In another major licensing grab for Netflix, HBO's juggernaut Sex and the City officially landed on the platform this month. Older fans of the show are already anticipating the possibility of Gen Z's horrified reaction to the raunchy and, in some ways, culturally outdated show. Can today's youth stomach Carrie's confusion over bisexuality or the women's obsession with thinness? Will "puriteens" be scandalized watching Samantha Jones hook up with a random delivery guy?
Lest we forget, Sex and the City has been available to stream for years. So the idea that teenagers and early 20-somethings have never engaged with the series before is a little presumptuous. (They've surely encountered some fashion inspo TikToks.) Rather, it seems like this move to Netflix has given everyone a chance to reignite the now-decades-long discourse about the show's storylines and characters.
It's only natural then that social media users are already firing off takes about Carrie Bradshaw. To be fair, fans are never not discussing the show's polarizing protagonist. In the years during and after the show aired in 1998, Carrie was largely celebrated as a feminist triumph — the rare single, childless (and messy) woman in her 30s portrayed in a (somewhat) aspirational light.
"We had never seen female characters date this way or talk this way before on television," says Jennifer Keishin Armstrong, author of Sex and the City and Us: How Four Single Women Changed the Way We Think, Live, and Love. "Carrie was at its center, which is a position often reserved for the sane, grounded, most relatable one."
However, the 2010s saw a wave of essays and criticism reevaluating her character — mostly by emphasizing her more annoying qualities — which the show occasionally downplayed. Was Carrie ever the ideal image of female independence, or just a self-absorbed, self-destructive nightmare?
In 2024, the latter opinion has become more of a default perspective, and the primary lens through which many fans seem to enjoy the show. How did this anti-Carrie sentiment come to consume so much of the discourse surrounding SATC — a lighthearted but textually rich show with an abundance of interesting talking points, a slew of actual villains, and three other complex main characters?
