Sex and the City and Us, page 21
Many of those women of color watching Sex and the City found its formula a little more familiar than most of the white women who watched. They had also watched Living Single, a show about unmarried women that was ahead of its time. Starring Queen Latifah and Kim Fields, it premiered on Fox in 1993, a year before Friends, and featured six black, single friends—four women and two men. It anticipated the formulas used by both Friends and Sex and the City with its focus on single life in Brooklyn. It highlighted the women, who were “bodacious and bold,” as creator Yvette Lee Bowser described them to People magazine. “They weren’t playing dumb to get a man.”
It hit big in its target demographic, young African Americans. But Fox never marketed it outside that group, so its cultural impact was negligible among the white Americans who dominated mainstream media coverage: To wit, it was the No. 1 show among African American audiences in the 1996–97 season; the same year, it ranked 104th in the overall Nielsen rankings. It won two NAACP Image Awards, but didn’t crack the mainstream, white-dominated Emmys (aside from two nominations for its lighting direction).
The parallels to Sex and the City are striking: Like Carrie, Latifah’s character, Khadijah, works in media, as an editor and publisher. Fields’s character, Regine, works in fashion and pines for a man to take care of her. One of their girlfriends, Max, is an attorney, just like Miranda.
Black women who watched both Living Single and Sex and the City could see themselves in both: “I always say that I’m Khadijah from Living Single, but I’m also Miranda from Sex and the City,” said Issa Rae. She went on to, in 2016, create and star in HBO’s Insecure, which is proudly influenced by both shows.
Living Single would never get the credit that Sex and the City would, and Dr. Robert Leeds wouldn’t get enough time to make much of an impact on Sex and the City.
THE CONVERSION
Charlotte’s final evolution of the series began at Pastis, the Meatpacking District brasserie that was a favorite place for the writers to brainstorm. There, among the French-countryside wooden tables and flea market mirrors, the clinking of glasses and plates and silverware, they came up with the last step in the WASP princess’s transformation via love: She would become the perfect Jew.
Her new lover, divorce lawyer Harry Goldenblatt, shocks her when he says he could never marry her because she’s not Jewish. She does the only logical thing: She converts. But this wouldn’t be just any TV conversion, with a quick ceremonial scene never to be spoken of again. If Charlotte York was going to become Jewish, she would give it her all, and we would do it with her every step of the way, from her relentless pursuit of a rabbi who literally closes the door in her face three times as she seeks conversion to her solo preparation of a traditional Shabbat dinner.
Among the New York City–based crew, suddenly everyone had an opinion. Even the Jews among them hadn’t realized the crew was so heavily Jewish until shooting began on Charlotte’s conversion sequence. Grips spoke up: “I was raised Orthodox, and . . .” Though the show had hired an official consultant, many more volunteered as unofficial consultants: “Hey, she wouldn’t want her head covered that way!” “She would say ‘HaShem’ instead.”
Davis had done her homework, too, listening over and over to a tape of Hebrew prayers to get them just right.
Everyone’s diligence paid off, with a story line fans would mention to Davis as their favorite for years to come—more than her first wedding, more than Trey’s impotence, more than her infertility.
THE FINAL EPISODES
Writing the finale presented challenges far beyond those of a regular script. King knew he could disappoint at least a few million people who hoped for the opposite of whatever ending he chose.
The writers debated: With whom should Carrie end up? Mr. Big? Petrovsky? Someone else? No one? King says he always planned for Big and Carrie to end up together. He simply wanted to make sure they didn’t get together in a traditional way: no spectacular marriage proposal, all of the plot driven by Carrie’s choices. It would all hinge on Carrie’s decision to follow Petrovsky to Paris, hoping to find her happily-ever-after in that dreamy European city.
