Sex and the City is one of the most important TV shows of all time—especially for women. The glittery HBO comedy, starring Sarah Jessica Parker, unapologetically celebrated female sexuality in a way that had never been done before. It broke barriers, started important conversations, and featured some out-of-this-world shoes (that looked painful AF, let's be real).
The show has also sparked debates among thousands of friends about who is the Carrie (Parker), Samantha (Kim Cattrall), Charlotte (Kristin Davis), and Miranda (Cynthia Nixon) in their groups. But this is difficult. The women on Sex and the City—specifically, the three who aren't Carrie—are such archetypes that it gets hard to play this game. Samantha, Charlotte, and Miranda are simply too one-note to be truly relatable. No real people are 100 percent like them.
And SJP thinks this too. In fact, at one point, she didn't even think they were real characters, but rather "literary conceits" for Carrie's newspaper column. Yup.
"I used to wonder if Samantha, Charlotte, and Miranda were real. That that wasn't just her column," Parker said this week on Chris Hardwick's Nerdist podcast.
Parker went on to say that Miranda, Charlotte, and Samantha are "perfectly archetypal" characters and that Carrie could've created (and embellished) them solely for her work.
"You're writing a column about sexual politics ... so you're picking one type," she said. "You're saying this type is this and this and then you just complicate it more, like any good writer does."
Mind blown, right? Not really. Yes, the idea of Sex and the City being nothing but a figment of Carrie's imagination is crazy. However, this theory is comforting for any woman who's ever felt the polished prowess of these ladies wasn't relatable. No, it's not normal to have your dream job and a generous Manolo Blahnik budget at 30, but Sex and the City spent six years making us think it was. If this theory is true, then the joke is on Miranda, Samantha, and Charlotte because they weren't real.
Well, maybe they were, but SJP's confession makes their shiny perfection a little less blinding. We can see clearly now.
