Why Carrie Bradshaw Is the Anti-hero We Didn’t Know We Needed
What the first two seasons of Sex and the City got right about dating
After watching Materialists, I was inspired to revisit Sex and the City. I watched episodes here and there in high school and college, but I wasn’t super obsessed with the show. I'm currently (hate)watching And Just Like That..., which I hoped would have something interesting to say about post-menopausal women in their late 50s and early 60s. Alas, they're all just very bored and rich, having achieved all the dreams they cried over and felt insecure about in their 30s. The Gilded Age handles this whole "rich people with silly problems" concept much better. There are six more episodes left of this season of AJLT, so they might surprise us and rev up the storytelling, but I have doubts.
As I was making my way through the first two seasons of SATC, something odd took over me—I felt myself understanding Carrie and even recognizing my past self in some of her insecurities and decision-making. It was odd, but perhaps she's such a controversial character because she is written with a type of messy, raw truth that's truer to life than we'd like to admit.
During her promo tour for the new season of AJLT, Sarah Jessica Parker gave an interview to The Guardian where she mentioned she prefers to think of Carrie as an anti-hero. Emily Nussbaum first wrote about Carrie as an anti-hero1 back in 2013 for The New Yorker.
“I prefer that to any other description of her, because it allows her to be as male as the men have been. I love The Sopranos so much, and I look at all the times [Tony] was unlawful, and we loved him. Carrie has an affair and everybody falls apart,” says Parker ruefully.
The following analysis covers the storylines and character developments in the first two seasons of SATC (with a little bit of season three sprinkled in)—which display genuinely excellent comedy, drama, performances and writing. Watching them took me back to dating in my 20s and 30s, reliving some of the mistakes I made. Much of the plotting that was attempted in Materialists is articulated and executed far better across seasons one and two of SATC.
Carrie's Relatable Toxic Patterns
“An antihero, to me, is somebody that’s not behaving in conventional ways, and she hasn’t ever.” - Sarah Jessica Parker on Carrie in an interview with The Guardian
Love her or hate her, Carrie's emotional immaturity and insecure attachment style in the first two season are deeply relatable. We'd all like to think we'd never be like her, but we've all had a "Carrie moment" here and there. The difference is that I learned not to get back with my exes after two unsuccessful attempts in my 30s—those relationships didn't work for a reason. Carrie is still doing this in her 50s with Aiden, and it's baffling!
I remain perplexed by the storyline in AJLT wherein Aiden2 asks her to put her life on hold for five years while he sorts out his demanding family situation. It's an insane request at any age, but to ask that of a woman her age is particularly egregious in my opinion. She seems weirdly cuckolded by this choice and I don't like it. Then again, she did do him very dirty when they first dated. Carrie lives for the drama, but the drama in Carrie x Aiden 2.0 is just depressing.
Carrie in her 30s is an absolute lunatic. Remember her ransacking the apartment of that very cute guy with the Tweety Bird tattoo to find something incriminating? She also stalked Big and his mother at church! It was sad that this led to her finding out that Big hadn't even mentioned her to his mother after they'd been dating for maybe six months at that point—bad sign! Red flag! (Later in season three she balks at meeting Aiden's parents, but at least she had self-awareness about the self-sabotage. Growth!)
Both Big and Carrie are toxic and thrive on drama. He drops the news of moving to Paris, and she's not even part of the equation—he's not thinking about how this relationship might work or not. Carrie shows up at his apartment with McDonald's, talking about "le Big Mac" and "le French fries," trying to make a long-distance relationship work, and they have a huge blowout fight. Rationally, she knows what's wrong with this relationship, but her emotions get the best of her when it comes to him—her romantic delusions are strong even with the blatant evidence that the man she loves will not prioritize her.
The Big Dynamic: A Situationship For the Ages
While Big and Carrie went on dates, and occasionally he took her to high society parties, they mostly existed in his apartment, in his bed. She was his favorite lover, no doubt, but in these early seasons she’s not "the one." I love how the show illustrated his preference for brunettes—his ex-wife and Natasha both have dark hair and similar style. Carrie was this wild child who turned him on, but he definitely had a madonna/whore complex about her.
Big is a walking red flag, he is very handsome, charming even, but also kind of smarmy in some ways. He is giving "man of the streets," and yet Carrie is so smitten. You can tell he cultivated a lot of charm and panties were always dropping for him in high school and college; he easily deflects and manipulates to get his preferred outcome. Classic stuff, but Chris Noth is just so good at not making Big come across as a villain—you totally understand why Carrie has her delusions about him and his intentions.
It's almost cruel how he strings her along. He is a very good illustration of a rich guy and why they're not always a catch—he goes and marries the 25-year-old Natasha, who he subsequently cheats on, repeating the pattern of behavior that made his first wife leave him. In season three Carrie leans into being a side-chick because she happily lives in her delusions of how one day he’ll choose her, which he eventually does but not without humiliating her one last time at the altar.