The other women would get their own forms of happily-ever-after. In the finale, Miranda invites Steve’s mother, Mary (played by the incomparable Anne Meara), to live with them in Brooklyn as she shows signs of dementia. When Miranda’s form of a fairy godmother, her housekeeper Magda, sees her giving the disoriented Mary a bath, her reaction is pure pride: “That’s love,” Magda says, kissing Miranda on the forehead. Charlotte and Harry receive word that they’ve been approved to adopt a Chinese baby. And Samantha gives her triumphant cancer luncheon speech with support from her sensitive love, Smith Jerrod (played by model and 90210 guest star Jason Lewis). Even more significantly, she sends Smith off to shoot a movie by insisting that he have sex with other women, given her lowered libido during cancer treatment. But she finds herself hoping he won’t—and is thrilled when he returns home to say that he prefers to be monogamous with her. Samantha has finally made peace with love.
King added to the already astronomical finale workload with an extraordinary decision to shoot several endings as decoys for the paparazzi and tabloids. They might be able to spot a location shoot and guess from afar what was happening in it, or even get a rogue crew member to spill about a scene, but they wouldn’t be able to tell which shoot was real. He peppered the shoots with misdirects: Maybe she’d end up with Big. Maybe she’d end up with Petrovsky. Maybe she would decide to stay in Paris. The actors and writers knew which was real, but the crew—which could include newcomers, freelancers, or just people who want to share secrets with their spouses after all their hard work—would not.
In one alternate scene, Carrie fakes out her friends by telling them she’s already married Petrovsky. Then she reveals that he’s coming back to the States from Paris so they can have a ceremony with her three best friends as her maids of honor. In another alternate ending, Samantha says Big “went all the way to Paris to choke.” Carrie replies, “It’s the Big ending we’ve all been waiting for.”
The decoy endings made for some absurd moments. After one long day of shooting in the coffee shop, among Cafeteria’s familiar white-paneled walls and white plastic chairs, they still had those alternate scenes to shoot. Writer Julie Rottenberg realized just how obvious they were being. In a real scene, they’d run in between takes to give actors notes. She scurried in with a bogus note for Nixon, who shot her an incredulous look. Perhaps Rottenberg was better off not doing any acting of her own.
King channeled the writing room debate into his scripts for the final two episodes. Carrie and Miranda have a devastating fight when Carrie decides to quit her job and move to Paris. “What are you gonna do over there without your job?” Miranda asks. “Eat croissants?”
“I cannot stay in New York and be single for you!” Carrie tells her. It’s the quintessential friendship problem in adulthood: We are taught to prioritize romantic relationships over our female friendships. We’d see it as crazy and possibly stupid to stay in a certain place for a platonic friend, even one we’ve known and loved for years, even when the alternative is a chilly, older Russian artist we haven’t known for long.
When Carrie stalks off, Miranda utters another rich line, especially for Sex and the City: “You’re living in a fantasy!”
Another fraught finale scene happens on Carrie’s street—Perry Street in the West Village, that cozy, tree-lined, and brownstone-filled few blocks that had become a second home base for the production over the years. For one last time, it would pretend to be a street on the Upper East Side. Perry was blocked off, as always, and the lights were rigged at the top of the trees. It looked like “this magical terrarium,” King says.
In the finale, Big comes by Carrie’s place in a typically half-hearted attempt, either at winning her back or at closure. “I came here to tell you something,” he says. “You and I—”
“You and I nothing!” she screams. “You cannot do this to me again. You cannot jerk me around.” After he claims that it’s “different this time,” she cuts him off: “Forget you know my number—in fact, forget you know my name. And you can drive down this street all you want—because I don’t live here anymore!”
Most of the many nights they’d spent on the street had come in the spring or summer; this time they were shooting in the winter. The final season shot in the bitter cold, often with snow still on the ground. That night, the actors’ breaths made little white puffs in the air as they shot on that street for the last time ever.
The “I don’t live here anymore” struck Parker in the heart. She didn’t live here anymore. She was leaving Carrie behind. When the scene wrapped, her only solace came from a surprise visitor: Her husband, Matthew Broderick, had been standing there watching with three friends.
