<\/p>\n
In the end, Carrie was left holding the pie. – Credit: Craig Blankenhorn\/HBO<\/p>\n<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n
I started watching Sex and the City<\/em> in college. On Sunday nights, I\u2019d walk over to my friend Anna\u2019s room in our small Midwestern liberal arts college. I\u2019d sit on the cheaply carpeted floor, our friend Kate on the bed. We\u2019d drink beer or Fresca, eat bags of Doritos and greasy cafeteria pizza. We screamed about the Post-it note breakup. The $485 shoes stolen at the baby shower. Sex swings and dildos and gorgeous, gorgeous clothes.<\/p>\n Back then, the New York world of Carrie (Sarah Jessica Parker), Miranda (Cynthia Nixon), Charlotte (Kristin Davis), and Samantha (Kim Cattrall) felt so far away. I watched them like I was ogling jewelry in a Tiffany case. It was glamorous, fascinating, sparkly, sometimes incredibly tacky, but always a fantasy life for someone else.<\/p>\n More from Rolling Stone<\/strong><\/p>\n We\u2019d take the BuzzFeed quizzes to determine which SATC<\/em> type we were. I was a Charlotte, Anna the Carrie, Kate the Miranda. (No Samathas \u2014 we were good Midwestern girls then.) It was a safe kind of a foil for us and our lives. We didn\u2019t have the shoes, the hair, the Manhattan apartments, or the careers, but we still had to muddle through the same morass of love and loss, and embarrassing failed relationships.<\/p>\n I am still friends with Anna and Kate. In the past 24 years, we\u2019ve accumulated four marriages, three divorces, three kids, and so much joy and heartbreak we\u2019ve stopped keeping track. And no matter where my friends and I have lived, or who we\u2019ve been married to, we\u2019ve always had each other, and Carrie Bradshaw.<\/p>\n When And Just Like That\u2026<\/em> premiered in December of 2021, we watched it again. We live far apart now, Fresca and Doritos making way for weed gummies and water. We are in our forties, we\u2019re tired, our stomachs hurt, and none of us is sitting on the floor anymore. But now, with Thursday night\u2019s conclusion of Season Three, our time with Carrie and friends is ending. Showrunner Michael Patrick King announced in an Aug. 1 Instagram post that the season finale would also serve as the last stop for the characters we\u2019ve come to know and love.<\/p>\n The finale was not a kumbaya moment for the women \u2014 a fractured Thanksgiving Day flooded with interpersonal drama and shit, both metaphorical and literal (see: Miranda\u2019s clogged toilet). At the end of the holiday, Carrie found herself alone, with an entire pie all to herself, in her huge home. It was not an easy happily-ever-after. But it was still a triumph. After 27 years of watching Carrie Bradshaw go through relationship after relationship, ending up not alone, but on her own, it felt like a detente, an uneasy peace with the world of heteronormative relationships.<\/p>\n In the three years since Carrie came back into our lives, many fans criticized the sequel series: The characters were obnoxious, the plot lines humiliating. Miranda is now fully gay, split up from Steve (David Eigenberg), her son Brady (Niall Cunningham) a man-child stumbling through his twenties. Charlotte is married with two children, one of them nonbinary, and she is reentering the workforce. Anthony Marentino (Mario Cantone), originally an SATC<\/em> sidekick as Charlotte\u2019s wedding planner (and then Carrie\u2019s, in the first movie) is a fully fleshed-out character who runs a bakery where men in hot pants sell baguettes (get it?). Samantha was there in absentia only, living in London, since Kim Cattrall decided not to come back for round two. In her stead, the sequel added Seema Patel (Sarita Choudhury), a sexy, high-profile real estate broker; and Lisa Todd Wexley (Nicole Ari Parker), an ambitious documentary filmmaker whose children go to the same exclusive private school as Charlotte\u2019s.<\/p>\n And Carrie, after getting on the apps, starting a podcast, and having it shut down, got back together with Aidan (John Corbett) 22 years after their second breakup, only for it to fail spectacularly all over again. She has a fling with a sexy author who lives below her, but it\u2019s short-lived. As she tells Charlotte, \u201cI have to quit thinking maybe a man. And start accepting maybe just me.\u201d<\/p>\n For many, the glamour of it all seemed to be gone, replaced with a glossy series of embarrassments. Why can\u2019t these women get it together? the critics cried. Why can\u2019t there be dignity? Why do they have to be so cringey? Why can\u2019t they\u2026<\/p>\n Why can\u2019t they what?<\/em> You want Carrie to sit at home and knit? You want them to drink water, journal, do \u201cthought work\u201d, talk about their healing journeys?<\/p>\n \u201cWhat is it you want from Carrie?\u201d<\/em> I want to scream. Because whatever she\u2019s given us \u2014 and I don\u2019t always know what that is \u2014 it\u2019s always been so much. The muchness of these two series (and the two feature films in between) and the lives of these women has always been the point. The stories have overflowed with a horrible, glorious narrative abundance. There is always adventure. Always sex. Always tears. Always a Cosmo with a friend at the end of the day. She gave us so much, but never perfection. And I thank her for that. Because that would be the one narrative I couldn\u2019t stand.<\/p>\n Carrie, frankly, has always been a mess \u2014 a beautiful, cringe-inducing, selfish, couture-wearing mess. I recently made my daughter, a 14-year-old, and her Gen Z\u00a0 friends watch the episode from the original series where Carrie dates the bisexual man, Sean, and is utterly baffled by it. (Alanis Morrissette makes a guest appearance at a party for cool young people who play spin the bottle, and her character and Carrie sharing what was at the time, I guess, a scandalous kiss.) The kids shrieked and groaned, just as much as I did watching Miranda follow her annoying comedian love, Che (Sara Ramirez), to L.A. in And Just Like That\u2026<\/em>, and then return uncoupled in shame.