Carrie Bradshaw (Sarah Jessica Parker) is literally the voice of the show; she narrates each episode. Each episode is structured around her train of thought while writing her weekly column, "Sex and the City" for the fictitious newspaper, The New York Star.
A member of the New York glitterati, she is a club/bar/restaurant staple who is known for her unique fashion sense; she violently joins together various styles into one outfit and it is not uncommon for her to pair inexpensive vintage pieces with high-end couture.
The resulting outfits range from the ridiculous to the sublime. Throughout the six seasons Carrie meets famous people, both fictional and non-fictional.
A self-proclaimed shoe fetishist, she focuses most of her attention on journalism. She works on her PowerBook in her apartment, writing newspaper articles focusing on the different aspects of a relationship.
Carrie is also the thinker of the group. Often exceeding her spending limit in one shopping trip, it is unclear how the modest income of a newspaper columnist could support such an addiction. In later seasons, her essays are collected as a book and she begins taking assignments from Vogue and New York Magazine.
In Season 4, it was revealed that Carrie had never before used email as she was having a hard time setting up an account to get in touch with Aidan. Carrie does not own a printer, so it's impossible to know how she submits her columns to the fictional New York Star.
It has been suggested that she perhaps saves her columns on floppy disks and submits her work thusly. Aidan also buys her a Zip drive in season 4 so that she can back up her work after her computer crashes. She is never seen in a library and does not mention printing out her work in hard copy. Carrie is very proud of her home, a one-bedroom apartment in an Upper East Side brownstone, which she eventually purchases, and lives in for the run of the series.
Charlotte York (Kristin Davis) an art dealer with a rigid Connecticut uptight blue-blooded upbringing.
She is the most conservative and optimistic of the group, the one who places the most emphasis on emotional love as opposed to lust, and is always searching for her "knight in shining armor."
Often scoffing at the lewder, more libertine antics that the show presents (primarily by way of Samantha), in her own way, Charlotte presents a more traditional attitude about relationships, usually based around "the rules" of love and dating. Despite her conservative outlook, she has been known to make concessions (while married) that even surprised her sexually freer girlfriends (such as her level of dirty talk, oral sex in public and "tuchus- lingus").
She gives up her career shortly after her first marriage, divorces upon irreconcilable differences around in vitro fertilization and receives a Park Avenue apartment in the divorce settlement. She eventually remarries to her less than perfect, but good-hearted divorce lawyer, Harry Goldenblatt after converting to Judaism.
Charlotte was a star all through her academic and social life.
A "straight A" student who eventually attended Smith College to major in Art History with a minor in Finance. Throughout the show it is also revealed that Charlotte was voted homecoming queen, prom queen, "most popular," student body president, track team captain, and was active as a teen model.
Miranda Hobbes (Cynthia Nixon) is a career-minded lawyer with extremely cynical views on relationships and men.
A Harvard University graduate from Philadelphia, she is Carrie's best friend, confidante, and voice of reason.
In the early seasons, she is portrayed as masculine and borderline misandric, but this image softens over the years, particularly after she becomes pregnant by her on again-off again boyfriend, Steve Brady, whom she eventually marries.
Miranda is nobody's fool and is smart enough to demand the "short hair discount." The birth of her son, Brady Hobbes, brings up new issues for her Type A, workaholic personality, but she soon finds a way to balance career, being single and motherhood. Of the four women, she is the first to purchase an apartment, and later a home in Brooklyn.
Miranda is obsessed with Jules and Mimi, an imaginary soap opera inside Sex and the City. The show first appears in Season 6, Episode 2. The small snippets shown have led to it being described as a "bi-racial sexually charged fictional BBC soap opera", and the damage of Miranda's TiVo by her cleaner, Magda, played a role in one episode. Miranda also has a love for hair dye, food, and gossip.
Samantha Jones (Kim Cattrall], the oldest of the group, is an independent publicist and a seductress who avoids emotional involvement at all costs, while satisfying every possible carnal desire imagineable while never being affected by Sexually Transmitted Disease.
She believes that she has had "hundreds" of soulmates and insists that her sexual partners leave, "an hour after I climax."
Throughout the course of the show, we learn Samantha's glamorous, impenetrable facade and dismissive approach to love actually hides a sensitive, caring heart.
Though she refuses to drop her mask, privately she struggles with the defection of hotel magnate and philanderer Richard Wright and goes through emotional turmoil to avoid becoming attached to actor/model/waiter Smith Jerrod. The latter effort was to shelter herself from potential heartbreak and in that effort she ultimately fails.
Aside from these, Samantha also has a number of other real relationships in the show, albeit far less than the number of her casual sex encounters.
However, this is hardly exclusive to Samantha, though as a rule, hers are far more unconventional and frequent than those of her friends.
For example, Samantha has a (relatively) long term relationship with a lesbian artist named Maria.
In Season 3, she moves from her full-service Upper East Side apartment to an expensive loft in the then-burgeoning Meatpacking District.
In Season 6, Samantha's character further develops when she is unexpectedly diagnosed with cancer when visiting a plastic surgeon for a breast implant consultation.
An operation, chemotherapy, and her powerful will help Samantha to beat cancer, and it becomes clear the experience has endowed her with a new perspective (and a new excuse to be fashionable, as she thereafter begins wearing all manner of wigs, hats, and bandanas).
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