Why Sarah Jessica Parker Keeps Playing Carrie Bradshaw

Jun 25, 2023

By Rachel Syme

On a recent Thursday afternoon at SJP Collection, a tiny, pink, candle-scented shoe boutique in Manhattan’s West Village, the store’s owner, the fifty-eight-year-old actress Sarah Jessica Parker, was working the floor. “Stuff the toes with this,” she said, holding a wad of tissue paper up to a bride-to-be who was wedding-shoe shopping with her mother. The young woman had selected a pair of white lace Cosettes ($450), a heeled Mary Jane with a rhinestone buckle. Parker was eagerly explaining how to store them between wears. She had on the same design along with her everyday “uniform,” a studiously distinctive take on jeans and a T-shirt: 7 for All Mankind denim, a cotton top that she cuts at the neckline and ruches with safety pins, and a charm necklace twisted through the strap of her bra so that the chain falls at her left breast, like an eccentrically long lapel pin. Her highlighted blond hair was pulled back into a tight chignon. She packed the Cosettes into a box and handed them to the women.

“Wear these in good health!” she said, doing the slightest curtsy.

Parker remains best known for her role as Carrie Bradshaw, the twinkly sex columnist in the HBO series “Sex and the City,” who had a lustier relationship with Manolo Blahniks than with most of the men she dated. Parker recalled that, when the series concluded after six seasons, in 2004, financiers began “backing up the money trucks,” asking her to put her name on a line of shoes. She was not against branding opportunities—a clothing line with the now defunct retailer Steve & Barry’s, a fragrance called Lovely—but she considered stilettos a taller order. “I felt honor-bound to produce shoes that I would wear,” she said. When she started SJP Collection, in 2014, she partnered with George Malkemus III, who’d helped popularize Manolo Blahniks as the brand’s U.S. president, and insisted that the shoes be handmade in Italy. In 2021, Malkemus III died, and though Parker has never taken a “single penny” of salary from the company, she continued designing the shoes herself.

The West Village SJP, which opened in February, is situated on Bleecker Street, the epicenter of “S.A.T.C.” fandom. Bus tours bring passengers to buy sweets at Magnolia Bakery, which the series made such a craze that at one point the shop had to enlist a “cupcake bouncer.” Around the corner, the Carrie House, whose façade doubled as Carrie’s Upper East Side apartment, bears a sign imploring gawkers to stay off the stoop. The West Village today is both more moneyed and more blandly touristy than it was before “S.A.T.C.” made it famous. Parker, who lives in the neighborhood and is among its most ardent boosters, said that the shoe store’s locale wasn’t intentional. Bleecker Street in the twenty-tens became what the Times labelled a “luxury blightscape,” pockmarked with empty storefronts previously occupied by designer brands, in large part because of the inflated retail bubble that “Sex and the City” helped create. The block has bounced back somewhat, but the pandemic didn’t help. Parker said, of the rent there, “It was the most affordable, if you can freakin’ believe it.” But proximity to the show’s other landmarks has made SJP an active stop on the “S.A.T.C.” tour (customers who show their vouchers receive ten per cent off on shoes), and by working in the store, which she aims to do weekly, Parker has effectively made herself a bonus attraction. The result is a surreal bit of immersive fan service—emphasis on the “service”—not unlike if Jerry Seinfeld decided to spend his Thursday afternoons waiting tables at Tom’s Restaurant.

Parker has been acting professionally since the age of eight, though for much of her childhood she was on track to become a professional ballerina. She is an admirer of George Balanchine, the famously exacting late co-founder of New York City Ballet, who would implore his dancers not to be “stingy” by holding back onstage. As both a businesswoman and a performer, Parker likes to feel that she’s devoted herself all the way. Her brand extends to winemaking, a luggage line, and even to book publishing, under a new imprint with the independent publisher Zando, SJP Lit. (Her reading taste runs to approachable literary fiction; she named a shoe design for Donna Tartt, the author of one of her favorite novels, “The Goldfinch.”) On “Sex and the City,” she starred in and narrated every episode, and in the latter seasons also executive-produced. Her workdays could last eighteen hours, and her costume fittings upward of eight. Molly Rogers, who worked with the costume designer Patricia Field on the original “S.A.T.C.,” told me, “She tried on so many things once during Season 6 that she rubbed her elbows raw.” Parker calls herself a “bitter ender.” Performance, in her approach, requires the discipline to stick with it. Even trying on designer clothes can be an act of endurance. She told me she’d welcome the chance to one day lean into her fascination with regimentation and play, against type, the role of a nun.

“Sex and the City” ended almost two decades ago. In the time since, Parker has teamed up with Michael Patrick King, who wrote for and executive-produced the series before adding showrunner to his duties, taking over from Darren Star. Together, Parker and King have made two “S.A.T.C.” movies plus “And Just Like That . . . ,” a streaming reboot that premièred in 2021 and begins a second season this month. Many critics agree that neither the movies nor the new series has fully recaptured the alchemy of the original, but Parker avoids the discourse. (“No one sends me press clippings,” she said. “I don’t get reviews, watch reviews, read reviews.”) She continues to play Carrie because, as she put it, she finds the material “unmistakably rich,” but also out of what seems to be a peculiar sense of responsibility. When the reboot was about to début, in the midst of the pandemic, she described it as a kind of palliative: “The world of Carrie and her friends has always been about coming home, and I felt like we needed that right now,” she told Vogue. The first season of “And Just Like That” broke a streaming record for HBO Max (now simply called Max). Whether or not we needed it, viewers are following Parker to the bitter end.

