No More Sex

Carrie Bradshaw and the gang have their last hoorah.

By Ramon Jaime | CNLA Correspondent
Sunday, Februay 22, 2004 at 8:05 PM PST

Sunday night was a big night for both Sex and the City and its real-life stars.

"Sex and the City," which was airing its final episode on HBO on Sunday, won the SAG trophy for best ensemble cast in a TV comedy, ironically while most of America was anxiously waiting for the final episode to air. The end of six years came too quickly.

Despite all of the inroads the show has forged in making the TV landscape safe for provocative comedy and in helping to transform female sexuality from something dirty to something proud and urgent, the federal government is working busily to crack down on broadcasters in perceived areas of nudity and profanity. It's an issue that, thankfully, "Sex" has been permitted to skirt comfortably, thumbing its nose at convention and exercising the freedom to be as wanton as it wants to be -- and then some.

During its six seasons, the show has dealt openly and often uproariously with such heretofore-taboo issues as orgasms, penis size, the taste of semen, pubic hair color, oral sex etiquette and the degree to which a woman is in touch with -- and typically looks at -- her own vagina. The show has been permitted to use real four-letter words and encouraged to spell out the amorous/sexual feelings that have long been present on television solely in euphemism.

Ah, to be on premium cable.

Even so, the irony of "Sex" leaving the air at a moment of such creative trepidation and content caution should not be lost. The message, perhaps, is that while the show has done much to open up the tube and even leave an indelible mark on the culture, it remains, to the end, a peerless rebel.

Candace Bushnell, upon whose best-selling book "Sex and the City" the show is based on and who had creative input into the series during its first two seasons, believes that the social issues that led to her writing that first tome still exist in a significant way.

"There was this whole culture of single women who suddenly found themselves having careers in big cities, trying to work out relationships with men," Bushnell emphasizes. "The whole concept that I started with was, why are there all of these fabulous thirtysomething single women -- and where are the fabulous thirtysomething single men to date them and marry them? And you know what? Ten years later, it's still a good question."

Apart from that, Bushnell is proud to have inspired a rare female-driven comedy: "That reflects the reality of the way women think," she says. "I've talked to women from age 18 up to probably 70, and they actually feel the show and my books reflect the way women actually feel but weren't allowed to say publicly until now. I've lived that life myself, so I'm here to tell you just how real it is."

"Sex and the City" also seems to have struck a particular chord with the gay community, which has embraced the show as its own despite a storyline surrounding four very heterosexual women.
"The theory has long been that these women were actually gay men in drag and were created to impart that idea, particularly in the way they're so sexually neurotic," says Karl Petros, Televison critic for CNLA. "They were almost like stereotypical gay men: obsessed with sex, fashion and finding Mr. Right."

Gay or straight, when audiences finally bid farewell to those four pals Carrie Bradshaw (Sarah Jessica Parker), Samantha Jones (Kim Cattrall), Charlotte York (Kristin Davis) and Miranda Hobbes (Cynthia Nixon), they will simultaneously be saying goodbye to a style of TV comedy the likes of which we're not likely to see again for a while -- certainly not in the network primetime universe.

The final burst of episodes this season has provided the usual level of tumult facing our heroines. Samantha contracted breast cancer. Miranda finally got married to Steve the bartender (David Eigenberg), the father of her son. Carrie has fallen in love with famed Russian artist Aleksandr Petrovsky (Mikhail Baryshnikov), though Mr. Big (Chris Noth) never looms too terribly far from her thoughts. And a few weeks ago, an aging party girl (guest star Kristen Johnston) fell out an 18th-story window while desperately trying to light a cigarette. Just another season in that peculiar paradise they call Manhattan.

This is one of the show's primary selling points, according to no less an authority than Playboy founder and chairman Hugh Hefner, who did a guest spot in one "Sex" episode that was filmed at the famed Playboy Mansion in Holmby Hills.

"There are a lot of reasons why this is my favorite show," Hefner begins, "but at the top of that list is the fact that 'Sex and the City' has done the same thing that I tried to accomplish in my magazine in the very conservative 1950s -- that is, put forward the notion that nice girls like sex, too. The show makes it clear that women are just as sexual as guys. And that the key to personal sexual freedom for women is to be judged in a way that's not so very different than men.

"Historically, women were the perceived daughters of Eve, the sources of original sin," he continues. "It gave them second-class, nonhuman roles in society. They were the ones expected to uphold our morality, while guys did whatever they felt like doing. 'Sex and the City' put women on equal sexual footing. The reality is, all of us -- women and men -- are sexual creatures. This show has recognized that."

The fact that Hefner has never missed an episode and has all of the "Sex" DVDs is music to the ears of Darren Star, the show's creator and executive producer, who adapted the series from author Bushnell's book. Although Star long ago relinquished creative control of "Sex" to showrunner Michael Patrick King, he continued to have a hand in it, reading all of the scripts and inserting his two-cents worth where necessary.

