simply because those are rather standard plotlines for shows about single women. Fortunately, even when the series takes a misstep and covers old ground in does so in a fresh way, mainly because Carrie and her friends are willing to talk about everything from fetishes to the Rabbit. It is that boldness and audacity that made "Sex and the City" stand out right from the beginning.

That is why the idea that HBO would forget about showing theatrical films and just devote itself to producing television shows and movies has so much appeal to me. I already watch more shows on HBO than any other network and when I list the top 10 shows on television they always have at least half of them. Now, if only their DVD sets for these series would stop being the most expensive ones on the market.

All news on this site are owned and copyrighted to their respective publishers. this is a non commercial website.