Illustration by Kyle T. Webster.

A few weeks before the premiere of The Carrie Diaries on The CW, The Observer drove to Connecticut to meet the “real Carrie Bradshaw,” who now lives by herself on a small farm with two large poodles.

Candace Bushnell is not an easy woman to find. After several wrong turns on a chilly, overcast Tuesday, we found ourselves driving up a small dirt road in the middle of nowhere (technically, Roxbury, Conn.). A sharp right, and we were in the gravel driveway of what appeared to be a steeply pitched farmhouse. In a puffy blue parka, bomber hat yanked over her ears, the slight blond figure bounded down the steps of the barn, calling away her dogs and exhorting us to park somewhere else so she could get her car out. She seemed so unnerved by our arrival that we weren’t even sure she was the woman behind the cultural juggernaut Sex and the City.

“I’m one of those people who don’t get lonely,” Ms. Bushnell, 54, told The Observer later in the afternoon. “I like being alone. I write and I read. I’m not interrupted. Friends live nearby.” She’s taken up dressage riding at a nearby stable, which houses her German Warmblood, Mr. Winters.

There was a time when Ms. Bushnell more closely resembled her famed alter-ego. Raised in Connecticut, an hour away from her current home, she arrived in New York, arms open, after selling a children’s book to Simon & Schuster at age 19.

“I would literally go up to people and say, ‘I’m a writer. Can I write something for you?’” She remembered. “I wrote for this paper called Night Magazine, which was mainly just a bunch of pictures of people at Studio 54. I would do little interviews and profiles.”

Ms. Bushnell’s darkly satirical 'Sex and the City' columns, written for this newspaper when she was in her 30s and already established, read more like the savage humor of her friends Jay McInerney and Bret Easton Ellis than those fictional musings of Ms. Bradshaw. Still, it was easy to confuse Carrie and Candace. They both had Mr. Bigs. They had friends named Miranda and Samantha. They were smart, savvy and knew everybody. If the ’90s in New York had to take on a single voice, Bushnell-as-Bradshaw was as good an option as any.

But at some point—around the time her show became a hit, it seems—the personalities split. Ms. Bushnell retreated. Asked if it was strange to see her creation become such a cultural touchstone, the writer shrugged. “I was traveling a lot when that happened,” she said vaguely.

Carrie Bradshaw, however, never left New York (except for that one time she went to the Middle East). Her legacy lives on in anyone who has ever smoked a cigarette in a Patricia Field knockoff and blogged about guys. Her apparition hovers over every “girlfriend brunch.” Her spirit possesses every college girl who still clutches onto her identity by declaring that she is “totally a Carrie!” (Or a Samantha, depending on the time of night.) She does not age, lose her New York celebrity status or suffer the effects of a recession and a media winter.

And thanks to Candace Bushnell and HBO, we can still fantasize about being Carrie Bradshaw, even when the real Carrie Bradshaw no longer does.

Despite leaving us with the taste of its terrible big-screen sequel film in our mouths, the SATC franchise fantasy is as strong as ever. Not only in The Carrie Diaries, a high school prequel which premieres next Monday on The CW, but in HBO’s show about four women—headed by a self-obsessed writer—trying to make it New York.

Before the first season of Girls had even premiered, creator/writer/producer/actress Lena Dunham was forced to answer for the show’s Sex and the City-ness. Despite the unending, indistinguishable line of quirky detectives who live on USA, and despite HBO/AMC/Showtime’s boundless well of misanthropic and misogynistic anti-heroes (Walter White, Rick Grimes, Tony Soprano, Dexter, Don Draper, etc., etc.), it was implausible—nay, impossible!—that there could be a second popular show about women, sex and urban life.

Rather than bristle, Ms. Dunham embraced the comparisons. As she told Laura Sullivan on All Things Considered, Girls owed a lot to the series, “not only because [Sex and the City] carved the space for women,” but because “the girls this show is about probably moved to New York three-quarters because they watched a Sex and the City marathon and thought, like, ‘I want me a piece of that.’”

Since similarities were inevitably drawn even before the cameras rolled, Girls set about in its premiere episode to prove that it existed in a post-Bradshaw world. In the pilot, flaky NYU student Shoshanna Shapiro was exactly the kind of young woman Ms. Dunham had described; a SATC obsessive whose dorm room was plastered with posters for the film Sex and the City ... arguably the furthest, most consumer-warped product to come from the original Bushnell series.