It has sometimes bothered Star (who also created "Beverly Hills, 90210" and "Melrose Place") that "Sex" is too often viewed as gratuitously, self-consciously naughty rather than simply character-driven and story-driven.

"When I originally pitched the show to (HBO chairman and CEO) Chris Albrecht, I told him you can watch the Playboy Channel and see all the soft porn that you want," Star recalls. "I made it clear that this show wouldn't just be about saying four-letter words and showing boobs.

"For me, it was about doing something that TV had never done before," he adds. "There was plenty of comedy on the networks, but the humor came out of what you couldn't say, from euphemism. I wanted to try a comedy where the laughs came from what the characters actually were saying and from a truthful place, from what they were going through. We had never seen sex from the female point of view. That had simply never been expressed. It wasn't about seeing how many naughty words we could slip through but the way that the audience was actually thinking and speaking. The films (1975's) 'Shampoo' and (1971's) 'Carnal Knowledge' were my touchstones for what we set out to do."

It was also important to Star that the show reflect its surroundings; hence, the very splashy, location-heavy, visually rich texture of "Sex," which early on became a sort of weekly valentine to the city that never sleeps.

"We devised a way fairly early on to maximize the locations in New York," Star says. "It was important to me -- from the beginning, that we do far more than just the usual couple of token exteriors. It was vital to the show's energy and vitality that it all be shot in New York City."

Another aspect that was key to Star's thinking was for the show to be compatible with the other entries on HBO's schedule, "so that it wouldn't be jarring to go from watching this show to watching a movie," he says. "The idea was to make a mini movie every week, which isn't easy with a comedy. But having it be single-camera film obviously helped tremendously."

As for the timing of the show's leaving the air when decency issues have grown to become the latest political rage, Star is simply grateful that "Sex" has been able to operate under the radar in seemingly something of its own racy orbit.

"We're very repressed and puritanical in this country," Star believes, "And maybe that's one reason this show became the I.D. of the viewers, especially women. It sent a message to single women in particular that they need not feel like pariahs or perverts. It opened up a real conversation about sex as well ... The show seemed to touch people's lives in a significant way -- because it gave voice to things they were thinking and were not always permitted to express."

To be sure, the show has left an indelible mark on HBO, greatly enhancing the pay-cabler's reputation in providing a home for edgy content free from conventional constraints.

HBO Entertainment president Carolyn Strauss emphasizes: "Airing this show has been a really terrific experience for all of us. The hallmark of 'Sex and the City' really has been its ability to capture an emotional truth of a certain sort of women at a time and place in their lives in a way that's never been done. To our mind, the true frankness of the show hasn't been in its language or sex, but in the emotion of it."

The show's four core characters have surely been all over the emotional and spiritual map -- experiencing love, loss, longing, laziness and the full-course meal of life. Unlike the conventional view of what it's like for single women in an urban metropolis, the ladies of "Sex" were neither conventionally unhappy nor incomplete, taking refuge in one another when the storm clouds of relationships made them scurry for cover.

So popular have these women become as cultural icons that one might have expected to see a scad of imitators. But aside from Showtime's new and "Sex"-influenced "The L Word," primetime television hasn't even attempted to duplicate the "Sex" magic. That surprises Robert J. Thompson, a professor at Syracuse University and director of the Center for the Study of Popular Television.
"It makes sense that we'd soon see the next generation of 'Sex and the City'-inspired programming," Thompson believes. "It has all the earmarks of a trailblazer. But it hasn't happened yet."

Thompson credits the show as "the first sitcom to really cop some serious artistic attitude. It demonstrated that the half-hour comedic form can do all kinds of things besides those episodes where the woman wants a surprise party, but pretends she doesn't," he says.
Even though the show is leaving the air in originals, "Sex and the City" isn't exactly going to disappear entirely. It returns in June on TBS Superstation for a 15-month exclusive window of weekly airings, featuring slightly modified language tracks originally recorded for international distribution. Then in Fall 2005, all 94 episodes will be stripped by Tribune Broadcasting on all of its stations, serving up a 22-minute version in greatly sanitized and edited form.

The show's final episode will feature more sentiment than the sassiness which inspired young women to embrace aging with confidence and vigor. Carrie chooses Mr. Big over the Russian, Alek, and New York over Paris. The roughewn Miranda gives in to love with her new Mother-in-law moving in. Charlotte gets a baby she really wants and Samantha ends up with the boy-toy who really loves her.

With the end of "Sex", the show will continue to inspire endless cocktail party chat over whether it's pre-feminist, post-feminist, anti-feminist or non-feminist. It will instigate endless rounds of next-day water cooler discussion. It will keep surprising us. And it will persist in making us laugh for years to come in reruns -- keeping the airwaves safe for breasts and bad behavior.

The Associated Press and Reuters were sourced for this article.