At the shoe store, Parker circulated among a dozen or so customers browsing shoes as colorful and carefully arranged as glacéed macarons. Teresa Hewgill, a thirtysomething hairdresser from Nottingham, England, had been in a cab on her way to the Carrie House when she noticed the SJP awning and decided to drop in.

“Can I help you?” Parker asked.

Hewgill pointed at an ivory Fawn ($350), a four-inch leather pump and the brand’s signature style. In an era of athleisure, Parker is selling shoes of a throwback fussy formality. Each style in the collection is accented with a strip of grosgrain fabric down the heel—in the ivory Fawn’s case, cherry red.

“I quite liked these,” Hewgill said.

Parker asked Hewgill for her size—U.K. 7—and added, “Don’t worry, I can do the conversions—if you have the patience, then we have the time.” Her voice, forever the voice of Carrie Bradshaw, was girlish. Her demeanor was hyperattentive. When she spoke, she placed a hand on her collarbone, a gesture of humble entreaty. She disappeared into a basement stockroom and returned with a size 40. Then she squatted down in front of Hewgill.

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It is uncanny to watch a person of immense wealth and fame, even a shoe-loving one, choose to cradle a stranger’s feet. But Parker was clearly relishing the shopgirl role. “You shouldn’t have to struggle this hard,” she said, as she tried to coax the shoe over Hewgill’s heel. Parker leaped up and pivoted around, leaving a little swirl in the pile of the carpet. (She’d chosen the store’s floor-to-ceiling color scheme to evoke the “blushy” hue of a point shoe—one from Freed of London, not Capezio, she made sure to note.) Minutes later, she returned with a stack of boxes and proffered a size 41.

“These are better. . . .” Hewgill said.

“Better or good?” Parker asked. “Don’t be afraid to tell me it needs to be better.” (Hewgill ultimately bought two pairs of shoes and told me, “That was maybe the best customer service I’ve ever had.”)

Toward the front of the store, spectators had gathered to take photos on their phones. Others stood outside with their faces pressed against the store’s windows, like children enthralled by a Macy’s Christmas display. An older woman tapped Parker on the back.

“Can I please get a picture with you?” she asked.

“I can’t, because I’m working right now,” Parker replied, her hand again on her collarbone. But she didn’t make fans leave empty-handed. “You are free to take as many pictures of me as you want,” she added. “Shoot away!”

A few years ago, while renovating the double-wide town house that she shares with her husband, the actor Matthew Broderick, and their three children, Parker had a salvaged turn-of-the-century sink installed in the foyer as a functional fetish object—Parker is equally fond of cleanliness and of the Victorian aesthetic. The block she lives on, West Eleventh Street, has, according to a recent real-estate story, priced out the “merely wealthy.” Yet Parker strives to be seen as unostentatious. She still rides the subway. She plays mah-jongg with an older woman she met at the beach. She likes to be the one asking questions or paying compliments, and she is anxious about inconveniencing anyone. (When I mixed up one of our meeting spots and had to reroute, she blamed herself and apologized repeatedly, even though it was my mistake.) Her mother, Barbara, told me that she always warned Parker not to feel that being an actor entitled her to special treatment. “I just think it doesn’t address the point of performing, which is something we do for other people,” Barbara said. To this day, Parker seems most at home, as in her shoe store, on the giving end of the exchange with fans. King told me, “She still doesn’t really know she’s there yet. I’ve seen people faint in front of her, and she cannot really take it in.”

Parker was born in 1965 in Nelsonville, Ohio, and spent her early years in the college town of Athens. Barbara was a schoolteacher. Parker’s father, Stephen, was a writer in graduate school. They divorced when Parker was young, and Barbara remarried a theatre student, Paul Forste, who’d been working as a babysitter to Parker and her three older siblings. Paul and Barbara moved with the kids to Cincinnati and eventually had four more children of their own. Barbara stayed home while Paul worked construction jobs and on the crew at a local theatre. Though they were not well off, Barbara was a staunch believer in arts education. Parker and her older brother Toby (who also became a professional actor) studied at the Cincinnati Ballet on full scholarships. Barbara discouraged television and had each child carry a library book when leaving the house. “The kids got free lunches for a while, which was embarrassing,” she said. “But I don’t think that we ever lived in an impoverished situation where there was no culture.”