With that wincingly painful lack of self-awareness that would go on to define the show’s unique tone, Shoshanna described her cousin as “a Carrie, but with some Samantha aspects and Charlotte hair. That’s like, a really good combination.” She continued, oblivious to her cousin’s (and the audience’s) dismay, “I think I’m definitely a Carrie at heart, but sometimes? Sometimes my Samantha side comes out. And then when I’m at school, I definitely try to put on my Miranda hat.”

Girls wasn’t about to mock Sex and the City—the way 30 Rock once did, with Liz Lemon telling four lookalikes, “SHUT UP! That’s horrible!”—but it wasn’t above savaging the very-real stereotype of women who still walk around trying to find their identities in four characters who haven’t been on television for almost a decade.

So why are the women of Sex and the City so ingrained in the city’s cultural subconscious and stamped indelibly on its soul?

Maybe it’s an age thing. Sex and the City certainly did provide role models for young women who grew up believing that becoming a glamorous, famous writer was as easy as moving to New York and finding three friends with different hair colors. Just as plucky Mary Tyler Moore did generations before, Sex and the City proved that we all were “gonna make it after all.”

The Daily Beast’s Rebecca Dana began her career by following in Ms. Bushnell’s footsteps, becoming a society writer for The Observer directly out of college. More than once, she wrote about her mixed feelings toward the franchise.

I started watching the series as a wide-eyed Pittsburgh teenager and was quickly seduced by the whole fantasy. Carrie Bradshaw became a totem in my life, a lure to the city so powerful that I’m now embarrassed to think about it.

After growing up on a diet of SATC, is it any wonder that young women like Ms. Dana and Ms. Dunham are still reflecting and refracting a cultural zeitgeist that no longer exists?

Because there are no two ways about it: the New York of Carrie Bradshaw and the gang is gone. It was pre-recession programming, and the signs of excess wealth—the shoes, the clothes, the endless parties, cabs and brunches—were everywhere. Even if out of our immediate grasp, that lifestyle seemed within reach. Somehow, we were convinced that a woman working off of Carrie Bradshaw’s salary as a columnist (as she started out) would be able to stock a closet with Manolos in her Manhattan apartment.

But today? Forget about it. It’s impossible to give voice to your secret Carrie aspirations—or, even worse, socialite Charlotte—without immediately feeling like kind of an asshole.

With the second season of Girls premiering one day before The Carrie Diaries, it’s doubtful anyone is still comparing the dark, unredemptive, messy tone of Ms. Dunham’s creation to the chirpy, pun-obsessed world of Sex and the City. As Peter Stevenson, who edited “Sex and the City” at The Observer, told us, “Girls makes SATC look like Downton Abbey.” It was as much an iconic snapshot of New York in the ’90s as Bonfire of the Vanities and Wall Street were of the ’80s.

And that’s how we arrive at The Carrie Diaries. Stuck in its era and unable to move forward without drastically changing its protagonist’s lifestyle, the SATC franchise had to rewind. The show, based on Bushnell’s 2010 book, takes place before Bradshaw ever moved to the city and scavenges the picked-over bones of ’80s nostalgia to bring us the story of Carrie’s formative years.

The “origin story” idea doesn’t really work. The show so clumsily belabors its ’80s milieu that episodes have more pop-culture references than a VH1 flashback. (Space Invaders! Madonna! Interview magazine!) And woof, the early-Bradshaw metaphors: “It’s then that I had the realization that I had just lost my innocence, my virginity. And not to the guy I had hoped, but a different man. Manhattan.”

It’s not a bad show—its premiere showed promising chemistry, and AnnaSophia Robb does a serviceable pre-Sex-Bradshaw. But maybe actress Freema Agyeman, who spoke on the red carpet during the New York Television Festival, said it best: “The best part is the fun costumes!”

“I know some people think it’s a cynical move,” showrunner Amy B. Harris told The Observer by phone. “‘Oh it’s a franchise, you’re just trying to wring some more money out if it.’ But this is a time of my life I feel so strongly about, it was my life. My hope is that women will want to go back to their experience.”
Ms. Harris recognized the irony of The Carrie Diaries now competing with a show like Girls for an audience. “Lena told me Girls wouldn’t exist without SATC,” she said. “I’m totally prepared for the comparison, but I would be lying to say it wasn’t a concern. I hope people will stay with [The Carrie Diaries] because they feel like its their own.”

