"Why are there so many great unmarried women, and no great unmarried men?" asks thirty-something Carrie Bradshaw (Sarah Jessica Parker), directly addressing the camera. That is one of the several questions she, as a newspaper columnist, tries to answer in the 94 episodes of one of the most fascinating TV shows of the '90s.
Her doubt stems from an encounter with a British woman (Sarah Wynter) who was inexplicably dumped by a New Yorker despite having looked at a house with him, which actually mean something in London according to her. Of course, Carrie readily informs her (and us), the same rules don't apply in New York, where romance appears to be dead. To prove her point, she interviews some of her acquaintances, dividing them in three categories: Toxic Bachelors (all the male interviewees except one), Hopeless Romantics (the guy who was left out earlier) and Unmarried Women (Carrie's best friends). It is with the latter that the protagonist subsequently has a cup of coffee, allowing the audience to know these ladies a little better: Miranda Hobbes (Cynthia Nixon) is a cynical lawyer who has lost nearly all faith in the male gender; Charlotte York (Kristin Davis), an art gallerist, shares Carrie's belief that true love does exist; and Samantha Jones (Kim Cattrall), a PR woman, is arguably the "worst" of the group, as she sleeps with a different man every night and claims women should be able to have sex like men, i.e. without any feelings involved. Carrie sets out to test this theory, eventually running into a handsome stranger known only as Mr. Big (Chris Noth)...
Based on the eponymous book by Candace Bushnell, the show also owes a lot to Jane Austen (the sharp female wit) and Woody Allen (the reflection on love in the Big Apple), combining the two aspects in a practically flawless exercise in smart comedy. If a complaint has to be made, it would be that the straight-to-camera asides (used in early episodes) come off as a little distracting from the main narrative flow, which is marvelous: dealing with a familiar yet interesting topic through the eyes of four wonderful "heroines" (all perfectly defined in less than five minutes - very remarkable), it generates 23 minutes of solid, heartfelt laughs.
The cast is quite simply astounding, especially the more pessimistic, and therefore funnier, Miranda and Samantha, with Nixon's cold intellectual ideally counterbalanced by Cattrall's feisty man-eater. Astonishingly, though, considering the latter's foul mouth in the remainder of the series, it is a bit of a surprise to find out that the pilot is the show's least profane episode, the F-word being spoken only twice: once by Nixon as the girls discuss The Last Seduction (one of the reasons they believe emotionless sex is possible), and once by the irresistibly charming Noth (the program's best male cast-member) in the last scene, which acts as the beginning of the serial's juiciest storyline. Absolutely fabulous.