Parker’s first paid job was a starring role in a 1974 NBC adaptation of the Hans Christian Andersen fairy tale “The Little Match Girl,” which filmed in Cincinnati. Two years later, when she was eleven, she travelled to New York to appear in a Broadway revival of William Archibald’s gothic play “The Innocents,” directed by Harold Pinter. The renowned British stage actress Claire Bloom was a co-star. Parker recalled, “Her enunciation was exquisite. She would call me to her dressing room and say, ‘You can never become a professional, child. I will be very disappointed in you.’ ” In 1977, Parker and a few of her siblings joined a touring production of “The Sound of Music,” with “The Partridge Family” star Shirley Jones in the role of Maria. The same year, Barbara and Paul relocated the family to New York and formally registered with the I.R.S. as the children’s managers.

Parker’s big break came in 1979, when, on the cusp of her fourteenth birthday, she took over the lead role in the Broadway musical “Annie.” New York City at the time was still smarting from a brush with bankruptcy, and the scrappy red-headed orphan was a welcome symbol of resilience. In addition to performing onstage, Parker sang “Tomorrow” on the steps of the New York Public Library as part of an anti-littering campaign, performed on the deck of the U.S.S. Iwo Jima at Bob Hope’s birthday spectacular, and was a guest at a Humane Society party at the Rainbow Room, where the dog who played Sandy was served steak tartare. The family lived briefly on Roosevelt Island, and Parker and Toby, who had a part in another Broadway musical, would take the tram into the city by themselves. On two-show days, Parker passed the hours between performances at a pinball arcade. Later, the role of Carrie Bradshaw would make Parker an N.Y.C. poster child. The Bravo host Andy Cohen, a longtime friend, told me, “Walking around with her now is like walking with the Empire State Building.” But already, as an adolescent, she seemed drawn to the role of municipal spokesperson. During an appearance on a TV show called “Tinseltown and the Big Apple,” she was asked, by a kid reporter, about her favorite things. “I like rainbows a lot,” she replied. “And I like New York City.”

Like many aspiring actors, however, Parker felt the pull toward Los Angeles. After a year, she left “Annie” and pursued roles on television, including a made-for-TV movie with her future “S.A.T.C.” co-star Cynthia Nixon and a CBS sitcom, “Square Pegs,” about a pair of nerdy high schoolers. “It was hard for my mom when I left the play,” Parker recalled. “TV was a little beneath her.” In 1984, she co-starred with Robert Downey, Jr., then an up-and-coming actor, in a teen thriller called “Firstborn,” which filmed in New York and New Jersey. The two became a couple and bounced between the East and West Coasts as they pushed to establish themselves. Parker played a spirited sidekick in “Footloose” and a dance-crazed Army brat in “Girls Just Want to Have Fun.” Downey, Jr., joined “S.N.L.” for a year, in 1985, and landed his breakout role soon afterward, in the Bret Easton Ellis adaptation “Less Than Zero.” But he was struggling with substance abuse. Parker did not do drugs and barely drank; she told me that she never felt it “necessary” to have a rebellious phase of any kind. The situation with Downey, Jr., made her feel like a parent at the age of twenty-two. “People around him would be dismissive of me, but I had given him stability and tried to create a steady heartbeat that allowed him to show up on time,” she said. “That made me angry and embarrassed me.” (Downey, Jr., said, through a representative, that he has “great respect” for Parker.)

She and Downey, Jr., separated in 1991, after seven years together, and Parker moved back to New York. But one of the last films she made in California, the romantic comedy “L.A. Story,” helped establish a new niche for her in Hollywood. Parker played opposite Steve Martin as a retail clerk named SanDeE* who exuded a sunny, spring-loaded energy. Martin, who also wrote the film, recalled, “She was the perfect actress for the part, and I think it kind of sent off her career, like, who’s that? It was her cheeriness, and that’s a hard thing to deliver, because it has to be perfectly pitched or it looks weird.” Parker recalled that previously she had always played “the friend of the beautiful one,” but that, by casting her in “L.A. Story,” Martin sent a message: “You are attractive. I’m attracted to you. You can play parts where men find you attractive.” Afterward, Parker continued to play variations on what, at the time, was often labelled the bimbo—as a gold digger in “The First Wives Club,” or a dim-witted witch in “Hocus Pocus”—though she told me that she never felt stuck “in the saddle of the ditzy blonde.”

In the summer of 1991, Parker met John F. Kennedy, Jr., at the theatre. He asked her out, and they dated for a few months. Paparazzi trailed them everywhere. In a Times profile of Parker not long afterward, she sounded shell-shocked. “I never had any idea what real fame was,” she said, adding, “When I die, they are going to say, ‘Oh, yeah, Sarah once dated John Kennedy.’ ” At the time, Parker still viewed herself primarily as a theatre person. Toby and another brother, Pippin, were the co-founders, with a dozen other downtown actors and writers, of an experimental company, Naked Angels, which operated out of a defunct picture-frame factory on Seventeenth Street. Marisa Tomei, Fisher Stevens, and Gina Gershon were members. “Everybody hung around Naked Angels,” Parker recalled—including Matthew Broderick. He had become famous in the cult teen comedy “Ferris Bueller’s Day Off,” but he’d grown up in Greenwich Village as the son of a painter and an actor. In 1983, at twenty-one, he’d won a Tony for his role as a Brooklyn youth in Neil Simon’s family drama “Brighton Beach Memoirs.” He and Parker first met at the movies with Pippin and Broderick’s childhood friend the playwright Kenneth Lonergan. Parker and Broderick were both involved with other people at the time, but they hit it off. Parker, who was three years younger, told me, “I was starstruck. But his fame was quiet. He wore it like a New Yorker.” A few months later, they began dating.

