Linguistic peculiarities of Sex and the City

Sex and the City is an Emmy award-winning cable television program, created by Darren Star. The show originally aired on the pay-TV cable channel Home Box Office (HBO) for six seasons from 1998 to 2004. In 2001 it won the Emmy for Outstanding Comedy series, the first time a cable television show has ever taken top honors for best series in any category. Sex and the City is an adaptation of Candice Bushnell’s collection of essays, also entitled ‘Sex and the City,’ which are based on her mid-nineties columns for the New York Observer about «negotiating the urban jungle in the cruel planet that is Manhattan». Her column, that established itself as a ‘must-read’ for every urban New Yorker, «chronicles the cultural elite, a perversely poignant universe of Manhattan night spots and Hampton beach houses inhabited by glamorous but cynical women and rich soulless men». The column mixed the investigative with personal, tracing the parties, preoccupations, and sexual peccadilloes of the wealthy Manhattan social scene. Some of these autobiographical vignettes were later collected in her book.
The premise of the show depicts a ‘thirty-something’ New York column writer (based on Bushnell herself) named Carrie Bradshaw, who considers herself to be on a pseudo anthropological quest to understand contemporary urban dating rituals of her various ‘Manhattanite’ friends.
The social scene evoked by Bushnell was unfailingly cruel, superficial, and harsh, and often unforgiving of women. Even for a cable channel like HBO, known to be more willing to take risks in its programming than the networks, the prospect of a television show retaining all the «the big black truth» of Bushnell’s «horrific» writing (Bret Easton Ellis, cited on back cover of Bushnell, 1996) seemed too risky a venture, too potentially alienating to audiences. Michael Patrick King, executive producer of the show, described how the writing team recognized that «to make the premise work on television they would have to adapt some of Bushnell’s tone and add more humor». Much of the book’s cold cynicism had been replaced with comedy, and while the competitive world and sharply observed New York glamorous elite were still there, the television series focused on a complex but warm central female protagonist and her best friends. It is an urban story about four female characters in their thirties-forties: Carrie Bradshaw, a newspaper columnist; Miranda Hobbes, a corporate lawyer; Samantha Jones, a public relations executive; and Charlotte York, an art gallery owner.
The show revolves around the main protagonist, Carrie Bradshaw, who narrates each episode as she seeks insight and answers to relationship dilemmas. Each episode is organized around her column topics, in such a way as to provide background commentary to the unfolding plots of the show’s episodes.