Blame my media studies AS-level, but I love revisiting old TV shows and re-evaluating my originalanalysis. For example, was She-Ra just a brightly coloured gateway drug into full-blown feminism? And what does EastEnders’ Dirty Den tell us about British masculinity? But here’s an evergreen thesis about Sex And The City: the series was a flawed masterpiece, and I will always love Carrie, as charmingly played by Sarah Jessica Parker. That’s not an opinion I will ever reverse.
Parker, 51, was something of a teen star, but I first saw her in early 1990s movies Hocus Pocus and The First Wives Club. When SATC first aired in 1998, the show scandalised teenage me – I remember the frisson of illicit pleasure at watching it. I had a poster of Carrie, free from a magazine (the flipside featured George Clooney as Dr Doug Ross on ER – ah, the late 90s!), hanging on my bedroom wall. As Carrie the “everygirl”, she was equal parts winsome and deplorable, funny and kind, but also selfish, spoiled and immature. I adored her performance, which always felt true. She’s a girl’s girl, in the best possible way.
SJP’s great talent is a winning believability: she’s nice but not too nice, pretty but not too pretty, ordinary without being plain. You cheer for her characters, whoever she plays (see also The Family Stone). I bought Parker’s perfume, for crying out loud.
And I’ll be cheering again come October, when her long TV hiatus is over. Her new show is Divorce, written by Sharon Horgan, in which she plays a woman in the storm of a conscious uncoupling. I might have to make room for another poster.