Parker recalled that she still thought of herself as a journeyman, the kind of reliable local actor who remained anonymous enough to stroll down Sixth Avenue unnoticed. In 1995, she garnered rave reviews for playing a hyperactive dog in A. R. Gurney’s play “Sylvia.” (One critic praised the “truth and wit” of her canine impersonation, which she modelled on Broderick’s shepherd mix.) The following year, not long before they were married, Broderick and Parker starred opposite each other in the musical “How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying.” Parker’s close friend, the actor John Benjamin Hickey—who last year directed Parker and Broderick in a Broadway revival of Neil Simon’s “Plaza Suite,” which will travel to London’s West End next year—told me, “Our lives together have been a life of acting and actors and the theatre.”

In 1997, however, Parker got a message from Darren Star, the creator of the prime-time soap operas “Melrose Place” and “Beverly Hills, 90210.” He was working on a new half-hour series for HBO about four thirtysomething single women living in Manhattan, adapted from a New York Observer column turned book by Candace Bushnell (who used Carrie as a pseudonym). A fan of Parker’s work in “Sylvia” and in the movies, Star had written the lead role with her in mind. But Parker was ending a starring run in “Once Upon a Mattress,” on Broadway, and was leery of committing to daily life on a soundstage. “I wanted to be able to do a play, and then a reading, and then a TV movie of the week in Yugoslavia,” she said. Parker and Star met at an Upper East Side café to discuss the pilot. Star told me, “I remember her saying, ‘Matthew read it. And he said that if I do this I might become too famous.’ ”

Parker said that part of what persuaded her was the strength of Star’s pilot script, the last scene in particular. Carrie and the sly bachelor Mr. Big have had a string of chance encounters, and at the end of the episode he gives her a ride home in his town car. When she gets out, she taps on his window and asks, “Have you ever been in love?” He answers with a grin, as the car speeds away: “Absofuckinglutely.” The final shot shows Carrie standing solo on the misty street. It is an ambivalent image—some might see the lonely side of urban life, or the spectre of romantic rejection—but Parker saw in it “all these possibilities.” She told me, “It’s New York. It’s this girl.”

Parker has a publicity team and a personal assistant, but she arranged all of our meetings herself, tossing out stylish restaurant suggestions—Daniel Boulud’s wine bar, a new Persian spot in Bushwick—with proposed dates and times, like a Holly Golightly with a bullet journal. Her way of text messaging was self-consciously polished and a bit theatrical. One day, when she couldn’t figure out how to insert the circumflexes into “tête-a-tête,” she texted, “Missing the wee hat!” She signed every communiqué with a single air-kiss: “X.”

I’d asked a few times to visit Parker at home, but she said that letting a reporter into family life is something that she and Broderick have “never done.” She added, “I don’t make proclamations about my marriage. I don’t talk about my kids.” In May, we met instead at one of her favorite West Village restaurants, Café Cluny, a Franco-American bistro on a cobblestoned corner two blocks from her house. She’d called in advance to ask for a quiet place to talk, so management had blocked off one side of the outdoor dining area, leaving a half-dozen tables next to ours empty. But Parker seemed committed to the illusion that she was just a regular customer.

A server popped in to pour us water. “I have a crazy question,” Parker said. “If I sit and wait, will there be a tuna burger soon?”

The server said that it would be available at eleven-thirty. It was just after eleven.

“Oh, I can wait!” Parker said. She also ordered a brûléed grapefruit and French onion soup—hold the parsley. Parker hates the herb, and, like Carrie, whom she gave the same aversion, she often fibs and says that she’s allergic to insure that her request is honored.

Many of Parker’s other proclivities made it into “Sex and the City.” Like Parker, who wasn’t allowed much candy as a kid, Carrie loves sweets—bubble gum, Twizzlers, strawberry milkshakes. Like Parker, she avoids curse words. (“I don’t like how it sounds on me,” Parker said. “There’s a million other choices you can make.”) But Parker’s biggest effect on the character might be a matter of tone. Bushnell’s writing had a jaded quality. Her New York was glamorous and exciting but essentially Darwinian. In her book, she wrote, “We are all kept men and women—by our jobs, by our apartments, and then some of us by the pecking order at Mortimers and the Royalton, by Hamptons beachfront, by front-row Garden tickets—and we like it that way.” Bushnell told me that Parker struck her as in some ways the character’s opposite. “She’s never really been a single woman,” Bushnell said. “She’s always been successful.” But Star felt it was important that the lead actress be able to bring congeniality to the edgy material. “Sarah Jessica projects a lot of warmth,” he told me, drawing a comparison between Parker and another iconic TV good girl, Mary Tyler Moore.

