.com Sex and the City is based on Candace Bushnell s provocative bestselling book. Sarah Jessica Parker stars as Carrie Bradshaw a self-described sexual anthropologist who writes Sex and the City a newspaper column that chronicles the state of sexual affairs of Manhattanites in this age of un-innocence. Her posse including nice girl Charlotte (Kristin Davis) hard-edged Miranda (Cynthia Nixon) and party girl Samantha (Kim Cattrall)--not to mention her own tumultuous love life--gives Carrie plenty of column fodder. Over the course of the first season s 12 episodes the most prominent dramatic arc concerns Carrie who goes from turning the tables on toxic bachelors by having sex like a man to wanting to join the ranks of the monogamists with the elusive Mr. Big (Chris Noth). Meanwhile Miranda Cynthia and Samantha have their own dating woes. The second season builds on the foundation of the first season with plot arcs that are both hilarious and heartfelt taking the show from breakout hit to true pop-culture phenomenon. Relationship epiphanies coexist happily alongside farcical plots and zingy one-liners resulting in emotionally satisfying episodes that feature the sharp kind of character-defining dialogue that seems to have disappeared from the rest of TV long ago. When last we left the NYC gals Carrie had just broken up with a commitment-phobic Mr. Big (Chris Noth) but fans of Noth s seductive-yet-distant rake didn t have to wait long until he was back in the picture as he and Carrie tried to make another go of it. Their relationship evolution from reunion to second breakup provides the core of the second season. Among other adventures Charlotte puzzles over whether one of her beaus was gay-straight or straight-gay Miranda tries to date a guy who insists on having sex only in places where they might get caught and Samantha copes with dates who range from um not big enough to far too big--with numerous stops in between. The third season was the charm as the series earned its first Emmy for Outstanding Comedy Series to go along with its Golden Globes for Best Comedy Series and Best Actress (Parker). One of this season s two principal story arcs concerned hapless-in-love Charlotte and her pursuit of a husband enter (if only...) Kyle McLachlan as the unfortunately impotent Trey. Meanwhile Carrie has a brief but memorable fling with a politician who s golden but not in the way she anticipated. She then sabotages her too-good-to-be-true relationship with furniture designer Aidan (John Corbett) by having an affair with Mr. Big (Chris Noth) who himself has gotten married. Like I Love Lucy the series benefited from a brief change of scenery with a three-episode jaunt to Los Angeles where Carrie and company encountered among others Matthew McConaughey Vince Vaughn Hugh Hefner and Sarah Michelle Gellar. The fourth season is just as smart and sexy as ever mixing caustic adult wit and sharply observed situation comedy on the mean streets of Manhattan though this time the quartet of singleton city girls must endure even tougher combat in the unending war of love sex and shopping. Carrie finally seems to have found her ideal life partner when she is reunited with handsome craftsman Aidan. But can their relationship survive trial by cohabitation? Meanwhile Charlotte seems to have both her dream Park Avenue apartment and a solution to her marital problems with Trey. But when the subject of babies comes up everything starts to unravel for her too. It s not just Charlotte who has baby issues either: after what seems like an eternity of enforced sexual abstinence Miranda is horrified to discover she s pregnant. And as for the sultry Samantha she s on a quest for monogamy first with an exotic lesbian artist then with a philandering businessman with whom to her utter dismay she just might have fallen in love. It was a short but sweet fifth season as HBO s resident comediennes found themselves affected by forces beyond their control--the pregnancies of both Sarah Jessica Parker and Cynthia Nixon. A truncated shooting schedule to accommodate the actresses forced this season to be reduced to a mere eight episodes but they and creators forged ahead creating a handful of episodes that if short in content were long on emotion and laughs. Carrie and Miranda wrestled with their solitary lifestyles albeit with new attachments--Miranda had new baby Brady and single motherhood while Carrie found herself in the world of publishing as the author of a real-life book of her columns. Charlotte wondered if she d ever find another man while Samantha finally got rid of the one that had been vexing her far too much. If the season as a whole felt less than the sum of its parts those parts were some of the best comedy in the show s history. The season s climactic episode I Love a Charade was one of the series best episodes ever equally touching and funny and grounded the show in an emotional maturity that announced that after all their wild travails these women had truly grown up.