Television: A word of reassurance: it is safe to read this review even if you don't want to know in advance what happens to Carrie, Miranda, Samantha and Charlotte at the end of the final series of Sex and the City, writesCathy Dillon. (The final episode is due to be screened on TV3 on March 18th and on Channel 4 on March 19th.)
After it was announced that the current series would be the last, one of the producers, Michael Patrick King, promised that the main characters would not all end up treading down the aisle in traditional fashion.
"It's not going to end with a four-wedding ceremony in Central Park," he vowed. "I would shoot myself. And single women everywhere would find us and kill us."
He was exaggerating, but probably not much. The series chronicling the lives, loves and friendship of four single professional women in Manhattan had struck such a chord that it had long since ceased to be a mere TV programme and had become a cultural phenomenon inspiring devotion, division and endless debate and pulling in ratings, awards and magazine covers beyond its makers' wildest dreams.
It has also, inevitably, become a topic for academic study. Last year, the feminist author and commentator Naomi Wolf used an interview she conducted with Candace Bushnell, the author on whose newspaper columns and book the series is based, to look at what SATC's success could be saying about modern womanhood. Wolf argued that the series did nothing less than answer the question originally posed by Virginia Woolf: what would women do if they had a room of their own and £500 a year? (The answer, we could safely conclude, was have a very, very good time.)
Nonetheless, it's a bit daunting to come upon a whole book of learned cultural-theory essays about one of your favourite TV shows, like watching someone take a large scalpel to a lemon mousse. Still, if the title (that ominous "reading") is a bit alarming, the hot pink cover with a photo of a New York yellow cab bearing an ad for the show indicates that the editors (one of whom, Janet McCabe, is based in Trinity College, Dublin) have a sense of humour. The opening pages carry not just a list of the academics' contributions but a cast-list from the show and a recipe for the characters' favourite cocktail, the Cosmopolitan, which ends with the instruction to "curl up with this book and enjoy". In other words: relax, we're not going to be too po-faced about this. Discovering that at the back, along with the (extensive) bibliography there's a location map and a list of all the places in Manhattan the characters frequent, I began to hear alarm bells from the opposite direction - was this going to be completely trivial and undermine its subject? A case of trying to wear blue stockings and Manolos? Luckily the editors have managed to mirror the show's fine balancing act between breezy and serious. And the light, delicious confection stands up well to the surgical analysis. You thought the show's opening credit sequence, with its shots of Carrie strolling past New York landmarks and getting drenched by a bus to a jaunty salsa tune, was just a kick-ass introduction? No, apparently it "confirms a masochistic relationship that pits women against each other in patriarchal fairytales".
Sex and the City didn't start off very promisingly, despite its obvious intelligence, high production values and the use of witty Woody Allen-style devices such as vox-pops and direct-to-camera monologues (covered here in Tom Grochowski's entertaining essay 'Neurotic in New York: The Woody Allen touches in Sex and the City').
As someone who has never even tried on, let alone bought, a pair of Jimmy Choos or a Dior dress, the first few episodes irritated me and I gave up. The characters seemed spoilt, self-absorbed and so in thrall to their designer labels and brash, designer men that it seemed that few women outside Manhattan could identify with them. But I chanced on it again during the second series and was immediately hooked. The four main characters had been softened from Bushnell's husband-hunting harridans into something approaching normal, attractive women - sassy, smart and likeable. And there was no resisting the storylines, which spoke to urban professional women everywhere and their concerns about sex, relationships, work, having or not having children, and how to get someone to fix the plumbing.
Moreover, while it has been criticised for being reactionary in that it is about an old-fashioned quest for Mr Right, it is immediately obvious that the core relationship and the most important one is the friendship of the four women.
The show struck a chord because it is sharp and perceptive and very witty. Occasionally it's moving too. Like the episode in which Miranda's mother dies and the friends travel to her home town for the funeral. As well as her grief, Miranda has to cope with the pity of her relatives for her single state. Her sister and brother-in-law want her to walk out of the church with them because "God forbid I walk it alone, because that would be the real tragedy, right? A 35-year-old single woman is more awful than a coffin" . She wisecracks through as best she can, but coming down the central aisle alone after the service, she looks as if she's about to fall - until Carrie comes to the rescue and they walk out hand in hand.
Much has been made of the show's graphic sexual content, and it is true that it is incredibly explicit - anyone who is easily offended should steer well clear. But while the women are tough, sexually assertive and extremely frank about the details of their sex lives, they are seldom gratuitously crude - well, apart from Samantha, and her friends are often as shocked (and amused) by her as we are. Nor are they gratuitously cruel. And their banter is very funny, comparable with Woody Allen at his best. Which is probably why the show has managed not to alienate male viewers - 40 per cent of the audience for the third series on Channel 4 was male, a higher proportion than for the other main "singleton" shows, Ally McBeal and Friends.