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Carrie and the other women of “S.A.T.C.”—the Waspy art gallerina Charlotte York (Kristin Davis), the pragmatic lawyer Miranda Hobbes (Nixon), and the uninhibited publicist Samantha Jones (Kim Cattrall)—chain-smoked, caroused, got bikini waxes, and dished around the brunch table about “tuchus lingus,” the taste of semen, and errant flatulence. Parker told me that such things were “completely unfamiliar” to her. “That just was not how I conducted conversations,” she said. (She did, for a time, smoke cigarettes.) She’d never done nudity professionally, and she told Star that she didn’t intend to. Even now, she sounds somewhat confounded by Carrie’s life style. “I could never do any of that stuff in my life,” she said. “It would be immoral. It would be unprincipled. An affair, husbands, kissing, buying, drinking—whims, whims, whims!” But she connected with the idea of Carrie as one in a long line of female strivers searching for their place in the metropolis, from the secretaries of Rona Jaffe’s novel “The Best of Everything” to Marlo Thomas’s plucky heroine in the sitcom “That Girl.” Parker said, “There is a buoyancy to what I’m talking about that makes you excited about a life here.”

There is a natural lightness to Parker’s physicality onscreen—she recalled that on the set of “L.A. Story” the director, Mick Jackson, would begin takes by chanting, “Bounce, Sarah Jessica, bounce!”—though it is a lightness born of exertion. When we were walking together one day, she demonstrated the difference between her natural gait—pin straight, delicate, quick—and Carrie’s, which has an ambling bravado. Petite but long-legged, Parker pulled off even Patricia Field’s most iconoclastic costuming choices: a miniskirt with a bunny tail, an Alpine dirndl, a belt wrapped around a bare midriff. John Corbett, who played Carrie’s boyfriend Aidan in the original series and is brought back in the upcoming season of “And Just Like That,” told me, “She looks like she’s in a Bob Fosse show. She’s my favorite actor to fucking watch.”

Julia Louis-Dreyfus defined the character of Elaine on “Seinfeld” with what Ariel Levy, in a New Yorker Profile, called “the shove,” an aggressive gesture by a woman asserting herself among the boys. If there is one action that similarly epitomizes Carrie Bradshaw—her eagerness, her self-sabotage, her moony relationship to skyscrapers—it is the trip. Parker is a precise and charismatic slapstick comedian. In the show’s famous intro sequence, she wobbles like a fawn, in a tutu, as a passing bus splashes her with gutter water. Elsewhere in the series, she kersplats backward into a mud pit at a country cabin; skids belly first across the polished floor of a Dior boutique like a penguin on an ice floe; and, in what might be the show’s funniest episode, wipes out dramatically while strutting down a fashion runway, prompting her friend Stanford (the late Willie Garson) to scream, “She’s fashion roadkill!” Parker told me that she learned how to trip from Broderick, who is a silent-film fanatic. “You walk in front of yourself and then force yourself to fall,” she said, adding, “I know exactly where my shoes are going to land.” Like Tom Cruise, who does his own stunts for “Mission: Impossible,” Parker welcomes the physical effort of embodying Carrie. Could Cruise run several blocks in Louboutin mules? For one such scene of “S.A.T.C.,” Parker refused the offer of a body double. “You have to remember, I was a ballet dancer. I’ve got bad stuff all over my feet now, huge marks and bumps. But it’s a badge of honor. If we are shooting in February for a scene that takes place in June and I’m in a little dress, what, am I gonna wear a coat?”

Parker became more involved in overseeing “S.A.T.C.” as it went on, especially after King took over as showrunner. The series had become a hit by then—Richard Plepler, the former C.E.O. of HBO, liked to call the audience the “gang of ten million”—and the on-location shoots were mobbed by paparazzi and crowds of fans. The show’s budget ballooned, and its look became glossier. Most of the clothes the cast wore in the first season were bought on consignment or off the rack at Bloomingdale’s and Century 21. The two-part series finale, shot in Paris, featured Parker in a couture gown lent by Versace and worth a reported eighty thousand dollars.

“Sex and the City” was hotly debated from the outset. Some viewers endorsed it as a fresh feminist text. (Camille Paglia called the show’s success a “victory.”) Others dismissed it as a materialist fantasy. Plenty of the commentary was tinged with sexism: Was it too frivolous? Too slutty? One of the most divisive aspects of the series, even among fans, was its conventional dénouement: Carrie ends up with Big, and all the other protagonists happily pair off with men. Bushnell has not been shy about pointing out that this conclusion ran counter to the real experience of the women she was writing about. (In a New Yorker interview last year, she said, “TV has its own logic.”) But over time the series was increasingly recognized as a pioneer of the kind of ambitious, thorny programming that defined the so-called golden age of cable. No matter how much Parker sparkled in the role, Carrie was always a character defined by her flaws.

