The stars and producer of HBO's Sex and the City talk about the hit show's last season and the secrets of its success.
By ERIC DEGGANS
Published June 22, 2003
[Photos: HBO]
Sarah Jessica Parker has a cryptic response to being asked what’s in store for her character, Carrie Bradshaw: “Michael (Patrick King, head writer) likens Carrie’s life to a parallel of the emotional life of New York City.”
The women of Sex and the City: from left, Kim Cattrall, Sarah Jessica Parker, Cynthia Nixon and Kristin Davis. In the final season, “There will be a wedding, there will be heartbreak, there will be new men,” head writer Michael Patrick King says.
David Eigenberg, who plays the ex-boyfriend who fathered the baby of Nixon’s Miranda, is surprised that his character has lasted as long as it has.
LONG ISLAND CITY, N.Y. - What's most amazing about Sex and the City star Sarah Jessica Parker isn't her boundless energy.
Or the total lack of flab on her tiny frame after her recent pregnancy (thank you, in-home yoga teacher).
It's that she can offer coherent, thoughtful replies to any question on the approaching end of her hit HBO series while a makeup artist wielding powder, lipstick, eyeliner and blush attacks her face with the speed of a pit crew mechanic.
"When we started talking about it, we came to the realization that there weren't any more seasons (of stories) left to tell," said Parker, pausing to blot her lipstick while explaining her decision to walk away after the show's sixth season.
"Everybody sort of agreed . . . you don't want to drag yourself across the finish line," added Parker, who talks in the same energetic, earnest flood of sentences as her character, New York sex columnist Carrie Bradshaw. "If you leave in, say, season nine, you don't give yourself the option for maybe something else. A revisit, (or) some kind of invitation back into people's homes. Basically, we don't want to produce a bunch of mediocre shows for them."
And how did Parker - an executive producer who made the decision with head writer and executive producer Michael Patrick King - break the news to her three co-stars?
"Luckily, that's business affairs' (job)," she joked before acknowledging that she, Cynthia Nixon, Kristin Davis and Kim Cattrall had not extensively discussed the decision to end the show. "It seems so far in the distance, and we have so much work to do before then. I just think it's one of those things we haven't discussed (because) we're in the actual day-to-day of producing the show."
How to end it
It was, Parker said, a long answer to a short question. But that's the kind of complexity that Sex and the City serves up, using in-your-face sex jokes and broad comedy to disguise a sophisticated series about emotional honesty among four cynical, urban women.
Though some have implied that the series' creativity dimmed after Carrie walked away from two perfect men - commitment-phobe executive Mr. Big and marriage-happy furniture maker Aidan - King isn't buying it.
"We're not ending because we ran out of ideas. . . . We're ending because we're so excited about the ideas we're doing in season six that doing season seven would be tough," he said, taking a break from crafting episode 11 of the final 20 shows. "There will be a wedding, there will be heartbreak, there will be new men. My theory has always been that you want to believe these girls (wind up) in New York together. Still, there doesn't have to be one ending (for everyone)."
One thing King did promise: "The show will not end with four girls married," he said, laughing. "We would feel that would be an injustice. This show started out as a complete war cry for the single people. We want to make sure people know that single people still matter."
Ask Parker what's coming this season and her answer is even more cryptic.
"Michael likens Carrie's life to a parallel of the emotional life of New York City . . . (and New York City) since Sept. 11 is feeling like it's found its sea legs," she said. "There's this optimistic feeling. Then something happens that I feel shows Carrie how small her world was . . . this idea that there was a provincial nature to the city and all of a sudden her world just broadened. It's exciting and new."
And that's about as specific as anyone on the set will be about what happens during Sex and the City's final season.
But because critics have been sent the season's first two episodes, we can drop some spoilers.
ALERT: SKIP THE NEXT TWO PARAGRAPHS IF YOU DON'T WANT TO KNOW WHAT WILL HAPPEN.
Mr. Big (Chris Noth) and Aidan (John Corbett) do pop up, though probably not in ways that fans might hope. Carrie is working on her relationship with Berger (who has broken up with an old flame), and Davis' WASPy Charlotte York is considering a religious conversion to keep her man.
Cattrall's man-hungry publicist, Samantha Jones, is back to her old ways, seducing a young waiter who just may be her sexual equal. (Imagine that!) And Nixon's lawyer-turned-single-mom, Miranda Hobbes, is struggling with a horrifying idea: She may actually feel something besides friendship for Steve (David Eigenberg), the ex-boyfriend who fathered her baby.
SPOILERS OVER - READ ON.
The cleanest "sex" show
Although pay cable outlet HBO allows some awfully explicit dramatizations - Samantha's first all-night rendezvous with her waiter pal looks like an outtake from Showtime's soft-core Red Shoe Diaries series - King said that those who focus on the nudity and sex scenes are missing the point.