Ms. Bushnell herself might not be among them. “I really relate to Girls,” she told us. “I feel like it’s what my 20s were like.”

A common theme in The Carrie Diaries and Summer and the City (Ms. Bushnell’s sequel-to-the-prequel novel) as well as the author’s own self-narrative is the conviction that one could come to New York and make it as a famous writer. Not out of sheer willpower or hard work, but because of destiny.

“I do think there’s something in people’s DNA,” Ms. Bushnell pondered while we made some coffee and settled in. “The decision to leave your small town and leave your city, that’s a certain type of person.”

By way of explanation, Ms. Bushnell asked us to consider the lowly ant: most of them, she said, lived and worked in the colony. “But the colony would die if there weren’t ants that ventured outside their little box,” she said. “The human population would either die or be living in a dark age if some people—the right ones—didn’t move to big metropolitan areas and bring us all culture.”

This is not the story, of course, provided in the TV show The Carrie Diaries. If anything, that “certain type of person” that Ms. Bushnell described was Lena Dunham’s stubborn Hannah Horvath, who moves to Brooklyn from Michigan and founders in underemployment. Much like Ms. Bushnell, Hannah has minimally tried her hands in other types of work, but is convinced that her path is that of a writer. Specifically, one who only writes about her own life. She’s “a voice! Of a generation!”

Too bad Carrie Bradshaw has already claimed the title as the voice of every generation. About as far away from a banquette at Moomba as one can get, Ms. Bushnell acknowledged the grip her creation still holds on American culture. “Of course they’re saying Girls is like Sex and the City,” she said dryly. “It’s a TV show involving women.”

AnnaSophia Robb, who simply has to wonder. (Getty Images)

Hope she's practicing looking pensive while typing--the actress AnnaSophia Robb, most recently of the film Soul Surfer, has been picked as the young Carrie Bradshaw in the CW pilot The Carrie Diaries, based on Candace Bushnell's young-adult Sex and the City prequel, reports TV Guide. We really were rooting for Elizabeth Olsen.

The Bradshaw Redemption

While the Sex and the City prequel film is still up in the air, rumors today abound that the CW will be coming to rescue young Americans from having to think about relationships in anything other than metaphors about chocolate. Think: a TV adaptation of The Carrie Diaries, Candace Bushnell's teen tale of the iconic Bradshaw during her senior year of high school. Obviously, this show will be produced by Josh Schwartz and Stephanie Savage, they of Gossip Girl and The O.C. fame. Who knows the inner-workings of rich teenagers better than those two.

And yet...we have reservations. The Carrie Diaries have become hit books for the misguided YA set who, when they aren’t dreaming about making out with vampires, plot their future marriage to Chris Noth’s eyebrows. But we can't help but remember the ill-fated Valley Girls:  Schwartz and Savage's attempt to create an origin story for Gossip Girl's resident old person, Lily van der Woodsen.

We can just imagine Schwartz and Savage using the discarded designer nouns from Valley Girl and just replacing them, Mad Libs-style, for The Carrie Diaries. To give you an example, we've taken some choice quotes from Candace's original "Sex and the City" column and slightly reworked them to fit into the network's model of what 80s teen culture looked like.

Sex and the City: June 26, 1995
"Bad things can happen to city women when they come back from visiting their newly-married-with-children friends in the suburbs. First, on the train back, one feels a yearning for those green yards, waxed Acuras and adorable children. Then, revulsion sets in, pure disgust at the lack of interesting people, artists, musicians. Instead, you get all those Stepford Wives, and their sniveling brats and fake wood paneling. Gimme shelter—in Bowery Bar."

The Carrie Diaries – Episode 2
"Bad things can happen to city women when they come back from visiting their friends with newly-remarried moms in the suburbs. First, on the train back, one feels a yearning for perms, waxed Lotus Esprits and jelly bracelets. Then, revulsion sets in, pure disgust at the lack of interesting people, artists, musicians, and all the other weird kids from Saint Ann's. Instead, you get all those step-dads, off-brand Valium, and fake IDs that say you were born in 1984. Gimme shelter—at Tunnel."

Sex and the City: Sometime before 1996
“I moved into a friend’s apartment,” said Bunny, “and about two weeks later I met Dudley at Chester’s—that East Side bar for young swells. Within five minutes of meeting him, I was annoyed. He was wearing spectator shoes, a trilby hat and a Ralph Lauren suit...He tells bad jokes, makes fun of my pony-skin designer shoes. ‘I’m a cow, moo, wear me,’ he said. ‘Excuse me, but I believe you’re the big beef,’ I said. I was embarrassed to be seen talking to him."

