When talk turns to the landmark comedies leaving TV this season, expect lots of highfalutin language devoted to the young urban adults in NBC's Friends, the urbane wit of NBC's other comedy hit, Frasier, and, if star Ray Romano shakes off the money truck CBS is backing to his door as you read this, the New York-area family in CBS's big hit Everybody Loves Raymond.
So let's take time now, before all that starts, to memorialize the comedy that really is TV's best love letter to urban life: HBO's Sex and the City.
It's not just the cynical sexual politics, the explicit sex scenes, the ribald jokes, the cutting-edge fashions or the guest stars, including Blair Underwood, Candice Bergen, Sonia Braga, Margaret Cho, John Corbett, Kyle MacLachlan, Alanis Morrisette, Sarah Michelle Gellar, Carrie Fisher and Vince Vaughn.
It's the love.
Love among true friends, love for endless eccentricities on the hip end of Manhattan and love for the possibility of finding a significant other that can make all the angsty nonsense of life in Manhattan vanish like a bad dream.
In short, love for what it means to be a single, successful, open-hearted woman in a city where any fantasy is within reach if you're fabulous enough.
"We were somehow responsible for a new voice of women," star Sarah Jessica Parker told me in May during a break on the show's New York set. Back then, she was still relatively unsentimental over filling sex columnist Carrie Bradshaw's Manolo Blahniks for one last season.
"Carrie's (life) is parallel to the emotional life of New York City. We're past the shock and devastation (of the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks) . . . (and) the city feels like it has a lot of potential, and lot of it feels very optimistic," Parker said, expressing few reservations about her decision to end the show while its acclaim and quality still are high. "The thing we've worked very hard to do is have Carrie never settle. Contentment has to be really authentic for her. No matter how the show ends, she will find contentment . . . whether she's with somebody, by herself . . . whatever that is."
As the show winds down to its supersized conclusion tonight, we've seen each of Carrie's best buddies find that contentment in the most unexpected places.
Blue-blood social climber Charlotte York (Kristin Davis) is settled with a Jewish power lawyer; man-eating hedonist Samantha Jones (Kim Cattrall) is struggling with cancer and settled down with a 20-something model/actor who really loves her; Type A career girl Miranda Hobbes (Cynthia Nixon) married her bartender ex-boyfriend, with whom she has a child, and moved (scary music rises here) to Brooklyn.
The only question left hanging: Can Carrie's painfully offbeat love affair with the older, accomplished Russian artist played by Mikhail Baryshnikov (a pairing that looked awkward onscreen even last week) truly offer Carrie the kind of love her friends have found?
Fans learned last week that the lost love of Carrie's life, Chris Noth's Mr. Big, is back in the picture, likely headed to Paris to declare his love for the first time. With Carrie feeling alone, thousands of miles from her beloved Manhattan, will she give the commitment-phobic businessman (reportedly based on former GQ magazine publisher Ronald Galotti) another chance?
"(This season) really underlines how brave Carrie is going to have to be for following her own choices," Michael Patrick King, one of the shows executive producers, told me last year. "The journey for season six will be her trying to follow her heart. That's the fun of the show."
Don't bother asking Noth to spill the beans. Even if he were so inclined, King and Co. filmed three versions of the series finale, so not even the actors know how it pans out.
"I respect the idea of (the show), and it's time to end it. . . . I think Sarah Jessica's instinct was right," Noth said last month, refusing to speculate on whether their characters should marry at the show's end (an ending fans seem to prefer). "They didn't want to stretch it out just for the sake of having it go on. . . . (And) it was a great ride."
Though his performances on Law & Order replay every day on cable TV and DVD, it's his turn as Mr. Big that really changed life in his hometown, New York City.
"Nothing could prepare me for the level of scrutiny that comes from being on this show," he said, with more than a hint of annoyance in his voice. "I ride the subways and walk the streets. . . . I refuse to live life in a compound. But it has made my anonymity impossible. It's a little like being an exotic animal in the zoo."