Outside her relationship with Big, Carrie is vibrant and fun. She has a great life and many friends. Her job provides enough flexibility to stay out partying until 3 AM and wake up at noon the next day. But with Big, she becomes someone else because he has an avoidant attachment style and never provides the emotional security she needs. In contemporary terms, she was in a situationship!
I wish we got to see fun Carrie in And Just Like That, what is she doing with all her free time and all that money she inherited? Instead we just see her caught up in the same pattern from her youth, waiting on the sidelines and being manipulated once again by a man with other priorities. Looking at her storyline through this lens is upsetting but people are like this, they don’t change poor behavioral patterns.
What Carrie’s Clothes Said About Her State of Mind: The Genius of Patricia Field
I guess SJP loved a tube top irl as well
Carrie's costuming was genius—that woman never met a tube top or tube dress she didn't like. Her tutu in the opening credits looks infantilizing, now whether that choice was intentional or not, it’s another visual cue that points to her immaturity. I haven't even touched on the daddy issues/attention-seeking vibes she has with Big.
Costume designer Patricia Field was perfectly attuned to this character. Carrie stands out in many scenes with colorful and patterned clothes while the dominant aesthetic of the time favored solid colors and minimalist silhouettes.
Side note: The fashions in the first two seasons of SATC are remarkable because the women dressed authentically. Their clothing choices speak subtly to character development rather than screaming with the loud, clashing patterns we see in AJLT.
One costuming moment that caught my attention was the wedding episode in season two where Miranda's friend, who she hoped to date, ends up falling in love and getting engaged to her interior designer. Carrie asks Big to be her date to the wedding, and of course he has an attitude about it and doesn't want to sign the gift card. Carrie is due to give a speech at the wedding at the bride's request and she's very nervous about it. In the middle of her speech, Big takes a phone call—a stab to the gut showcasing how little he prioritizes her. She ends up in tears but plays it off as being emotional about the wedding itself. I find these types of fights they had to be so heartbreaking because they're quite realistic; you really feel for Carrie in moments like that.
Anyway, the dress she wears is this beautiful sparkly peach-pink tulle number with slits up both thighs, and of course it is strapless because Carrie loves a strapless moment. But the visual contrast of her in this dress compared to what Charlotte, Miranda, and Samantha wore—which were more classic styles, minimal and solid-colored numbers—is striking. Charlotte's black dress was sexy with the open back but fit her aesthetic, Samantha looked very beautiful in her retro curls and silk dress, and Miranda looked very classy in the long-sleeve mesh panel dress.
Carrie is another pink tulle number in AJLT, this does look very cute!
To my eyes, Carrie's dress in terms of color, material and sparkles, plus the way she was acting during the episode, gave off a bit of a "little girl having a tantrum because she wasn’t getting enough attention" moment. Granted Big was being a massive dick. I don't know if that was the intention in the costuming or if the garments were merely reflecting the fashions of the time, but there's something about her clothes and her emotional state that really go hand in hand. The pink tulle dress above with the stuffed roses she wears in AJLT speaks to the romantic in her, even if she's sending weird, wordless postcards to Aiden because he says they should essentially have no contact. WTF? Dump him, Carrie!
There's a very cute visual note in costuming: in season three, she wears all these adorable boho looks which kind of mesh with Aiden's whole 70s hippie look. Natasha's style definitely shakes her and she tones down the overt sexiness of her outfits compared to the previous two seasons. Carrie and Aiden visually fit together, while in seasons one and two, she and Big were an aesthetic mismatch.
SATC's Raw Dating Truths
Watching this show today, you have to admire the gumption of the writers in making Carrie imperfect. So many lead female characters these days feel overly sanitized—it's nice to see ladies being emotionally messy because that's how real life is. There's no scenario in which you act perfectly and rationally. The best you can hope for is to act as ethically as possible, but that doesn't make for interesting fictional drama, does it? Maybe that's what's missing from AJLT.
What SATC got right—and what And Just Like That is still struggling with (even though they attempted it in season one by recreating the real-life dating woes of the writing team at the time)—is the thematic grounding of each episode in ways women could genuinely relate to.
SATC gave Charlotte storylines around anal and oral sex that most likely reflected the mores of the time. Miranda hooked up with a guy who couldn't climax without having porn on in the background, and she ultimately dumps him because he prioritizes his long-term emotional attachment to the porn stars on screen over the real-life sex he's having with her. Carrie tried dating her friend with benefits, only to find out that they were fuck buddies for a reason. Samantha gave love a shot with a guy who literally could not measure up to her sexual needs and discovered that she likes what she likes.
