I can’t say it was Carrie and her squad who taught us everything we know about friendship, but they certainly solidified the idea that friends can feel like family too. What felt fresh back then was how much these women shared – nothing was too taboo to be chewed over at brunch. And that attitude of openness became a blueprint for girlfriends everywhere.
Yes, they divulged details of their sex lives, but they also bared their souls about everything from fertility to marital strife, cancer and periods to menopause and, of course, when Miranda’s son Brady came along, motherhood. As the juggling-it-all single mother and high-flying lawyer, Miranda was the original ‘slummy mummy’.
She was utterly imperfect, grappling with guilt, sleepless nights and struggling to balance her own needs with those of her son. At a time when women were starting to view motherhood as a choice rather than a rite of passage, Miranda Hobbs reflected a perspective seldom seen on screen.
‘You really can’t overstate the significance of SATC in its time,’ says Jennifer Keishin Armstrong, author of Sex and the City and Us: How Four Single Women Changed the Way We Think, Live, and Love. ‘We hadn’t seen anything remotely like it before, with female characters talking about sex the way they did and embodying this entirely new kind of single woman.
Single women before this, especially those over 30, were portrayed as sad and spinstery. But these women did not need men and did not apologise for having whatever kind of sex they wanted.’
Even the name was brazen for a prime-time slot and it opened eyes to a new dating world. In the very first episode, Carrie Bradshaw describes that era in New York as ‘the age of un-innocence’. ‘No one has breakfast at Tiffany’s or affairs to remember… we all have breakfast at 7am and affairs we try to forget,’ she laments.
At the turn of the millennium, that fast-paced dating scene seemed the antithesis of romance. Two decades on, in the Tinder age, it now seems positively Brontë-esque. Finding love (or lust) across a crowded bar, even if the intimate moments that ensued ended up being fleeting, feels like good old-fashioned romance.
But back then, one-night stands certainly weren’t mainstream TV fodder. (In all 236 episodes of Friends, which ran from 1994 to 2004, there were only ever a handful.) In that sense, to a certain generation (hi, Mum and Dad) the show may have seemed gratuitous, and perhaps even slightly depraved, but for those of us who were in – or about to hit – our dating years, those women’s love lives were mightily empowering.
