It also proved that TV didn’t need men – or, rather, that men could be objectified and minimised by female leads as they told their stories, in the same way women had been for years. In the direct aftermath came Desperate Housewives, also about a group of four female friends living in bougie splendour, and it has carried on from there. Even such recent TV fodder as 2017’s runaway hit Big Little Lies can be said to have its roots in SATC’s early success. It laid such a foundation that shows like Lena Dunham’s 2012 hit Girls include speeches like, ‘You’re definitely a Carrie with, like, some Samantha aspects, and Charlotte hair… I’m definitely a Carrie at heart, but sometimes Samantha kind of comes out.’ Meanwhile, Run the World – a 2021 comedy about black women in New York – has the character Ella describe her ex-boyfriend, saying, ‘He’s my Big’.

Despite this, the show is rarely given serious credit by cultural pundits. When people talk about the rise of great TV, they inevitably credit The Sopranos, Mad Men, Breaking Bad. But those shows had no comparable afterlife. This year’s film prequel to The Sopranos, The Many Saints of Newark, grossed just $11.6 million against a budget of $50 million.

‘I don’t think any other HBO show has had the legs that SATC has had,’ argues Tom Harrington, TV analyst at Enders Analysis. ‘If you just think in terms of spinoffs and continued cultural resonance, nothing else really comes close. The only other HBO shows to have a spin-off film – Entourage and The Sopranos – tanked. In reality, the viewership of the golden age mainstay shows – The Wire, Mad Men, even Succession – is very small, but includes influential metro/media types. They get talked about a lot, but they don’t hit the mainstream. Sex and the City managed to be both – it resonated in popular, rather than just critical, cultural impact and there was nothing like it that had come before.’ He points out that SATC’s films, prequel series and the original are all still widely available and valuable on platforms like Sky and continue to inspire – just witness the runaway success of the Sentimental in the City podcast: 20 hours of analysis of the show over nine episodes.

This cultural persistence is measurable. US research giant Parrot Analytics measures national and global demand for TV series, including activity on everything from search engines to micro-blogging sites and open streaming platforms, weighting activity by the amount of effort involved, so that a download of an episode is more significant than a ‘like’ on Facebook. Last month, audience demand for Sex and the City was more than 10 times the demand for the average TV series in the US, placing it in the top three per cent all US shows, despite its final episode going out over 17 years ago.

‘Sex and the City is appealing to the younger demographic despite not being on air for years and it’s doing that in a way that’s very similar to the likes of Friends,’ explains Amit Devani, director of insights EMEA, at Parrot Analytics. Sarah Jessica Parker, meanwhile, continues to be more in demand than other 1990s Hollywood stars – think Demi Moore, Meg Ryan and Julia Roberts. Hence And Just Like That….

There is a danger, however. The original SATC ‘was about growing up and figuring out what’s important,’ says Hannah McGill. ‘A hell of a lot of the stuff you spend time trying to do in your 30s doesn’t matter and you end up junking a lot of it. That’s what the films should have been about: what happens when you get rid of jumping around and showing off? For the Sex and the City generation – the women who got excited about the possibility of the post-feminist moment – we found that time disappears. A lot of the things you meant to do, you’re too late. The films let us down by not moving on. And also, in the second film, by being terrible.’