After “S.A.T.C.,” Parker played a conservative career woman in the winsome holiday movie “The Family Stone” (2005), and did a string of formulaic rom-coms. Her biggest movies, by far, were the two “S.A.T.C.” sequels. The first, a sporadically entertaining (and very expensive) franchise extension from 2008, earned more than four hundred million dollars at the box office. The second, released in 2010, featured the women on a luxury getaway to Abu Dhabi, where they were tended to by manservants and clumsily debated modest fashion. It also performed well but was a critical fiasco. (In the Times, A. O. Scott wrote that the film emanated “the ugly smell of unexamined privilege.”) Attempts to get a third movie off the ground, in 2018, collapsed amid rumors of a contractual dispute between Cattrall and the studio. Cattrall, who declined to be interviewed for this story, has since aired various grievances in the press and on social media, among them that she had played the part of Samantha “past the finish line.” Even Nixon, who is close friends with Parker, and gladly returned to play Miranda on “And Just Like That” after a run for New York governor, told me that she’s been surprised by the franchise’s longevity. “I thought it was done after the first movie,” she said. “I always think it’s done.”

For many performers, a career-defining role can be an albatross. In the twenty-tens, through her production company, Pretty Matches, Parker developed and starred in an HBO dramedy, “Divorce,” which ran for three seasons. She recruited the Irish actress and producer Sharon Horgan to write the pilot. The character was an upstate mom whose marriage was unravelling. The tone was understated. Critics liked the show, but it never quite caught on. Parker said, “I think it was just really hard for people to allow me to be somebody who isn’t joyfully tripping through Manhattan with opportunity.” At the same time, she has never felt a strong urge to escape her association with Carrie Bradshaw, perhaps because for Parker the outcome of whatever she’s making matters less than endeavoring to make it. She prefers not to watch herself onscreen, and to this day hasn’t seen many “S.A.T.C.” episodes. She has a mental archive of seemingly every garment she wore on the show—and, thanks to a clause in her contract, has most of the actual garments, too, in cold storage—but is hazy on entire characters and storylines. She told me, “I keep working, and some of it is successful and some of it isn’t. And that’s the career I imagined.”

In the early months of sheltering from Covid, Parker’s twin daughters, Tabitha and Loretta, who turn fourteen in June, passed the time binge-watching old episodes of “The Bob Newhart Show.” Parker told me, “We were so happy hearing that theme song. I started realizing, Oh, my gosh, you know, we’re all so nostalgic.” A younger generation of viewers was discovering the “Sex and the City” back catalogue through streaming. There were new fans to serve. She called up Michael Patrick King with the same idea that many restless entertainers were having at the time: Why don’t we start a podcast? They would chat through each episode of the original series chronologically. “It would be like the laminate you get at a Barbra Streisand concert—backstage, all access, everything,” Parker said. Before they were set to tape, however, the pair had another notion. She recalled, “We started thinking, Wait, is this the time to go back to TV?”

King began writing “And Just Like That” during the summer of 2020, in the midst of the nation’s reckoning with racial injustice. In the original “S.A.T.C.,” the four women rarely stepped outside of their white, wealthy world. When Miranda moved to Brooklyn, in the final season, the friends mourned as if she were going to war. King told me, “When ‘And Just Like That’ happened, there were two topics in the city: race and gender. There was no way in hell these characters were going to come back without being current.” He and Parker agreed that any reboot—they prefer the term “new chapter”—would have to “break the old show.”

In “And Just Like That,” heterosexual men are no longer the focal point of the protagonists’ lives. At the end of Episode 1, in a deus ex machina fit for the pandemic, Mr. Big dies of a heart attack while working out on his Peloton. (In 2021, the actor who played Big, Chris Noth, was accused of sexual assault by multiple women—he denied the claims—but Parker told me that the plan to kill off the character dated back to the thwarted third movie, because, for creative reasons, “Michael did not want Carrie to be married anymore.”) Miranda’s husband, Steve, once a virile nice guy, is now sexless and hard of hearing. In place of men, the show introduces a group of female and nonbinary characters of color to shake up the lives of Carrie, Miranda, and Charlotte. (Samantha is heard from only via text message, from her new home in London.) Where the original “S.A.T.C.” was fizzy and irreverent, and markedly nonjudgmental about the women’s most outrageous choices, the new show is preoccupied with what is socially and morally acceptable. Miranda soon leaves Steve for Che Diaz (Sara Ramirez), a self-professed “queer, nonbinary Mexican Irish diva,” who does anodyne identity-based standup comedy. In one scene, Carrie frets over whether to buy a sari to accompany her new friend Seema Patel (Sarita Choudhury) to a Diwali celebration. “Is that allowed?” she asks, literally wringing her hands. The series struck many critics as a cringey apologia. Aisha Harris, at NPR, wrote that the creators seemed to be confronting past criticism of “S.A.T.C.” “like items on a to-do list.”

One hallmark of the original series was its schematic form. Carrie narrated each episode as she put together a new column, and the strands of action were braided into a central theme, whether it was conflicted promiscuity (“Are We Sluts?”), impossible beauty standards (“Attack of the 5′10″ Woman”), or how sensitive some men can be about their testicles (“Belles of the Balls,” which, like all “Sex and the City” episodes, featured a sack of shameless puns). As in a classic screwball comedy, the contrivances were part of the pleasure. “And Just Like That” has a looser architecture by design. King said that one of his first decisions was to discard Carrie’s running voice-overs. He told me, “Carrie’s not telling you what to think, so it’s more dangerous.” If “S.A.T.C.” was a show about blustery cosmopolitan confidence, “And Just Like That” is one about facing down confusion. The middle-aged women seem more eager to admit their haplessness than they ever were as thirtysomethings.

