Sex and the City and Us by Jennifer Keishin Armstrong

Author:Jennifer Keishin Armstrong
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Simon & Schuster

AN AFFAIR TO REMEMBER

From the beginning of Sex and the City, its most devoted fans obsessed about the characters’ personal decisions: Should Miranda give the puppyish Skipper a chance? Should Carrie have kept the money a guy left her by the bedside when he thought she was a high-class hooker? What should Miranda do about her nosy housekeeper, Magda, who insists on replacing her coffee with tea and her vibrator with a statue of the Virgin Mary? These questions enlivened our brunch conversations and sometimes even helped us figure out where we stood on everything from basic dating etiquette to sex work to opting out.

But none of these debates matched the intensity of feeling unleashed by one of the major story lines for the third season: First, the writers would introduce Mr. Big’s first serious rival for Carrie’s affection, a sensitive carpenter named Aidan, played by John Corbett. The actor was known for his role on the quirky early-’90s dramedy Northern Exposure and served as the antithesis of Noth’s Mr. Big. He had wavy sandy hair, an easy smile, and an outdoorsy, hippie vibe. Though Parker knew of him and his work, she was surprised by the strength of some women’s ardor when she mentioned Corbett would play her new boyfriend.

Corbett was Aidan. When the Sex and the City producers first offered Corbett the role, he wasn’t sure he wanted to do it. He was building a house in West Virginia and he didn’t want to stop just to work on a show he’d never seen. He also resisted the idea of getting naked on-screen, and the first draft of Aidan’s debut script had him taking a bath with Carrie. He couldn’t do it, he said, as long as his mother was still alive.

But he agreed to meet with Parker to discuss the role. “As soon as she opened to door to her house, I fell in love,” he said. Luckily, that bath was scrapped, too.

Viewers’ affection for Aidan only intensified the audience’s feelings about the second half of the season, which features Carrie cheating on everyone’s favorite new boyfriend, Aidan, with the now-married Mr. Big.

On the one hand, plenty of viewers remained Team Big. Around this time, King went to dinner with Noth and Parker, riding in the backseat of Noth’s 1970 vintage Mercedes while the TV couple rode in front. When they stopped at a red light, a couple in the next car spotted them and said, “Ooh, it’s real! I knew it!”

But viewers lashed out against Carrie after the affair, trotting out the age-old sexist trope that affairs are always the woman’s fault. (The sentiment, expressed mostly through letters, emails, interviews, and hearsay at the time, solidified later into a “Carrie Bradshaw Was an Impossibly Awful Human” genre of blog posts during the show’s afterlife.) “It’s funny because it’s like, ‘Hey, he’s the one who’s married. She’s not married,’ ” Bicks says. “There was such a double standard going on.”

The story line marked a departure for the show in several ways.

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