The Carrie Diaries: Episode 3
"I’m sleeping over at a friend’s apartment,” said Bunny, “and about two weeks later I met Dudley at Limelight—that Chelsea spot for young kids who liked the Peter Murphy post-Bauhaus scene. Within five minutes of meeting him, I was annoyed. He was wearing Perry Ellis racers, Ray-Bans and a Z-Cavaricci sweater...He tells bad jokes, makes fun of my pony-skin designer shoes. ‘I’m a cow, moo, wear me,’ he said. ‘Excuse me, but where’s the beef?’ I said. I was embarrassed to be seen talking to him."

Sex and the City: March 25th, 1996
"There are things worse than being 35, single and female in New York. Like: being 25, single and female in New York.

It’s a rite of passage few women would want to repeat. It’s about sleeping with the wrong men, wearing the wrong clothes, having the wrong roommate, saying the wrong thing, being ignored, getting fired, not being taken seriously and generally being treated like shit."

The Carrie Diaries – Episode 4

"There are things worse than being 18, single and female in New York. Like: being 16, single and female in New York.

Sophomore year is something few seniors would want to repeat. It’s about going to second base (under shirt, above bra) with the wrong homeroom teacher, having the wrong parents, being ignored, watching your homeroom teacher get fired, not being taken seriously and generally being treated like shit."

Too bad this show is too late to cash into the 80s nostalgia vibe...maybe if Carrie had grown up in the late 90s, they could run Diaries to compete with Degrassi time-slots on Teen Nick.

Either way, Michael Patrick King, the Sex and the City creative force who directed both movies, is otherwise occupied with the upcoming premiere of CBS's 2 Broke Girls, about two young women struggling to make their way in the hostile city. Sounds like an unofficial Sex and the City prequel, in spirit at least!

UPDATE: Ms. Parker's rep tells us that "The Daily Mail's story"--which cites an unnamed source--"is false." Ms. Parker's TV ventures remain limited to new creative endeavors like the Bravo reality show Work of Art.

ddaddario@observer.com

Bright lights illuminated the high ceilings, ornate moldings and chandeliers within the 1898 mansion, which was standing in as a billionaire bachelor’s New York City apartment. Banks of additional lights outside the building created artificial sunlight streaming through the windows. The grand staircase was covered in plastic wrap. At the top, Brooke Shields—tall, sleek and TV makeup-ready—waited in a puffy winter coat (heat, apparently, not high on the list of priorities) to be called in front of the cameras, and tried to placate her daughter, the 4-and-a-half-year-old Rowan, who wondered, insistently, how much longer. The blond little girl attempted to stare down her famous mother. The two heads came together for some whispered negotiations, before Ms. Shields pulled Rowan cozily onto her lap. “Sorry,” she said with the universal what-can-you-do mommy smile. “We had a little bit of a change of schedule today.”

There was something awfully appropriate about witnessing this scene, as Lipstick Jungle, based on the best-selling novel by Sex and the City author Candace Bushnell, tackles the subject of three high-powered Manhattan women juggling their big-time jobs, their relationships, friendships and—in Ms. Shields’ character’s case—kids.

With Lipstick Jungle, the powers-that-be at NBC are hoping to capture the millions of viewers whose longing for Carrie, Miranda, Samantha and Charlotte has not been slaked by the reruns, DVD’s and sanitized TBS versions they have had to make do with since the hit HBO show went off the air in 2004. “It’s a jungle out there. Dress accordingly” is the show’s tag line; the trailers and adverts not-so-subtly suggest the show’s Sex and The City lineage, with glamour shots of high heels striding on sidewalks and the three female leads showing plenty of leg and cleavage. And the Jan. 31 premiere party would thrill Carrie Bradshaw: It’s being held in the shoe department of Saks Fifth Avenue.

But the creators of the show stress its move into new territory.

“In Sex and The City, the shocking thing was women talking about sex,” said Candace Bushnell, who created Sex and The City in the pages of The New York Observer in the 1990’s and is one of the show’s executive producers. “But today, women still have a hard time talking about ambition.” The blond and blue-eyed Ms. Bushnell, who is a dedicated presence on set, was perfectly coiffed and surprisingly delicate in dark jeans (and, yes, fashionably pointy high heels). “I mean, we have a woman running for president,” she said. “Sex isn’t forbidden—there are women having Tupperware parties with sex toys—but saying you want to be CEO or president of the United States? You’re not supposed to say that unless you’re 12 and then no one takes you seriously.”

