Reading Sex and the City (Reading Contemporary Television)

Reading Sex and the City (Reading Contemporary Television)

Language: English

Pages: 288

ISBN: 1850434239

Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub


HBO's hit series Sex and the City has a huge international fan base and has picked up major awards. This highly readable critical celebration of the life and times of Carrie, Miranda, Charlotte and Samantha looks at the series as a new departure for television. It discusses the show's position in an increasingly complex television landscape, and pioneers innovative approaches to the study of contemporary television culture. The book explores, among many other issues, female fandom and fan culture; fashion and fashion journalism; male archetypes and the search for Mr. Right; third wave feminism; and of course, sex and the single girl. The book includes a full episode guide, reports from the Sex and the City Manhattan tour and a map of Sex and the City New York.

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when it happens in Big’s limousine, is intense and unapologetic. This sexual attraction highlights how powerless Carrie is to Big’s phallic masculinity, which works primarily at a libidinal level. From that first untamed encounter where Carrie wears ‘the naked dress’, theirs is an uninhibited sexual relationship, an attraction that Carrie abandons herself to repeatedly. Like cigarettes, the rush she gets from Big is an addiction that she cannot control. While she initially worries their

hundred dollars on a pair of Manolo Blahnik strappy sandals’ (25) but their male counterparts are richer still, rendering the beautiful and successful women they sleep with successors of earlier urban courtesans – prosperous and feted, but only as long as age and appearance permit. The columns’ opening references to The Age of Innocence and Breakfast at Tiffany’s (1961) announce their literary (or more probably cinematic) sources, but they also signal the continuing dependence of her urban women,

signature cocktail, the cosmopolitan, which ironically also became New York’s hometown cocktail in the late 1990s. The series’ fear-and-fantasy of prostitution continued into season three, in ‘Running with Scissors’ (3:11), the opening sequence of which details the declining venues for Carrie’s and Big’s clandestine affair: roses and champagne at a pricier hotel degenerate into cheese crackers at a hotel at 56th and Eighth, a corner of New York where no one knows them: ‘Our affair, like our

ever heard?’ Coming from Samantha, the most sexually adventurous of the quartet and the closest to being a queer mouthpiece, this is disingenuous. It is notable that for this episode, the taxpaying citizen’s sex, in contrast to the exotic queer sex on offer in the street below, is especially vanilla: it involves the missionary position, a generic hunk, and an insistence on Samantha’s concentration. Is Samantha’s restlessness created by the sex workers’ distraction, or merely fuelled by it? Her

friends above all else. Their stories dominate, and the audience becomes absorbed in what these four girls will do, and the serious issues that could be found in the earliest episodes are not tackled to the same degree and in the same form in the later ones. 158 N E U ROT I C I N N E W YO R K This is especially the case in matters of visual style. Even in the fourth and fifth seasons, Sex and the City is well shot, with generally strong writing (another trait of Allen’s, obviously), but the

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