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On a Sex and the City tour, part of a friend’s New York-themed birthday week itinerary, I am now the same age as Carrie Bradshaw in the show’s final season (2004), but it is 20 years later. A guide introduces herself, adds that she is “also an actress,” and the bus careens from where opening credits were shot—some riders are wearing tulle skirts to memorialize that freeze-framed street splash—to Buddakan, Magnolia Bakery, the West Village town house meant to be Carrie’s Upper East Side apartment building, and Onieal’s, a bar called Scout on the show.

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My friends and I are, according to our raised hands, the only ones on the bus who currently live or have ever lived in New York. Each announcement introduces the city itself through a lens of T.V. lore, leaving out details about the block it points out and making the trip an exercise in suspending the natural inclination to attach real memories to places. This is not where millions of important things happened and then one thing happened to me; it is where characters met one another. In SoHo, the actress recalls when Charlotte worked as a gallery girl, but we zoom past Mercer Street, where I’d expected us to turn. I happen to know that some of those gallery scenes took place in an office where I later worked. Production didn’t even change out the red Eames chairs, like the one in which I later sat, or take off the window decal, which says the name of the magazine I later edited.

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Shortly after SATC premiered (1998), my mother divorced my father and made friends with my art teacher, a younger divorcée. Together, they rented the series on V.H.S. cassettes, and at night I snuck into the living room to watch on low volume. I was expecting something different. (A trailer’s voiceover asks, “Are you ready for sex? Six hours of sex?”) It was not a trashy escape, and also not my mom, whose favorite T.V. show pre-divorce was the cozy CBS sitcom Northern Exposure (1990–1995). Once, I came home to my teacher and her making cosmopolitans in a type of glass I didn’t know we had. She was born the year after Kim Cattrall, who played Samantha. In the last season, the character goes through chemotherapy. In the terribly written sequel, And Just Like That… (2021–present), even though she isn’t on the show, Samantha is, unlike my mom, still alive.

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"This is not where millions of important things happened and then one thing happened to me; it is where characters met one another." — Natasha Stagg

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‍‍It didn’t occur to me as a kid growing up in Michigan that this show was filmed on location, unlike concurrent T.V. depictions of New York. Or that the city in question even mattered. Sitcoms were perfunctorily set in the place where scripts are conceived, I assumed, where more action could happen because more people lived in proximity, buildings nestled next to one another, homes attached with hallways that acted as highways for character arcs to merge. Back then, I didn’t think about how close my mother’s New Jersey hometown was to Manhattan, how she could relate.

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We know that SATC inspired a type of woman to move to the city because the show has become shorthand for a period post-9/11 (an event famously not mentioned), when New York felt overrun by people expecting something dreamier than what it offered. I didn’t see the before and after firsthand, but I’d still argue that the expectation has become a certain reality, in some new and distorted way, reflecting its citizens’ desires. And that original fantasy is derived from reality. Its characters are based on the lives of local newspaper columnist Candace Bushnell’s friends and acquaintances, as recounted, evocatively, for a couple of years in print and then collected as a book. (Top Reddit reviews are confused: “It’s not a novel or a memoir with a through line, but a series of sketches about various women’s sex lives in the city.”) Versions blow up bigger than their origins, creating new myths, new stimuli, and the city, like all cities, changes.

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That evening, we sit at a bar, women in our 30s discussing our dating lives, writing columns, working for galleries. Dance music videos from 20 years ago play on mounted T.V. sets, distracting us from our own lives, the ones we paused to learn about the depictions of others.