Shopping plus sex equals sequels

Critics were not very impressed by the caricatures or social conservatism of 'Sex and the City' but the series – basically about things you can buy and people you can sleep with – became a TV phenomenon, and now keeps spawning offshoots, including a new book and film, writes DONALD CLARKE

SO, WHICH one are you? Are you the career-obsessed cyborg? Are you the anally retentive prude? Or the sex maniac with the weird drag-queen vocal delivery? Perhaps you are the neurotic everywoman who appears to have been dressed by a passing typhoon? The question is facile.

Newspapers and TV shows will, however, continue to ask it repeatedly over the next month. To the surprise of many – even some fervent fans – the pop-cultural behemoth that is Sex and the Citycontinues to bludgeon its way across the planet's media outlets. Last week, Candace Bushnell, progenitor of the original concept, published a prequel, aimed at the young adult market, entitled The Carrie Diaries.

At the end of this month, Sex and the City 2,sequel to the jaw-droppingly successful first movie version, will be offered as an alternative to the looming World Cup. You may already have seen the bizarre poster which, utilising the wonders of digital manipulation, renders the cast as unrecognisable teenage versions of themselves. To paraphrase Gerry Adams on a marginally more sinister threat, they haven't gone away, you know.

As everybody is aware, Sex and the Citybegan life as a chatty newspaper column by Ms Bushnell. Originally published in The New York Observerin the mid 1990s – later collected as a pseudo-novel in 1997 – the articles were somewhat saltier than the series they later spawned.

Thinly disguising herself as Carrie Bradshaw (note the character's initials), a journalist for the fictional New York Star, Bushnell served up a diverting dissection of the prevailing sexual mores in pre-millennial Manhattan. Though the book sold well, nobody anticipated that the subsequent TV series would become a zeitgeist rattler of unprecedented proportions.

The show's canny creator, Darren Star (also the brains behind Melrose Place) realised from the start that it was necessary to pare the columns' baggy dramatis personae into a tight knot of easily digestible stereotypes. Bradshaw's three pals were, in the book, relatively minor characters. In the series, first screened in 1998, they formed an inseparable, endlessly gossipy cabal of sexual buccaneers.

Samantha, played by the experienced Kim Cattrall, represents the part of you that wishes to fondle every bottom within grasping distance. Miranda, given breath by the flinty Cynthia Nixon, stands in for the bit of the brain that values professional achievement over the immediate pleasures of the flesh. Charlotte, whose hyperglycemic giggles are voiced by Kristin Davis, is a squeaky priggish bore with an annoying habit of bouncing on the balls of her feet when excited.

Granted a modicum of nuance by the genuinely gifted Sarah Jessica Parker, Carrie is the closest thing to a fleshed-out character in the series. To employ the lexicon of Snow White, the others are drawn from the main body of Dwarfs – Sleepy, Dopey, Greedy and so forth – whereas Carrie is closer to the less easily stereotyped Doc.

When the show was launched on this side of the Atlantic, following a modestly successful debut at home, much of the agitated press attention was focused on its supposed sexual explicitness. Made for the cable network HBO, which famously allows any amount of swearing and nudity, Sex and the Citypromised to be a new class of American comedy. (It's not quite a sitcom. But it's not really a drama either.) As it happened, the opening episodes failed to stimulate the collective clitoris of this territory's critics and viewers.

The acting was too broad. The attempts to shock were faintly childish. The characters were too narcissistic. The general consensus was that Sex and the Citywould never work with British or Irish audiences.

Within a few years, however, Starr's series – Bushnell has no direct involvement and is rumoured to have received a flat fee for the rights – had gradually grown into the television phenomenon of the age. If in, say, 2002, an Irish viewer, saddled with the basic cable package, hammered the remote control hard enough, he or she could find Sex and the Cityplaying on as many as four channels simultaneously. Like Bruce Springsteen (in this way alone), the series survived initial overly hysterical hype to discover a fervent, devoted audience.