“I like that it’s not only about the happily ever after,” said Brooke Shields. “What I love about these women is that the goal is not finding the man and having that be the only type of happiness. We spend so much of our younger years thinking that’s what you have to get: you have to get the relationship, you have to get the family. … Now when you’re actually in it, when you get what you wished for, how do you spend your days in it?”

The three main characters of Lipstick Jungle are Wendy Healy (Ms. Shields), a married movie mogul; Nico Reilly(Kim Raver), a Vanity Fair-like editor in chief, also married; and Victory Ford (Lindsay Price) a fashion designer who dates a billionaire named Joe Bennett, played by 80’s heartthrob Andrew McCarthy. (All three women are described in Ms. Bushnell’s book as being in their early 40’s; NBC describes them as “30- and 40-somethings.”)

The pilot opens with the information that all three women have made it onto a list of “New York City’s 50 Most Powerful Women,” as they convene for Victory Ford’s fashion show—which is slammed in the press the following day. The trio assemble to console Victory with alternating advice. (“You can use the house in Montauk,” says Wendy. “The freezer in the garage is stocked with Dove bars and weed.” Nico counsels her not to show defeat: “I find it offensive that women always feel that we have to apologize for our success. There is no luck, there’s just talent and hard work, and the ability to bounce back when you’re knocked down.” Quips Wendy, “And I always thought she just screwed her way to the top.”)

Their individual story lines are set into place neatly: Wendy, who spends the pilot trying to nail down Leonardo DiCaprio to a film project, is struggling with her child’s private school application and the resentment of her less successful husband. Nico, who senses that a male co-worker is trying to usurp her position with the boss (played by hey-look-who-it-is Julian Sands), feels ignored by her husband and contemplates an affair with a young hottie played by Robert Buckley (who had the female contingent of the crew in a full-on swoon). And Victory sets about getting her fashion line back on track while beginning to date big-bucks Joe Bennett. Fantasy elements firmly in place (Joe sends his private jet to whisk Victory home!), the show’s heart emerges in scenes of the three women together being warm, supportive and irreverent.

“When I signed on, I moved it as close to thirtysomething as I could,” said Timothy Busfield, the TV acting veteran from that iconic drama, as well as The West Wing and Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip. Along with Ms. Bushnell and Oliver Goldstick, he is an executive producer of Lipstick Jungle and is also directing most of the initial episodes.

Mr. Busfield, hair a paler shade of ginger then in his thirtysomething days, had ER’s Anthony Edwards as a guest on set that day (the two have been friends since 1984’s Revenge of the Nerds), and looked tired but happy as the crew moved to a new location, the French Embassy, just down the block.

“I really wanted this show to be about the little problems,” he said. “I do not like necessarily, even in our show, when we get too hijinks-orientated. Too high profile. I’d love the show to be, at its core, about the difficulty of the working mom, a leader in the workplace, who still is a mom and wife who provides for her husband and kids. My dream moment is to see Brooke come home after an enormously long day and have to load the dishwasher. Those little problems—not the business going under, or flying to Scotland to get J.K. Rowling … That stuff? Great, we have it. But the matters of self-doubt and overcoming self-doubt, that is what the show is about.”

Mr. Busfield, who was raised by a single mom, has encouraged the cast to bring their kids to the set (Ms. Raver has a 5-year-old son and 3-month-old baby) in the name of creating a happy work environment. “If Kim breaks to nurse, no one is allowed to make her feel bad or rush,” said Mr. Busfield. “This is a show when women can bring their kids. I don’t expect you to leave them at home, I’ll wait for you to finish pumping if you need to.”

He also expects the show to offer sympathetic and complex male chara
cters. “I felt the men were a little two-dimensional on Sex and The City,” said Mr. Busfield, adding, “I think men’s reaction to Sex and The City is like women’s reaction to The Three Stooges.

“I want the male audience,” he continued. “I want them to think, What can I do better?” He laughed. “They laugh, but the actresses know I want to shoot them like John Wayne. They’re all John Wayne to me. Shoot the costumes, get the moments, let me see the spurs.”