One morning in April, I went to watch Parker and King work on new episodes of “And Just Like That” in an editing suite near Penn Station. Parker sat cross-legged on a gray love seat. King, a tall redhead with pointy features, sat beside her. Parker told me that the two grew close before Darren Star departed as showrunner. “It was almost an arranged marriage,” she recalled, adding, of Star, “He was setting the table so that we wouldn’t feel, or I wouldn’t feel, untethered or without a partner.” Parker and King have worked side by side on the franchise ever since. (Star has moved on to, among other projects, the “S.A.T.C.”-lite Netflix series “Emily in Paris.”) Parker is a bitter ender personnel-wise; she has had the same agent, financial adviser, lawyer, and hairdresser for decades. An animal trainer who worked with the dog in “Annie” now handles Charlotte’s English bulldog on “And Just Like That.” In the suite, Michael Berenbaum, an editor of both “S.A.T.C.” and the new series, pulled up a scene from Episode 3 of the new season. In it, Carrie is in a recording studio tracking the audiobook for a memoir she’s written about becoming a widow. King was worried that the orchestral score underneath was too maudlin.

“S.J. is our preview audience,” he said.

“I always think it’s better when the words are doing the work,” Parker replied. “If we have to layer it with music, it feels like we’re fearing that we’re falling short.”

Parker is, by all accounts, an energetic presence on set. She likes to kibbitz with crew members but is careful to keep people on schedule. On Wednesdays, a production assistant prints out her lines for the following week’s filming, and she sets about memorizing them as if there were a pop quiz coming. She expects the same of other cast members. “Freedom comes from preparation,” she likes to say. She arrives on set early to plot out routine prop work—talking on the phone, eating Chinese food, lighting a cigarette—with military-grade precision. “I say to everybody, ‘I hope you brought a book, because I’m going to need to figure this out,’ ” she told me. While filming a scene earlier this year, she noticed an off-kilter buttonhole in the costume of an actor playing a bit part and halted filming to fix it. Choudhury, who was also in the scene, said that working on the show can feel “like doing mathematics.” She added, “People come up to us, like, ‘Oh my God, it must be so much fun,’ and it is, but not in the way they think.” I asked Parker whether the people she works with complain about her punctiliousness. “Not to my face,” she replied, “but I wouldn’t be surprised.”

King and Parker watched the audiobook scene through with and without the music.

“Why could I not hear my knuckle crack in the silent one?” Parker said.

“It’s the exact same performance,” King replied.

“Did you hear the knuckle, Rachel?” Parker asked me. They played the score-free version again, and Parker gave a satisfied nod when she heard the pop.

When “And Just Like That” premièred, some fans were outraged that Samantha had been written out. Cattrall claimed in an interview that she’d learned about the new show on social media, “like everyone else.” Parker told me, “We felt like it had been made clear by her that this was not a character she wanted to revisit.” In Season 1, Samantha is estranged from the other friends. Her text messages from London are infrequent and terse. But in May Variety leaked the news that Cattrall would be returning in the Season 2 finale, for a phone-conversation scene that she’d filmed “without seeing or speaking with” her co-stars. The tabloids scoured the story for evidence of acrimony. As in the past, Parker has practiced a tight-lipped diplomacy. “It’s the weirdest thing, to be told we’re in a catfight,” she said to me. “I would never speak poorly about Kim. I just wouldn’t.” Parker said that King had “begged” her not to discuss the Cattrall cameo, but she did admit, “I am in the scene.”

I’ve seen most episodes of “And Just Like That” Season 2, and though they include some dreary stabs at topical relevance (can Tony Danza, an Italian American, play Che Diaz’s father in a sitcom?), the series over all is showing flashes of the original’s raunchy verve. Miranda enjoys adventures in “pegging.” Carrie advises Charlotte with some thoughtful musings on “jizz.” Like a Marvel movie or a Taylor Swift album, the show plants Easter eggs to titillate devotees. In Episode 1, Carrie is planning to attend the Met Gala, the annual fashion-world soirée, and, owing to a seamstress shortage, she ends up wearing her Vivienne Westwood wedding gown from the first “S.A.T.C.” movie. Every episode of the new series ends with a single line of voice-over that begins, “And just like that. . . .” As Carrie steps onto her stoop, she narrates, “And just like that I repurposed my pain.” It is a signal that the show is trying to move on, into a less encumbered phase, though it can be hard, as the “S.A.T.C.” franchise presses ahead, to tell the difference between moving forward and circling back.

In the editing suite, King played another scene from Episode 3, in which Carrie returns home after an orgiastic round of shoe shopping. In one boffo motion, she kicks open her apartment door with a heeled foot, squeezes through with half a dozen bags, tosses her keys toward a glass bowl, and tumbles onto the floor.

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Parker was shielding her eyes with one hand. “She hates this part,” King said.

In a later scene, Carrie unpacks one of her new purchases, a Loewe sandal that is white and dainty except for a garish red balloon-shaped object wedged under the front strap.

