I didn’t like Sex and the City, and then I watched it

polygon.com:

I never planned to watch Sex and the City. Nothing I heard about the series drew me to it in particular. My main familiarity with it involved being loosely a part of conversations where friends assigned themselves characters, like being “a Miranda” or “a Carrie.” However, on one sleepy Friday evening, my partner had turned it on to watch as they cooked. Content to try something new, I plopped myself down on the couch with a chocolate martini in hand.

The fact that I would prejudge Sex and the City isn’t all that surprising. In a 2013 essay for the New Yorker, Emily Nussbaum wrote about how even critics have historically excluded the show from the canon of television greats and relegated it to the sidelines of TV. And its supporters weren’t immune. She writes: “By the show’s fifteen-year anniversary, this year, we fans had trained ourselves to downgrade the show to a ‘guilty pleasure,’ to mock its puns, to get into self-flagellating conversations about those blinkered and blinged-out movies,” conversations that I had more or less absorbed over the years.

But after actually watching the show, Carrie’s quick tongue immediately ensnared me in her world and I could not stop watching. I grappled with the toxic push and pull of her romance with Big, and gawked at the absurdity of this portrayal of life in New York City in the ’90s and 2000s. But even more than any of this, the series contained a warmth that surprised me. Viewing the series in this day and age — when the premise of a woman being single and having sex in her 30s is ostensibly less provocative — strips it away of any sort of “shock” factor that comes with sex. Instead, what stood out to me was a story lined with the generosity and messiness of unconditional female friendships and love.

The four — you know them even if you don’t know them — don’t always get along. Miranda in particular takes issue with Carrie’s proclivity to chase after a man who doesn’t treat her well, and Charlotte might judge Samantha’s