"What people misunderstand about this show is that (they think) it's dirty . . . (when) it is the cleanest show with the word "sex' attached to it," he said. "The most shocking thing in our show isn't the nudity, it's the heartbreak. After you see a sex scene on our show, the last thing you want to do is have sex. People get emotionally naked. That's why it all works."
Fans who recall Sex scenes in which Charlotte struggled with an impotent husband and Miranda tried to keep up with a dirty-talking beau might agree.
"I haven't found any of the nudity I've done for the show particularly titillating," said Nixon, relaxing in her dressing room between takes, her bright red hair purposefully frayed and unkempt to reflect her character's harried life. "I've always thought of it as being mostly for comic effect. The point of taking my clothes off is to make the situations seem real."
As King ticked off a list of the reasons Sex has worked so well for so long, actual sex doesn't even make his top five.
"The actresses were magic. It's not so easy to find four stars where each one of them is so clearly drawn," he said, noting that producers also spend lots of money to make New York look like the perfect urban playground for their stars.
"And our shows are commercial-free, which means you're actually able to fall into the story without a guy in a Lotrimin commercial interrupting your train of thought."
Some critics have written that Sex and the City really seems like the story of four gay men told through the more acceptable perspective of sexy single women. It's an idea that may have gained traction because King and series creator Darren Star are gay. However it started, the producer insisted that it's wrong.
"I'd like to say to every reporter that ever wrote that, I wish they'd been in the writing room with me and my seven single female writers for the last two years," King said. "They don't even talk about shoes. . . . They talk about heartbreak and dating and men and wanting careers or not."
King saw old-fashioned sexual politics in that rumor. "I think people . . . never heard women speak like that (before)," he said. "It's so interesting that in order for women to be confusing and interesting and strong and sexually aware, they had to make them written by men because women generally aren't written to be that way."
Parker, who says that she never reads what critics write, said that she's proud of helping create what she called "a new voice for women" on TV.
"The thing we've worked very hard to do is have Carrie never settle for anything," she said. "We try to retain that same feeling . . . where you tell the story, you don't think about how people will respond. You don't hire a 25-year-old actor because a bunch of girls are going to think he's cute . . . (but) because he's right for the part. And if people think that's provocative, that's all grand and good."
Elsewhere at Silvercup Studios - also home to another HBO hit, The Sopranos - Nixon and Eigenberg are shooting a scene from the season's fifth episode, showing Miranda growing more attached to a clueless Steve.
Juggling a plastic doll in a stroller - the increasingly irritable real twins who play the couple's baby are sleeping nearby - the pair need just two takes to get through a subtle scene communicating Miranda's increasing passion and the awkwardness of sharing a child but not romance.
Personable and unassumingly goofy, kind of like the character he plays, Eigenberg said that he never dreamed that his character would stick around so long.
"There is no assurance for any male on this show," he said. "I think sometimes in our society . . . women can be seen as expendable. On this show, there's definitely a flip . . . because there are no women that are disposable on this show. But the guys are. . . . We're not so much disposable as highly recyclable."
Nixon agreed, noting that male guest stars come and go with the frequency that young, beautiful female actors cycle through other series (think Seinfeld, Friends and Frasier, to name a few).
"It is a mind trip sometimes for the guys . . . who are the objects of desire, not the subject of it all," said Nixon, scarfing down a quick lunch between scenes while her baby, Charles, slept in the next room.
(Noth complained to Entertainment Weekly recently about sipping wine while "Tony Soprano's out there killing people . . . and you feel like such a wuss.")
"The guys are always more nervous than we are, . . . especially during sex scenes," Nixon said. "They're coming on . . . maybe they've been around one day on the set, and (the director) is saying, "Take off your clothes and talk dirty.' It's a little intimidating."
A few yards away on a different stage, Parker and Ron Livingston (an alum of ABC's The Practice who plays Berger) are working on a scene from the season's third episode, in which Carrie gives her man an interesting gift to displace the psychic residue of an old girlfriend.
This is the pace needed to finish the final 20 episodes, the largest number of shows the series has produced in one season. (HBO plans to air 12 episodes this summer and the remaining eight in January.)
It's also one reason why Parker isn't more emotional about the approaching end of the series that turned her into a star; there isn't time.
"I just don't think about it, because I think it's too sad," she said, just before hopping up to finish her scene with Livingston. "I'll miss the freedom we have, I think. I've worked for 30 years as an actress, and I've always had interesting experiences. I just don't want to find myself playing some part that isn't interesting."
King's goals are simpler. "My big hope: that people miss us. I want people to say, "Oh, they're crazy for leaving.' That would be the greatest compliment in the world."
Sex and the City begins its sixth and final season tonight at 9 on HBO. Grade: A. Rating: TV-MA (Mature Audiences).
David Eigenberg, who plays the ex-boyfriend who fathered the baby of Nixon’s Miranda, is surprised that his character has lasted as long as it has.