Before Lipstick Jungle went into production, it was already creating some drama. Last October, The New York Times reported on a fallout between Ms. Bushnell and her close friend, Sex and The City executive producer Darren Star. The gist: Mr. Star had bid for rights to develop the novel Lipstick Jungle for television in 2005; NBC reportedly doubled his bid, and won. Later, Ms. Bushnell learned that Mr. Star had proceeded to develop a show with a strikingly similar theme to that of her book, with Working Girl screenwriter Kevin Wade, called Cashmere Mafia.

Cashmere Mafia premiered on Jan. 6 on ABC to tepid reviews. “Mostly the series functions as an entertaining if pale sequel to its HBO prototype,” said The New York Times. “The show is too snide, condescending, and unpleasant to be salvageable,” said USA Today. The New York Post’s Linda Stasi, however, loved it—three stars! The ratings—the show has averaged 5.73 million viewers for the first three broadcasts—have been decent but unspectacular, particularly considering the show is debuting in an arid, WGA-strike-stripped television landscape. (Mr. Busfield said he had watched Cashmere Mafia. “I wasn’t devastated by it,” he said. “I was happy that they’re very different than us.”)

Back on the Lipstick Jungle set, Ms. Price huddled deeper into her coat as her character Victory’s wardrobe was packed up and returned. “I wanted to do this show so badly,” she said. “It was like having a crush on someone so much, you almost write it off.”

Her budding friendship with Ms. Shields and Ms. Raver has paralleled that of their characters. “Within our friendship we have an older, middle, and younger sister tone in real life that plays very much,” she said. “It’s natural. The work comes easily.”

She looked out a window, where the sun was setting and dousing Central Park in a late winter glow. “This role is so glamorous and fun and romantic—look where we’re sitting. Look at Fifth Avenue!”

What will Sex and The City fans see when they tune in next week?

The biggest difference for audiences, initially, will be Lipstick Jungle’s hourlong format. And while the clothes may still be stunning, the subtext is more grown-up. Sex and The City not only celebrated the state of singlehood in New York, it also heavily influenced that state; it created a generation of 20-something women, who are currently living in this city, who knew about Manolo Blahniks, Cosmopolitans and toxic bachelors before ever setting foot on the island and who have set about replicating it from their thin-walled Murray Hill apartments. Take a look around some Saturday night, and you’ll see them, in groups of four or five, dressed carefully, and saying “fabulous” and “fuck” a lot.

Lipstick Jungle does not seem out to swill Cosmos or get weak-kneed over boy toys. No naked Samantha careening about town or group giggles over Rabbit vibrators. And with a longer running time, it will have an opportunity to explore deeper, murkier ground. (Though you can bet the private jet will always be gassed-up on the tarmac.)

The sisterly comradeship that magnetized viewers to Sex and The City has survived intact in Lipstick Jungle. (Though when the ladies convene, they are just as likely to discuss their jobs or private schools as the men in their life. ) And the main sexual relationships onscreen are--gulp-- marriages: The first two episodes go places that Sex and The City didn’t spend much time in, like how scary and queasy a relationship can be when there are children involved and two people are committed to making it work. Or how lonely it can feel inside a marriage.

Ms. Bushnell was asked how New York City has changed since she wrote the first Sex and The City column in 1994. “I think the tenor of the city hasn’t changed,” she said. “It’s still a place to come and make it. The patterns are still there: They come to New York, they’re working up, they look up at the so-called establishment and the young want to tear it down and take its place. As time goes on they become hot and they become the establishment—and then everybody has kids and moves to Brooklyn.” She laughed. “It’s the city that people come to make it, a certain kind of maverick person. It was true in Edith Wharton’s day and it was true in 1994 and it’s certainly true today.”

The trailer offers few surprises. It starts with the first line of the classic, upbeat jingle Fever. And while we may never know how much S.J.P. loves us, HBO and New Line Cinema definitely do. After all, they really needn’t pour a bunch of money into fancy promotions. If they build it, we will come! A decent Web site, some late-night talk show appearances and movie listings would probably suffice. Still, they give us a rapturous, twirling Carrie Bradshaw in a wedding gown, a breathy voiceover (“They say nothing lasts forever; dreams change, trends come and go, but friendships never go out of style.”), a wide-angle shot of the ladies tromping down Fifth, shopping bags securely in-hand. Then, of course, they really stick it to us—the kicker: a lingering, fairytale smooch between Ms. Bradshaw and Mr. Big. Spring can’t come soon enough.

Semi-related shameless self-promotion: The Observer's Sex and the City archives