Sex and the City Season 1, Explained

By Joanna Rothkopf | June 4, 2018 | 5:00pm

Entertainment TV

For the 20th anniversary of Sex and the City—which premiered on HBO on June 6, 1998 and went on to become iconic prestige television—Jezebel is doing a week of posts dedicated to our favorite band of sexual women friends.

As an aspiring New York Star columnist growing up outside of New York in the ’90s and early ’00s, I watched Sex and the City non-stop and on permanent repeat since its premiere in ’98, hopelessly taken with its portrayal of literary New York (which I realize, now, directly informs what I think New York should be even after living here for many years).

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Of the six seasons, the first is the only one that feels actively dated in its tone, look, and content (though they all do to some degree). Carrie has brown hair! They still talk to the camera! All the interviewed “single guys” look like a very specific, prematurely aging kind of suit-wearing finance bro! They still eat Chinese food! They smoke in bars! They aren’t yet sudden and inexplicable members of the New York glitterati! It is somehow plausible that you could be on the side of a bus for writing a column!!!

It’s the season that introduced us to the five personality archetypes: the Carrie, the Miranda, the Charlotte, the Samantha, and the Stanford (I’m the Stanford), that forced us to recognize the Mr. Bigs in our life (mine was my neighbor who let me smoke pot in his blue VW camper), and that made us give our Skippers a really hard look to see if we could convince ourselves to get it up for them, after all (we couldn’t).

Love it? Hate it? Regardless—let me explain it to you.

Producer: Phoebe Bradford, Creative Producer: Eddie Costas