As the show gained greater prominence, serious thinkers began to worry about its socio-sexual meaning. You could argue that it was somewhat unfair to direct quite so much attention towards this harmless piece of fluff. As one of the very few hit shows concerning professional female characters, Sex and the City– despite being largely written and directed by men – was asked to shoulder the standard for all women on all TV programmes. The creators' sins were the sins of the whole medium.

Nonetheless, it was, for many feminists, surprising and depressing to find the characters swapping patriarchy's chains for self-forged manacles of consumerism and sexual dependence. Or, to put it in less snooty terms, all these bloody women seem to think about is shopping and sex. Emerging at about the same time as the similarly worrying film of Bridget Jones's Diary, the show seemed to argue that, however independent she may seem on the outside, no woman can be properly happy without a man by her side.

For many deluded romantics, New York City remained the place where (downtown) bohemians such as Patti Smith or Jackson Pollock smeared paint and yelled poetic obscenities while (uptown) less outré talents such as Woody Allen and Dorothy Parker exchanged barbed witticisms.

Sex and the Cityturned the city into a bourgeois shopping mall populated entirely by middle-class, white materialists. It was Los Angeles with poorer weather.

A common response to the show – often made by guiltier fans – suggested that the four caballeros were not, in fact, women at all.

Look at who created the show, they said. Carrie and her friends are, in fact, really gay men. The slur on the homosexual community still hangs about the enterprise.

It is, for all this carping, undeniable that the series reflected a new mood that, paradoxically, combined hedonism with social conservatism. Endless, variously positioned sex and obscenely expensive shoes were coveted, but the ultimate aspiration remained a traditional wedding with white dresses, big cakes and a vulgarity (is that the collective noun?) of painted doves.

Professor Imelda Whelehan, author of The Feminist Bestseller: From Sex and the Single Girl to Sex and the City, expressed it well a few years ago. "It does make for quite uncomfortable viewing," she said. "It does seem that, in the end, it had to come back to a traditional view. That the future for most women means marriage and children."

The series did, of course, deal with other issues aside from (a famous moment) the unpleasant taste of men’s bodily emissions or (Samantha again) whether having sex with a woman makes you a lesbian. There was a bit of cancer here. There was some stuff about adoption over there.

But the focus of the show, which eventually wound down in 2004, remained things you can buy and people you can sleep with.

In the last days of the series, it was rumoured that disparities between Ms Parker's fees and those of her colleagues created tensions that ultimately proved unmanageable. Yet somehow or other, having failed to succeed in solo projects, the actors managed to patch together their differences for the film version in 2008. The resulting movie played like a large portion of boiled down SATCessence. The well-crafted arcs of the early series were abandoned for an uninhibited celebration of the show's worst excesses: Charlotte turning her nose up at Mexico, Miranda craving a locale with no ethnic neighbours, more undignified cooing from Samantha.

Most serious critics savaged the picture – female reviewers were particularly appalled – but it went on to take a truly staggering $262 million dollars worldwide.

Now, inevitably, a sequel is teetering towards us on its giant Jimmy Choos. Already, there are reasons to feel slightly nauseous. Featuring a trip to one of the Middle East’s more commercially energised locales, the film was turned down by the city fathers of Dubai when they realised the title included the word “sex”.

Abu Dhabi then stepped up, but its burghers had second thoughts and the film ended up shooting in Morocco. Domestic readers, still recovering from the Oirish stereotypes in the recent rom-com Leap Year, will be alarmed to hear that Charlotte's nanny, played by Alice Eve, is an "Irish farm girl".

It all sounds pretty grim. But nothing – not a campaign of civil disobedience, not a giant international football tournament – will stop it becoming one of the biggest films of the year. Prepare yourself for a trilogy.

CV SEX AND THE CITY

What is it?Enormously successful (in this order) newspaper column, book, TV series and film franchise detailing the sexual adventures of four overdressed New Yorkers.

Why is it in the news?Last week, Candace Bushnell, author of the source material, published a prequel entitled The Carrie Diaries. Sex and the City 2, follow-up to the first movie version, is released on May 28th.

Most likely to say:Some dire, hackneyed double entendre that ends in the phrase or are you just pleased to see me.

Least likely to say:You know, you can get the same shoes at Penneys for about a twentieth of the price.