Last winter’s six-episode “Sex and the City” mini-season got a great deal of attention for managing, inadvertently, to capture the post-9/11 zeitgeist. The episodes were shot long before Sept. 11 but aired months after.
   In its typical incarnation, the HBO hit might have seemed crass and out-of-sync. Did anyone really want to watch the gang happily snatching up sexual partners and trendy shoes while in the real city people were, well, forlornly snatching up sexual partners and trendy shoes?
   Instead the show lurched in a risky, radically different direction.
     The season was suffused with melancholy: Traditionalist Charlotte (Kristin Davis) tried in vain to get pregnant, then saw her troubled marriage crumble for good. Cynical, independent Miranda (Cynthia Nixon), meanwhile, became pregnant accidentally and gave birth to a son, Brady (Steve, the father and ex-lover, will help raise him). 
   Trampy Samantha (Kim Cattrall) actually let her guard down and fell in love with her boss, Richard, then walked in on the slimeball pleasuring another woman. 
   And newspaper columnist Carrie (Sarah Jessica Parker), our hero and guide, broke off her engagement to sweet-but-stolid Aidan and saw her on-again-off-again significant other, “Big,” leave for the West Coast.
   In short, the gals were growing up and getting serious--just as the rest of New York was forced to do the same. 
    Those episodes were the best the series has ever been. The one-liners still flew fast and furious, but the show was also genuinely, if gently, heartbreaking.
   The sitcom’s fifth season, which began on July 21, has continued in a similar vein, but it's gotten off to an uneven start.
    These episodes were filmed after Sept. 11, and the effort of trying to pay homage to the wonder of New York City shows. 
    The series has always been an extended ode to New York, of course, but this season’s premiere dumped any trace of subtlety into the East River. Even after having a nightmare vision of her possible future--Carrie meets an elderly woman who notes that she used to be just like her, then mashes mood enhancers into her ice cream--she still concludes that New York is all the companionship she needs. Try telling that to real singles in the city.
   But the second episode picked up where last season left off, walking a fine line between poignancy and mawkishness. 
   On the wrong side of the line: Charlotte attends a seminar in which lonely women spout meaningless affirmations, then stands and sobs as she wonders why they haven’t worked out for her.
    On the right side: Baby Brady’s baptism, in which the inherent schmaltz factor is countered by the hilarious presence of Steve’s drunken, cursing mother.
    The most surprising part of the new season so far is how honestly the writers are dealing with Miranda’s motherhood. Samantha is openly horrified with how a baby-wielding friend cramps her style. (In the ultimate indignity, she’s forced to refer to Richard’s past transgression as “eating another woman’s sushi” to avoid swearing around Brady, though even an infant should be able to decipher that euphemism.) 
   Miranda herself is floundering a bit. Her sense of loss that her friends are out having fun while she’s left behind is captured beautifully. 
   Whether the writers will continue with this plot line, or follow the path of every sitcom in history and start pretending the baby doesn’t exist, remains to be seen.
   At a time in its life span when most series have become hopelessly stale, “Sex and the City” has successfully reinvented itself.
    The show became a sensation partly because of its novelty and shock value: TV had never before presented women talking in such a graphic way about sex. But developing the characters into real people always seemed like an afterthought.
    The series had no choice but to change before the novelty wore off, and in so doing it’s given the characters real depth for the first time.
    A bit battered, the “Sex and the City” women are struggling to find their way, but still going strong, much like the city in which they live.

^{-Dan Jewel is a senior editor at Biography Magazine in New York.}

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