The Math of Sex And The City

With the movie coming up, one of my favorite shows is getting press and debate again. This is part of a New York Magazine article written by E. Nussbaum:
Sex And The City's strengths were those of good episodic TV: It made a virtue of consistency and formula. For one thing, there was that four-plot rhythm, with each script weaving together two “serious” relationship plots with two smutty farces. And then there were the characters, who could be so off-putting at first. Stylized abstractions with rich(ish) inner lives, Carrie, Miranda, Samantha, and Charlotte were at once real people and placeholders in a Socratic dialogue, one centered on the show’s main question: What is the worth of a single woman’s life? The show could be nearly mathematical in its precision: four characters, two women each slotted neatly along three ideological axes. There were the romantics (Carrie and Charlotte) versus the cynics (Miranda and Samantha). There were the libertines, who saw sex as something fun and adventurous (Carrie and Samantha), versus the prudes, who saw it as grim or chaotic (Miranda and Charlotte). And there were the second-wave egalitarian feminists (Carrie and Miranda) versus the third-wave “power feminists,” who believed men and women were at war and women needed to use their feminine powers as a wedge (Charlotte the Rules Girl and Samantha the Power Slut).