In the final series of Sex and the City (Fridays, 10pm, Channel 4), Carrie Bradshaw, the New York dating columnist, appears still no nearer to catching her ideal man. If she does, then that will indeed be the story's end. Sitcoms depend on the immutability of their situations for their comedy. The old jokes are the only jokes. This is not to say, however, that Sex and the City has not moved on and adapted to the post-Enron, post-9/11 world. Why, in the opening episode, the four women came to terms with the cruelly imposed ban on smoking in Manhattan bars and restaurants. As Samantha raged, what next: no fucking in bars?
Bars and restaurants are crucial to Sex and the City, since they are the gladiatorial arenas in which our heroines seek to overpower male will. So Friday's episode (8 August), although duffly entitled Great Sexpectations, was about dining, not Dickens. The quartet find themselves in the latest trendy eatery - named Raw after, it transpires, both the food ("It's a lawn in a bowl," seethes Mir-anda) and the sex on the menu.
Samantha - played by Kim Cattrall, who apparently can't get a date in real life - is quickly on to how the place works: at the end of the meal, you take home not a doggy bag, but a waiter so hot that "I'm going to need a napkin to dry off my seat". Naturally, she gets her man and, after she has procured an outfit designed to make him "come in his pants as soon as he sees me", the hunk duly delivers in the bedroom department the satisfaction that the restaurant failed to supply from the kitchen.
If only restaurant promise were matched by bedroom reality for Carrie. Having lost both her big loves, Aidan and Big, in previous seasons, our heroine is more desperate than ever to find Mr Right. The appropriately named Burger seems to fit the bill, giving brilliant voicemail, talking in neat skits and, most important of all, entertaining her in restaurants. "We're so good everywhere else. We're so good in restaurants," she complains to her friends, mystified by how quiet things go in bed. ("It was so quiet I heard the M11 bus.") Samantha has no truck with this. "Fuck me badly once, shame on you," she says. "Fuck me badly twice, shame on me." But Carrie knows that restaurant compatibility will, in the long term, be more important than simultaneous orgasms - although, as a modern woman, she demands those, too.
Meanwhile, Miranda, the brainy one, is still proving immensely dim when it comes to her love life. Played so deftly by Cynthia Nixon, she cannot see that her soulmate is sitting right in front of her and is called Steve. Steve, who has sired her baby and is in love with her, has unfortunately disqualified himself by his niceness and by the low public esteem attached to his job as a bartender. Finally, however, Miranda declares she has fallen in love with him.
Although he is round her place all the time, the only way she can hope to effect his transition from best friend to boyfriend is by inviting him on a date to, needless to say, an expensive restaurant. But restaurants are not Steve's natural habitat and he asks for more candles on the table. Expecting the usual lecture about hanging around her too much, he says he is seeing someone else and it is going well. Miranda goes home resolving to remain faithful instead to her Tivo, a hard-drive video recorder designed never to miss a date and to predict her every preference. But in a home-help-related accident, the Tivo goes wrong. With exquisite irony, it is Steve who eventually mends it, making him an even more perfect man.
In other words, Sex and the City remains as clever and as objectionable as ever. It continues to pigeonhole men into stereotypes, proffering no excuse except the assumption - wrong, in my experience - that men think of women in similar terms. The jokes are, if anything, getting filthier. Some I don't even get. What exactly did Samantha mean when she said: "Spray it, don't say it?" Instead of offering genuine insights into the hell of modern dating, its true subject is surely four women who behave not "like men", but like lunatics.
Yet there is no denying its cleverness or how consistently funny it is. In the final strand of the current plots, Charlotte (Kristin Davis) is dating a Jew and considering converting to Judaism, the ultimate lifestyle change for this Wasp. The scene where Charlotte bursts in on a rabbi's sabbath and improvises her amens is a little masterpiece. So was Carrie's alfresco date (1 August), where an overactive pigeon, a sty and balsamic vinegar became hopelessly embroiled. All Sarah Jessica Parker as Carrie had to do was react to her date's antics, but her reaction shots made it. Having previously got into trouble with her agent for calling her a horse in a hairdo, may I say here what a comedienne she is?
Back home with her baby, Miranda had recorded on her Tivo a BBC sitcom called Jules and Mimi. Although the programme is made up, we see glimpses of it. Miranda loves it, and it is not unkindly meant. But Jules and Mimi is not a patch on Sex and the City. Then again, what British sitcom is?
Andrew Billen is a staff writer on the Times