And why not? This cast of characters lives in a paradise of restaurant openings, nightclub parties, gallery receptions and long lunches, mostly divorced from the stress of crime, commuting and earning a living.
In a New York free from the homeless, urban blight (and, too often, people of color), Carrie and Co. set about defining the times for single women of a certain age, taking a fascinating journey with more substance than you might expect.
Still, like so many romances on the show, my love affair with Sex started fitfully.
Based on the life and writings of Candace Bushnell while a columnist for the New York Observer, the series initially was burdened by its cynicism; it showed moneyed, self-centered men in an escalating struggle with moneyed, shrill, scared women.
I panned the first episode back in 1998, convinced that watching self-obsessed yuppies gripe while enjoying Manhattan's urban playground was depressing and annoying.
But that was before they came up with the Fab Four.
In Sex's early episodes, Carrie's pals Samantha, Miranda and Charlotte were part of a wider circle of characters, most of them shallow and instantly forgettable.
As producers decided to focus more on the Gang of Four and stop making those women victims of the men in their lives, the show really took flight.
"Once we realized we had this star, Sarah Jessica Parker, this believable character in New York, we started pulling out the scenes of her talking to the camera," said King last year (back then, Parker often faced the camera while talking directly to viewers; now her narration floats from off camera). "As the characters became more diverse, we realized they could give us that."
Before long, the fashion, the sex scenes, the trendy locales, even the humor became a thin disguise for the drama truly driving the show: the struggle to find love without compromise.
"At first, my concern was that, after the pilot, these women would be given the same kind of fate: to complain and bitch and be unfulfilled," Cattrall told me nearly four years ago, acknowledging that she initially turned down the role of Samantha. Twice. "Halfway through the first season, our writers knew who they were writing for, and our actors knew who they were playing. It became a very daring attempt at something new and different: a woman and her three friends getting down and not pulling any punches."
And it's that honesty - from the near-40-something characters to their various sexual foibles and beyond - that keeps Sex from turning into just another urban comedy about impossibly rich young people sleeping around. (Coupling producers, are you listening?)
"I'm not really interested in watching pubescent teens discuss sexuality, because I've had it ad nauseam," Cattrall said then. "At this point in my life, I know much more, just from surviving it. I don't want to pretend, like a lot of actors do, by playing someone younger than you are. I've never encountered a character that was so unjudgmental and joyful about her sexuality. It's nice to play someone who's where I'm at."
In some ways, the series has always been a Rorschach test. For viewers who celebrate sexual freedom, it's a modern-day clarion call; for those who complain of the emptiness in our sex-drenched society, it's a cautionary tale.
But the show's actors have often said they admire most how the main characters have evolved into fully formed beings, who realize sex without love is an empty game indeed.
"In the beginning, Miranda was really bitter, extremely angry and acerbic. . . . She was always attacking people, from her own women friends to the men she was dating," Nixon said in May, marveling at her character's progress. (One topic she wouldn't address directly: Whether she, Davis and Cattrall felt blindsided by Parker's nearly unilateral decision to end the show.)
"In a good way, (Miranda's) confidence has faltered," she said. "It made her kind of stop and realize, "I'm complaining I'm not with anybody because the guys all suck. But maybe I'm not right all the time. Maybe I don't have all the answers.' "
Because of the whole secrecy thing, HBO wouldn't release review copies of the finale or the hourlong retrospective that precedes it. (Perhaps it fears a repeat of the Seinfeld situation, in which a retrospective clip show severely outclassed the moribund finale.)
More likely, the network is struggling to give fans one last jolt of surprise from a series that has consistently challenged its writers, cast and audience.
"We always wanted to have ideas that would keep the women moving forward," said King, who has promised only no ending in which all four women are married. "And with the women where they are now, the show would have to morph into a different series in order to keep moving. It's better to say, "We hope they enjoy season six and miss us when we're gone.' "
Preview
Sex and the City ends its six-year run at 9 tonight on HBO with a 45-minute finale. An hourlong retrospective, Sex and the City: A Farewell, airs at 8. Rating: TV-MA (Mature Audiences).