<\/p>\n \u201cBut why is it cringe?\u201d my daughter asked. \u201cBecause life is,\u201d I told her. I got an eye-roll. But it\u2019s true.<\/p>\n Who cares if the ending wasn\u2019t what you wanted? Who ever gets the ending they want from this life? And wasn\u2019t the story of Carrie Bradshaw always the story of a woman seeking and never finding? Maybe finding pie, and peace, is enough. People who demand some sort of narrative continuity from a show that has always been absurd and complicated are remembering a Carrie Bradshaw who never existed.<\/p>\n The outcry over Carrie Bradshaw has always been less about the character and more about our culture. Right now, we are in a cultural regression that doesn\u2019t want to see women in public life. The rollback of reproductive rights, the ascendance of the trad wife as a cultural figure \u2014 these changes seem to say, \u201cWe don\u2019t want to see women alone, fucking around in beautiful shoes in a big city.\u201d<\/p>\n Part of the cultural discomfort with the show\u2019s reboot reflects a squeamishness with the idea of women aging. We want women to age, but to do so gracefully (whatever that means), and do it over there, where we don\u2019t have to see the tears, the mess, the continued mortifications and heartbreaks.<\/p>\n I love that the show was rebooted. I love that it didn\u2019t let Carrie or the rest of us off the hook with the fairy-tale of a life with Chris Noth\u2019s iconic character, Big (for those who don\u2019t know, he died in the first episode of the sequel series \u2014 a heart attack during a Peloton ride), which we all knew would never be that great. I love that it came back and it forced us to uncomfortably face the fact that none of us make it to middle age unscathed. That there is impotence and cancer and infidelity and vanity and loss. That you can get so much therapy and still come out and have sex with a nun (that would be a lesbian-Miranda subplot in AJLT<\/em>). That\u2019s life. I\u2019ve definitely done worse.<\/p>\n These characters dealt with it all, the literal and metaphorical shit. So, in that way, it was one of the most surreally real shows. A fantastic, absurdist fever dream that has felt more perfectly imperfect than anything else on TV to date.<\/p>\n I realize in some ways that my desire to scream is a misdirected anger at the critics. What I really want is to scream at is a world that asks so much of women and our lives and our stories. What else do you want from us?<\/em> You want us to fade off into a polished, beautiful oblivion, so you can pretend we didn\u2019t age, didn\u2019t get Botox, didn\u2019t struggle with a world that constantly pulls the rug out from under us just when we think we\u2019ve gotten there. Because, the truth is, we will never get there.<\/p>\n Whatever else we are, we are human, we are fallible, we are cringey messes, and often shitty friends; we don\u2019t age well, or parent well. Our kids are bratty, and we don\u2019t understand them. Our partners are needy. There is shit welling up from our toilets, we have complicated work relationships, we live through disappointments, and love affairs, and professional ambition, and everything goes wrong more often than goes right. We often wonder how we got here. And more often than not, like Carrie Bradshaw, we are giving up on dreams of a man and embracing the dreams of ourselves. It\u2019s bad, and imperfect, but here we still are, shoes off, eating a whole pie in the kitchen.<\/p>\n So, I say long live Carrie Bradshaw. Thank you for giving us your muchness and your mess. And long live the rest of us horribly, wonderful, and glorious women.<\/p>\n Best of Rolling Stone<\/strong><\/p>\n Sign up for RollingStone’s Newsletter<\/a>. For the latest news, follow us on Facebook<\/a>, Twitter<\/a>, and Instagram<\/a>.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n \u2018 The preceding article may include information circulated by third parties \u2019 <\/em><\/p>\n \u2018 Some details of this article were extracted from the following source www.yahoo.com \u2019 <\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" In the end, Carrie was left holding the pie. – Credit: Craig Blankenhorn\/HBO I started watching Sex and the City in college. On Sunday nights, I\u2019d walk over to my friend Anna\u2019s room in our small Midwestern liberal arts college. I\u2019d sit on the cheaply carpeted floor, our friend Kate on the bed. We\u2019d drink […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":1964024,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"om_disable_all_campaigns":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"jnews-multi-image_gallery":[],"jnews_single_post":[],"jnews_primary_category":[],"jnews_social_meta":[],"footnotes":""},"categories":[25172],"tags":[305461,315568,305207,346866,39497,304796],"class_list":["post-1964023","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-entertainment","tag-carrie","tag-carrie-bradshaw","tag-charlotte","tag-friend-kate","tag-kim-cattrall","tag-sarah-jessica-parker"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/08\/\u2018Sex-and-the-City-Is-Over-Long-Live-Carrie-Bradshaw.jpeg","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1964023","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1964023"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1964023\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/1964024"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1964023"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1964023"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1964023"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}