Around them, crew members and producers were crying. Everyone decided to end the night around the corner at the White Horse Tavern, a bar known for its history as a literary hangout in the 1950s and ’60s, frequented by Dylan Thomas, James Baldwin, Jack Kerouac, and others. It seemed like the perfect New York place to end the emotional night, except for one thing: The White Horse was closing early, at 1 a.m., to prepare for a city inspection the next day.
The cast and crew of Sex and the City began emptying their pockets of all their cash, handing it to the bartender. “Will you stay open for this much?” someone asked, referring to the wads of money. The White Horse stayed open.
• • •
The finale was expected to be widely watched, not just for its melodrama but also for the fashion spectacle of Carrie in Paris.
Patricia Field did not disappoint. She found an enormous, layered sea green Versace ball gown that was particularly memorable among the many memorable costume changes. This extraordinary dress, a Versace that didn’t look very Versace, held court among the many outfits Field had pulled as options for the Paris finale. The whole staff, even Field and Parker, knew it was over the top. But Parker said, “Just let me put it on.” They photographed it as an option to take to King.
Field and Parker would often have to come up with Supreme Court–level arguments to convince King to approve their more outrageous fashion choices, but this time they knew they had none. Field thought: Okay, maybe when the American fashion plate goes to Paris, she brings “all of her finery.” Parker remained more grounded: “We don’t have any argument for this. It’s just the dream.”
Field saw it as perfect for one of the saddest scenes in the series: the main character living what she thought was her dream with the man she thought was her dream—and being devastatingly disappointed. Carrie could wear it in the scene when she’s stood up by Petrovsky—all the better, because it would look phenomenal flounced out all around her as she waited for him. Baryshnikov described it as looking like a mille-feuille, the French pastry whose name means “a thousand layers” (and is known in America as a Napoleon). “The more heightened that gown was,” Field later said, “the more heightened that sadness was.”
As Parker now summarizes their plea to King: “It’s just everything she thinks she’s running from and everything she thinks she’s running toward. It’s ridiculous and it’s too much. It’s not even the person she is; it’s who she becomes in Aleksandr’s presence.”
Finally, Field called King down to her office, a room so stuffed with designer clothing it looked like a department store. In the middle stood the sea green Versace. “This just came from Paris,” she said in her smoker’s rasp. “It wants to be in the show.”
“Pat, it’s amazing.”
“It’s couture.”
“Pat, how would she ever get it there? Realistically, she would never be able to pack that.”
Field ignored this point. “For the scene where she’s stood up. I’m just saying, one-of-a-kind couture.”
“She couldn’t pack it.” He smiled sadly and left.
Then he thought better and returned. “Okay, do it,” he told Field. The Versace dress decision was one of King’s great takeaways from his entire Sex and the City experience: Sometimes what mattered most was the spectacle.
When it came time to shoot that scene at a New York hotel—many of the Paris interiors were shot stateside—Field drove from her new job at the sitcom Hope & Faith after a Friday night shoot to catch the Sex and the City dress in action. Parker’s stand-in was wearing the dress while the scene was set; to Field’s horror, the dress was crumpled like an unmade bed.
She interrupted to object, then led the crew in smoothing the dress out to cover the entire sofa. Parker should perch in the middle, among the dress’s layers. Then she should get up and go to the window, the gown following her. “That is the way this dress has to be shot,” Field remembered saying.
Parker needed to have four crew members help her carry its layers as she wore it. The scene appeared just as Field demanded. No one who watched that finale forgot that dress and the way it looked spread out on that sofa, Carrie waiting among its layers for true love to find her.
• • •
Baryshnikov, Parker, Noth, and the crew headed off to film in Paris in January 2004, a cold and rainy time in the City of Lights.
They shot at the Hôtel Plaza Athénée, where Petrovsky and Carrie stay together. The cast and crew also made the hotel their home for the shoot, so much so that Parker’s son, James Wilkie, then fifteen months old, started walking steadily there for the first time. He had taken his first step back home in New York, to the relief of father Matthew Broderick, who didn’t want to miss that moment. But James Wilkie became a toddler in Paris, delighting the crew, who felt like his extended family.
