- Network: HBO
- Series Premiere Date: Jun 6, 1998
- Critic Score
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Jun 13, 2013Funny fabulousness ... [with] a few too many talk-to-the-camera moments.
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Each slight, breezy half-hour is fresh and funny.
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As shamelessly superficial as the crowd it memorializes, but so sophisticated in its approach to shallowness that it's also great fun. [5 June 1998, p.F28]
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Apr 8, 2013When the series moves away from stereotyping its main female characters into the slutty (Kim Cattrall), the savvy (Cynthia Nixon) and the sweet (Kristin Davis), and dives right into the muck of the boy-girl thing, it's laugh-out-loud funny. [6 June 1998, p.1C]
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Apr 9, 2013Parker projects a saucy style, but her Carrie character comes across as an arrogant skeptic with an I-don't-really-care attitude. She avoids emotional risks. Despite her rampant curiosity and calculated posing, Carrie prefers to keep her distance as a journalist. [4 June 1998, p.43]
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Almost none of the characters is particularly likable - unless he or she is angling for something. What's refreshing about Sex and the City is that it pushes to a darkly comic extreme the situations that already fuel the many urban-singles sitcoms on network TV, particularly those with female leads like "Suddenly Susan" and "Caroline in the City." More social satire than sitcom, it looks openly at relationships steeped in ambivalence, fear, and the games people play. [6 Jun 1998, p.C6]
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Apr 9, 2013We won't be able to avoid the realization that "Sex" as we knew it was a lot more fun than it is as Darren Star, who persists in seeing all New York as "Central Park West," knows it. [5 June 1998, p.113]
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Single and in their 30s, each is a distinct blend of guile, guts and needfulness, traipsing through the dating world with predictable and even trite results, their chatter constantly hitting on sex, relationships and sex. Some good acting and some nicely shot romantic interludes provide some redemption for the series, but scripts need to loosen up and inherit some of the playfulness the actresses bring to their roles. [3 June 1998]
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Though stylishly directed, Sex and the City isn't especially funny, and it isn't as campy as Melrose Place in its prime. [6 June 1998, p.E1]
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Parker is appealing as always, but watching the show is an empty diversion—like scanning a gossip column about people who don't exist.
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It's somehow not as funny or as clever as it's meant to be. It tries very hard to be sophisticated, provocative and kinky. But underneath the big city smugg-and-smirk of these junior would-be movers and shakers are some very lonely people. [6 June 1998, p.11]
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The series itself turns out to be less "candid and comic" (as HBO puts it) than tired and tacky. [4 June 1998, p.G6]
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Apr 9, 2013What may be a reasonable, even sexy premise comes out flat, bitter and flaccid...Neither director nor cast can do anything much with Star's awkward script, which is choppy and burdened with impossible dialogue. But worst is that the smarty mood leaps beyond cynical, and his characters are too disagreeable to make funny. [3 June 1998]
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Apr 9, 2013From the constant smoking to the constant whining, Star, who wrote several of the scripts, has again given his actors and directors dialogue and plot lines that make it virtually impossible for them to do anything but laboriously go through the motions of real life. [4 June 1998, p.104]
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Enough to make you re-evaluate the virtues of celibacy...Here's a thought: Perhaps these whiners can't find great guys because they're not so great themselves. [5 June 1998, p.12E]
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Sarah Jessica Parker has an in-your-face face. In her new HBO comedy series, Sex and the City, she always seems to be thrusting it forward. She's in love with the camera. Unfortunately, it's unrequited...Parker, with her scraggly hair and jutty jaw, is certainly not the worst thing about this smirky-jerky sexcom, but she usually seems so light and funny that it's dismaying to see her in bad form, looking like a walking flea market and coming across about as subtly as a tsunami. [6 June 1998, p.C01]
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A dark, outrageously cynical, cold take on the lives of thoroughly unpleasant people living in present-day Manhattan...What's supposed to be entertainment is wearisome, whiny and annoying. [6 June 1998, p.E07]
User score distribution:
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Positive: 2 out of 3
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Mixed: 0 out of 3
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Negative: 1 out of 3
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Nov 10, 2013
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Jun 12, 2013