“We picked the most decadent, the most unnecessary, the most impractical,” Parker said, of the shoe.

“It makes you stop and have a judgment,” King said. “You’re involved now.”

I squinted back at the screen as Carrie strained to get the preposterous thing onto her foot.

“That look on your face,” King said to me. “That’s our show.”

Even in the heady early two-thousands, when Carrie Bradshaw was writing freelance for four-fifty a word, it was fantasy that a single newspaper columnist could afford a life of non-stop designer handbags and taxicabs. For most transplants, of course, New York is a grinding place. Rent is extortionate. The subways are erratic. As soon as the weather gets warm, the smell of garbage is merciless. Part of moving here is undergoing a process of disenchantment. Parker, like Carrie, seems to have bypassed that step. From the charmed perch she has long occupied, even the city’s lowliest flourishes remain lovable—including, she once joked to Jay Leno, the dog poop underfoot. When I was with her one day on the boardwalk in Coney Island, she delighted at the sight of an old-fashioned trash can and said that she was trying to persuade the city to sell her a decommissioned one for her town house. At Parker’s suggestion, one episode of “S.A.T.C.” featured a shot of an employee at a Gray’s Papaya hot-dog shop wearing a button bearing the establishment’s ironic slogan: “Polite New Yorker.” For Parker, the word lacks its oxymoronic edge. Though she does not oblige requests for selfies, she often offers to chat with her fans on the street. Broderick quipped, “Sometimes I’m, like, ‘Why don’t you just take the picture, then you won’t have to stop and hear how important your show is?’ ” But for Parker the entire city is a souvenir shop, and her own attention is a trinket she can bestow like an I❤️N.Y. mug. If you would just put down your phone and talk to her, really talk to her, she will remember your name “forever” and maybe even tell you the best place to get a hot pretzel. For the record, Parker says that it’s Sabrett stands, which in her description sounds no less enchanting than a French pâtisserie: “Hot dogs in the summer. Chestnuts in the winter.”

On a placid evening in April, I joined Parker for the opening night of the spring season of New York City Ballet, where she has been on the board for more than a decade. What does one wear to a ballet première with a woman who once wore a foot-high Nativity Scene headpiece to the Met Gala? I chose a frilly blue cocktail dress and a bejewelled choker necklace. When I met Parker before the show, at the restaurant Tatiana, on Lincoln Plaza, she was reading a dog-eared book manuscript and wearing jeans with one of Broderick’s old button-down shirts—the dress code, perhaps, of someone for whom the ballet is as ordinary as a hot-dog lunch. She seemed to sense my embarrassment. “You make me want to run home and change!” she said, and for the rest of the night she overcompensated by telling me how “pretty” I looked.

We sat in a corner of the packed dining room. Parker ordered a cocktail, but declared it too strong after one sip. She told me that she didn’t try a “real cosmopolitan” until after “S.A.T.C.” ended—though, through a beverage company that she co-founded, she recently started selling a canned version, the Perfect Cosmo by SJP. Seated next to us was a group of four older women who were having dinner before the opera—a preview of “S.A.T.C.” octogenarians’ edition. (Let’s not rule it out.) As they got up to leave, Parker chatted with one of them.

“You look beautiful! I noticed you right away,” she said to the woman, who was putting on a fur coat. Then, pointing to me, she added, “Can you believe how nicely she’s dressed for the ballet?”

As a teen-ager, Parker studied for two years at the American Ballet Theatre, N.Y.C.B.’s rival company. “I have dreams all the time that I’m still dancing,” she said. It was her idea to cast the celebrated Soviet-émigré ballet dancer Mikhail Baryshnikov as Carrie’s love interest in the final season of “S.A.T.C.” “I was here when Misha defected and came to America,” she said. “Everyone was carrying a bag with him on it that said ‘Gotta Dance.’ New York was ballet.”

When we got to the theatre, an usher directed us to the front row of the mezzanine. “I can’t believe we got these seats!” Parker said.

“You’re on the board,” I said, a bit surprised that she was surprised.

“Yes, but they are really good seats!” she said.

The evening’s program was “All Balanchine,” beginning with a spritely number set to Bach’s “Concerto Barocco.” Parker, who still has a ballerina’s posture, peered down at the stage through a pair of chunky binoculars. She was chewing a piece of bubble gum, and during the dancer’s most demanding moves she murmured appreciatively. The second ballet was set to “Kammermusik No. 2,” a frenetic chamber piece by the German composer Paul Hindemith. Balanchine’s choreography involves the two lead ballerinas performing the same movements a count apart; one of Balanchine’s biographers described it as among his “least ingratiating” works. A few minutes into the piece, Mira Nadon, a new principal, lost her footing and stumbled out of a series of turns. Parker squeezed my thigh and gasped. “That was not supposed to happen,” she whispered. Per the choreography, Nadon exited the stage briefly a minute later, and when she bounded back from the wings she had a smile plastered on her face. At intermission, Parker was still thinking about Nadon’s misstep. She told me, “I just hope there’s someone backstage saying to her, ‘It’s a rite of passage.’ ” ♦