If there is one thing that Sex and the City fans can all agree on, it’s that Carrie Bradshaw shouldn’t be able to afford her apartment. She lives by herself in a cavernous estate on the Upper East Side, with her closet alone big enough to fetch at least $1,500 per month on the Lower Manhattan rental market. This is made financially possible by filing exactly one column a week (freelance, no less!) for a second-tier tabloid called the New York Star.
But OK, fine, let’s suspend belief—as a late convert to the cult of Sex and the City, I’ve learned that the first thing I should do is set aside my enviousness of Carrie’s fairy tale livelihood, if only because contemplating lavish 1990s media pay makes me want to die. Besides, a new and far more pressing question about our heroine has captured my curiosity lately. It’s a mystery that has never been fully answered across 94 episodes, two films, and both a prequel and sequel series: Seriously, for the love of God, can somebody tell me how famous this woman is supposed to be?
This question flashed into my mind during the premiere of the second season of And Just Like That …, when we learn that Carrie, alongside Lisa and—inexplicably—Charlotte, has been invited to the Met Gala. The show, in its characteristically tortured way, strains to inform us that the three women are not attending the party as featured red-carpet guests in the same league as Rihanna and Lady Gaga, but they are still required to dress in unconscionably expensive gowns to match the all-time terrible theme “Veiled Beauty.” (Carrie struggles to find a suitable outfit, before eventually dusting off her wedding dress to fit the bill.) We are never informed how Carrie made the guest list. Podcasters and columnists do not exactly meld with the Met Gala’s preferred class of celebrity—I mean, the least famous person at the 2023 soiree was, like, Phoebe Bridgers—but in the fizzy, rent-controlled New York of Sex and the City, Carrie and her ex–art dealer friend apparently command enough relevancy to toast Champagne flutes with the likes of Pedro Pascal.
So, how is Carrie Bradshaw—reasonably successful author and struggling new-media maven, apparently—always swimming with the big fishes? Where did she get all this juice? Once again: How famous is she supposed to be?
Here are the facts as I understand them: Carrie Bradshaw is famous enough to be enshrined on a New York City bus advertisement, a point that is hammered home over and over again in the opening credits of the original series. New Yorkers clearly read her column, as evidenced by how frequently her work seems to pop up in casual happy-hour conversations, and I think it’s reasonable to assume that a Carrie Bradshaw “fandom” exists, albeit one that leaves her curiously free of paparazzi harassment.
Carrie has enough cachet for her oeuvre to be optioned into a Matthew McConaughey–produced film in the third season, and in the fifth season she publishes a hardcover collection of essays that is pleasantly received by legendary New York Times critic Michiko Kakutani. In the first film, the event of her midlife marriage to Mr. Big is treated as a pop-culture phenomenon, meriting a Vogue spread—Carrie dresses up in ridiculously goopy wedding couture for the photo shoot, awed to share the same pages as bona fide stars, which is as close to big-deal fame as a writer can hope for. The less said about the second film the better, but Liza Minnelli does appear as the officiant of Stanford and Anthony’s wedding, which certainly implies that Carrie has plenty of high-profile favors to call in. (Minnelli’s cover of “Single Ladies” during the reception, by the way, is arguably the aesthetic nadir of the entire Sex and the City chronology.)
All of this suggests a woman who has achieved, at the very least, a decent level of literary notoriety. Given that Carrie is a proxy for the author of the Sex and the City universe’s source material—the eternal downtown legend and New York Observer columnist Candace Bushnell—her fame seems fairly credible by real-world standards. The two have identical success stories: Bushnell also watched her saucy little dating column bloom into a book deal and a hugely popular screen adaptation, and, much like Carrie, she enjoys an air of Manhattan immortality as an It Girl emeritus. However, would Bushnell have been a shoo-in for the Met Gala, even during the apex of her fame? I have my doubts. Meanwhile, Sarah Jessica Parker has attended the ball at least 11 times between 1999 and 2023. I can think of no starker reminder of the partition between the A-list and the B-list, the star and the blogger.
Carrie’s clout is further complicated by And Just Like That …, a show that, set more than a decade after the second movie, appears determined to humble the four women at the heart of Sex and the City by any means necessary. For Carrie, this means that she’s buffeted by a healthy dose of life-changing grief and cascading societal irrelevancy. We watch her attempt to adapt the languishing Sex and the City column into podcast form, the provocative spark of her celebrity apparently fading in a world that doesn’t read newspapers anymore. Carrie’s producers keep telling her that her numbers are down and the end is nigh for the podcasting industry writ large, giving the impression that she’s teetering on the brink of cancellation—heartbreaking news for her hundred or so loyal listeners. In “The Real Deal,” the second episode of Season 2, the ax finally comes for her podcast after the studio that produces it is sold off.
You get the sense that, between her flop of a podcast and her memoir about what it’s like to start over, newly widowed, in her 50s, Carrie is just barely holding on to the residual threads of her celebrity, a shrinking level of clout grandfathered in by her success in her glory days. If she were on Twitter, my expert guess is that she’d have about 60,000 followers with almost zero engagement. In fact, I bet she would hardly post at all.
It’s this side of And Just Like That … that offers the most realistic estimation of Carrie Bradshaw’s fame, far more than the fantasy of a Met Gala invite. Her rise was always contingent on her own connection to celebrity and access: her ability to know the right parties, to possess the right gossip, and to spill her flings with John Slattery into sharp newsprint. For much of the original series, Carrie herself never quite belonged to that class, which is why the city bus bearing her visage splashes her with patented New York City sewage juice in those opening credits. But she was savvy and charming enough to be able to pass—at least for a little while. Once that illusory connection became severed by the inevitable forces of washedness that come for us all, she floated gently back down to her roots: just another has-been downtown writer, equipped with a million stories to tell from her nights in the trenches (albeit exponentially richer than your average freelancer, thanks to Big’s largesse). Carrie didn’t necessarily set out to be famous, but she did enjoy being adjacent to famous people, blurring the lines for a few wondrous years. I hate to say it, but that might be the most relatable thing about her.