At other location shoots around the city, Carrie lunched with Petrovsky’s ex at the trendy restaurant Kong. She called Miranda from a pay phone at Place Saint-Sulpice. She shopped (and tripped) at Dior on Avenue Montaigne. She looked on as a Sex and the City–like foursome brunched at the nearby L’Avenue. She stepped in dog poop while wearing Louboutins on Rue Servandoni. She strolled Place Dauphine with Petrovsky in one of their final moments as a happy couple.
Carrie had, in fact, gotten everything she’d searched for throughout the series: a famous boyfriend, a romantic city. But now she had become the outsider in a city even more glamorous than New York. She could barely communicate with anyone, she didn’t understand the customs, and she lost her trademark “Carrie” necklace, an unsubtle symbol of her identity.
The writers chose the ending that had been there from the beginning: Mr. Big was The One after all. And King went big with Big’s grand gesture.
Big asks for Carrie’s friends’ permission to go sweep her off her feet in Paris. He indicates that he knows his place in Carrie’s life—and articulates the series’s thesis—when he tells her friends, “You’re the loves of her life. A guy’s just lucky to come in fourth.”
Miranda delivers their judgment: “Go get our girl.” Nixon delivers it in such a way that it could make even the most anti-Big among us cry.
Big finds Carrie in Paris and vows to have a word with the Russian when he hears that Petrovsky (accidentally) slapped Carrie. “I don’t need you to rescue me,” she says, in another of the finale’s clear-message moments.
Big at last declares his love at the Pont des Arts: “It took me a really long time to get here. But I’m here. Carrie, you’re The One.”
Her response: “I miss New York. Take me home.”
But the script doesn’t leave it at that. The last scene has Carrie alone among the crowds on the street in New York City, heading off toward whatever is next.
It was here that King planted a surprise for the writers, revealing Mr. Big’s real name when it comes up on Carrie’s pink, bedazzled flip phone: John. The writers learned it for the first time when they read his script. Normally, a detail like that would have been hashed out in the writers’ room. But as he wrote, it just hit him: “He has to have a name. Now, that he’s finally seen Carrie as The One, he’s real.”
John was the least specific name he could come up with. Just John. Just “man.”
King took pride in those final two scripts. “Those Paris episodes,” he says, “landed.”
Yet the show’s creator, Darren Star, had a different reaction. He felt the ending “betrayed what [the show] was about.” The series, he said, was supposed to be about women not being defined by men. They could fall in love with men, but the message should not be about finding fulfillment with one. Alone on the streets of New York would have been fine. Reunited with her friends, sure. Why did Mr. Big have to be such a big part of it? “At the end,” Star says, “it became a conventional romantic comedy.”
Star’s old friend Candace Bushnell agreed with him, though she understood King’s decision. “In real life, Carrie and Big wouldn’t have ended up together,” Bushnell later said. “But at that point the TV show had become so big. Viewers got so invested in the story line of Carrie and Big that it became a bit like Mr. Darcy and Elizabeth Bennet.”
Viewers split along the same lines: Many swooned over the romantic ending. Many others complained that it had betrayed what they loved most about the show. Either way, everyone had a strong opinion about the ending, just as they did about the show.
• • •
By the time the show signed off HBO in 2004, Sex and the City attracted 10.6 million viewers for its finale. The final episode was the series’s most-watched ever. Sex and the City had helped build the cable network into a purveyor of respected television. The show had also gained at least some prestige, not only in the form of Emmys and admiring reviews, but also in academia: UK film studies professors Kim Akass and Janet McCabe edited Reading Sex and the City, a 2004 anthology of critical essays that examine the show’s place in the literary canon (alongside the likes of Theodore Dreiser’s Sister Carrie), its relationship to Woody Allen films, and its strong connection to gay culture.
Over the series’s six seasons, it was nominated for more than fifty Emmys and won seven, including the Outstanding Comedy Series award in 2001, when it needed such recognition most. King won for Outstanding Directing for a Comedy Series in 2002, and Parker and Nixon won for their acting in 2004.
