Everyone knows that Sex and the City made lasting changes on our culture. Here it is, 27 years after the first episode aired, and we’re still talking about it — and also talking about the current sequel series And Just Like That. Even people who have never watched a minute of the thing have a general sense of what it means to be asked, “Are you a Charlotte or a Samantha?”
But there are few who have a firmer grip on how much the legendary HBO series impacted people than Sarah Jessica Parker, who plays the franchise’s central character Carrie Bradshaw. An entire field of scholarship exists explaining how the show shattered taboos around what people are allowed to talk about (let alone allowed to want) in their intimate lives, not to mention how the production influenced the worlds of fashion and design.
Parker’s recent appearance on the Call Her Daddy podcast, however, offered some unusual insight into some very specific changes that she clocked in her home town (and the show’s location) of New York City.
HBO/Courtesy Everett Collection / Everett Collection
“About a year into the show airing, I could see evidence of the way it was impacting New York City,” she said. “You’d see groups of women all of a sudden at tables leaning into each other, not leaning in… which, I can’t stand that phrase. But, I mean, physically, like, clustered.”
The anthropologically observant actress continued, “And you’d see them in fours walking down a sidewalk, like, lined up, almost like a piece of equipment, which I’d never really [seen before].”
She then admitted that this may have been a bit of confirmation bias on her part.
“Maybe I was, like, hypervigilant because of what we were doing all day long,” she said, likely referring to the many, many times that she, Kim Cattrall, Cynthia Nixon, and Kristin Davis would have to march down the avenue side by side, which is certainly a photogenic way to get across town, but a real hassle to actual New York pedestrians who may want to keep a livelier stride.
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With those revelations out of the way, Parker then slipped in the response one might expect when asked about the impact of a show that is regularly credited with empowering women for decades.
“The anecdotal stuff of all the women that just came up to me and said all these years, you know, ‘I was allowed to be me,'” she shared.
To watch the full 73-minute chat with Sarah Jessica Parker on Call Her Daddy, all you need to do is press the play button below.