One contributor to the book, David Greven, in his essay, 'The Museum of Unnatural History', argues that the male characters in the programme, both straight and gay, are a series of freaks and that "the freakishness of the suitors emerges not as a critique of male power but as a relentless assault on the essential umarriageability of the women, ongoing examples of their terrible, jinxed luck". But he fails to take into account that while the women get through a fair amount of "modelisers" (men who will date only models), commitment-phobes and serious neurotics, Carrie's three main boyfriends were handsome, powerful Mr Big; handsome, kind Aidan; and handsome, clever Berger. By the end of the last series Miranda had settled down with dependable, likeable Steve, Charlotte was happily married to dependable, likeable Harry, and even Samantha's cynicism about love was being eroded by caring younger boyfriend Smith.
If anything, these guys are too good to be true, a view endorsed by Joanna Di Mattia's enjoyable opening essay in which she outlines how Big and Aidan represent two elements of the common fantasy of Mr Right, passion and security - and how both are shown to be illusions. Besides, as Andrew Billen, quoted here, observed in the Guardian, "overhearing the sexual revelations of four attractive women is not high on the list of the straight man's unpleasant experiences".
Initially, some commentators speculated that SATC was just a "gay-code" show, with the women characters simply mouthpieces for gay men, in spite of the fact that it is frequently written by women, mainly Cindy Chupack and Jenny Bicks, and directed by them - the directors have included respected independent auteurs like Susan Seidelman (Desperately Seeking Susan), Allison Anders (Gas, Food, Lodging) and Nicole Holofcener (Walking and Talking).
Much hasbeen made too of the emphasis on consumerism and designer labels. And there's no doubt that the aspirational element which irked me has played a large part in its success, with the show enjoying a symbiotic relationship with the fashion press. This is dealt with in a number of the contributions, most especially in three engaging essays in the section titled Fashion and Cultural Identities: 'Fashion is the Fifth Character' by Stella Bruzzi and Pamela Church Gibson; 'Sex and the City: A Fashion Editor's Dream?' by Anna König and 'My Manolos, My Self' by Sarah Niblock.
When it comes to the rampant consumerism, the Allen-esque irony of the script frequently rescues things. In one episode Samantha is helping prepare Smith, an actor, for an appearance on a teen TV show. She insists that the label-averse hunk wear a pair of designer sunglasses with his off-the-peg denims and T-shirt.
"After all," she chirps, "if you're not wearing something they can't afford, how will the kids know to look up to you?"
The shop-till-you-drop ethic doesn't go unquestioned. Stella Bruzzi and Pamela Church Gibson cite the episode in which Carrie, the shoe-shopper extraordinaire, is in danger of losing her rent-controlled apartment and Miranda, after a quick calculation, points out that if Carrie had saved all the money she spent on shoes she would have enough for a mortgage deposit. And the later series, while retaining the glamour, concentrated more on serious issues including breast cancer and in-vitro fertilisation.
Given that New York plays such an important role in the series I was surprised that there wasn't more mention of September 11th in this book. There are a couple of references to the fact that the opening credit sequence had to be changed, with the Empire State Building substituted for the Twin Towers, but I expected more, given that the lifestyle embraced by the characters is part of what offends fundamentalists.
While it's clear that most of the contributors to this book are fans, it's not just hagiography. In her essay 'Orgasms and Empowerment' (which is much more lively than its 1970s-sounding title suggests), Astrid Henry links SATC to "Third Wave feminism" , and the arrival of a generation that "considers feminism a given, handed to young women at birth". She does, however, admit that the show's "vision of female empowerment is severely limited by the fact that all four of its protagonists are white, heterosexual, thin, conventionally attractive and, importantly, economically well-off".
Occasionally the contributions do lapse into dismal academic-ese - I found Jonathan Bignell's essay 'Sex, Confession and Witness', which explores SATC in the context of women's magazines and TV magazine shows such as Oprah dull - but, for the most part, analytically minded fans, or foes who still can't see what the fuss is about, should find quite a bit to enjoy. Sex and the City - and this book - illustrate not only that feminism is alive and well, but that good writing by and about women is too. She might be shocked by the girls' vocabulary but I think, overall, Virginia would approve.
Cathy Dillon is a journalist and critic
Reading Sex and the City. Edited by Kim Akass and Janet McCabe, I.B. Tauris. £12.95