The show accurately reflects the prevailing attitudes of its time. The liberated casual sex they happily engaged in gave way to hookup culture for millennial women, which evolved into the situationship and "talking stage" dynamics Gen Z women navigate today.
Contemporarily, wouldn't it be interesting if And Just Like That explored how dating has changed as technology and pornography have further coalesced? Instead we get Charlotte having a storyline about her dog being accused of something it didn’t do. Golden Girls was extremely funny, those ladies dated and dealt with issues of the time, why can’t AJLT figure out how to be topical, relevant and funny?
Character Archetypes
And Just Like That attempted to introduce several new characters in its first two seasons, but none of them are as strong as the original foursome. The effort came across as diversity theater—the writers lacked the skill to flesh out these women and make audiences care about them. Will Lisa Todd Wexley or Seema Patel be memorable? Probably not unless the show finds something deeper for them to do. They're both trapped in boring work storylines when they need something juicier.
In SATC, all the women balanced each other out—you got a nice mix of personalities that helped explore dating in myriad ways.
Carrie: The Delusional Romantic
Carrie was delulu before being delulu was a thing. I have to say I kind of admire her steadfast romanticism—even now in her 50s, she's never let any of her dating and marriage experience make her become totally cynical or jaded. She's happy to put on a transparent fitted tulle dress over her mismatched bra and panties and saunter down the street to mail a postcard to yet another emotionally unavailable man. She will not let the messy reality of her romantic entanglements stop her from looking hot.
If there was ever an avatar for romanticizing your life, it's Carrie.
It's kind of funny—someone theorized on X that when Big first met Carrie, he might have mistaken her for an escort. Later in season one, she does get mistaken for one by a date, and he leaves her $1,000 on the hotel dresser. All those times she showed up to Big's apartment in those scantily clad outfits, the doormen must have thought something was up. She even remarks on this in one episode in season two while she waited for him.
I wonder if some of this perception just put her in the good time gal box in Big's mind, whereas the "marriage material" girls looked completely different. I think the whole madonna/whore thing is part of what the show was pushing back against through its costuming and letting Gen X women taking ownership of their bodies through their clothing and not being slut-shamed for it.
Samantha: The Liberated Woman
Samantha, with her insatiable sexual appetite and emotional detachment from most of her hookups, didn't feel like a real person to me in the first two seasons—she's an idea, a stand-in for the concept of the liberated woman who can shamelessly "fuck like a man." Kim Cattrall is an excellent actress because while Samantha is cringe-worthy in many ways, Cattrall has impeccable comedic timing and knew how to subtly show when Samantha felt pangs of regret or loneliness. Movies in the '90s like Basic Instinct and Disclosure framed women who enjoyed sex as emasculating threats to men; Samantha is never presented that way. She always maintains her power and agency, which the show deserves credit for.
Charlotte: The Balanced Center
Charlotte was the most balanced and well-rounded of the foursome—she clearly knew what she wanted, set her boundaries, and wasn't so rigid that she never experimented or tried something new. However, that episode where she dates an uncircumcised man has aged poorly. The women essentially decide that the natural state of a man's penis is unnatural, and they'd never let their future sons keep their foreskins lest it "freak some woman out." They don't even discuss this in religious or health terms—it's purely "ew, gross foreskin." Yikes. But what I like about her is her unwavering belief in love, it’s a more healthy version than Carrie’s.
Miranda: Insecurity Masquerading as Standards
Miranda was very cynical and acerbic (but they did mellow her out a bit in season 3), much of which stemmed from insecurity. You just want to shake her and tell her to give it a rest. Steve is much more emotionally open than she is and as a couple their dynamic was very entertaining. I know her thing is disliking "nice guys," but yeesh, Steve was definitely a catch! Cynthia Nixon is very funny and really pulls off the dramatic moments Miranda is given. The episode where she buys her own apartment and then gets paranoid about dying alone in it, not having anyone but her parents to put as her emergency contact—that's the kind of vulnerable stuff AJLT hasn't figured out how to show yet for women in their 50s and 60s.
Remember when Big bought Carrie a sparkly bird purse because it ‘reminded him of her’ and she was offended? Was he wrong though? She was a bird lol.
I'm making my way through season three, which is very funny, although I miss the rawness of the first two seasons and we lose all the man-on-the-street interviews that rounded out how "average" New Yorkers felt about one dating issue or another. Season three has this new sheen and polish that makes it feel like a continuation but also a different show than the first two seasons. The girls' messy entanglements continue and their wardrobes get increasingly pricey, which adds to the fantasy element of their lives.
Do you have a favorite SATC season? Are you hate-watching AJLT?
The bird purse comment got me lol. After reading this I feel like I need to go back and rewatch the original SATC episodes. You are right—as much hate as Carrie gets, she is all of us to some degree. It would have been so nice to feel that relatability still in AJLT!