I Was Always a Sam
If one fictional character shaped my sensibility more than every teacher, parent, and former partner combined, it’s Samantha Jones from Sex and the City. Never a Carrie. Always a Sam—the one who takes what she wants and doesn’t pretend the wanting isn’t happening.
The show turned twenty this year. Six seasons, two films I refuse to acknowledge, and a catalog of scenes that still land harder than most things written for adults. The two movies—I’m leaving them out entirely, the way any serious fan should.
The opening shot is already legendary: Carrie getting splashed by a passing bus bearing her own face. The image became iconic partly because of what it was, partly because of what came next—someone had painted an enormous cock on the side of that bus, right next to her cheek. A perfect introduction to what the show was going to be.
Gossip, obviously, is one of the show’s great pleasures—Carrie and Stanford tearing through everyone they know with surgical precision. There’s something genuinely therapeutic about sitting with your best friend and saying exactly what you think about everyone. It elevates the self-esteem in ways that probably don’t hold up to scrutiny. Who cares. It works.
Samantha spending an entire day masturbating is played for comedy but lands differently if you’ve been there. I have. Unlike her, I wasn’t chasing a lost orgasm. I simply had the time, the inclination, and no particular reason to stop.
The scene where Carrie admits she’s fantasized about shooting herself in the head—not out of actual despair, just because life is that exhausting sometimes—is the most honest piece of writing the show ever produced. You know the feeling exactly. You make coffee instead. That’s the whole bit. It shouldn’t be as comforting as it is, and yet.
When Big gets married and Carrie walks out with a single hair flip, I cry. Still do. Watching someone let their kryptonite person go with that much style is genuinely moving—she outclasses the new bride by doing absolutely nothing at all.
The scene where she finally tells someone to stop policing how she expresses herself is my actual favorite. The satisfaction of watching a person say precisely the right thing at precisely the right moment is almost unbearable. I’m almost never that sharp in real life. Most people aren’t. That’s why the scene exists.
The Post-It breakup. An ex once had a mutual friend send me a Facebook message to deliver the news. That was humiliating in its own specific way—but still not as bad as a Post-It. What makes that Sex and the City scene work isn’t the cruelty of the gesture; it’s the recognition that Jack Berger was probably the best boyfriend Carrie ever had, and she still got a Post-It. Relationships have no sense of proportion.
When Samantha leaves Richard, she does it with a kind of self-possession most people only achieve in retrospect, alone in the car an hour later. Richard felt like a real match, which makes the exit harder to watch. I cried more at that scene than I did at The Notebook, and I’ll stand behind that statement.
The drive-through Cosmopolitan is a fantasy I understand completely. Someone once told me you could get beer at McDonald’s if you asked with enough confidence and specificity. It was a lie. There is no beer at McDonald’s. The system protects itself.
The shopping scene cuts through something nobody admits out loud. You tell yourself you’re developing a personal style, that the jacket is about self-expression. But mostly you’re trying to make someone want to sleep with you while maintaining plausible deniability about that being the reason. You want women to look at you and feel something. Samantha is the only character who says this plainly, without the cover story.
And at the end: Carrie in the same outfit she’s worn twice this week, comfortable and not apologizing for it. I wear the same sweatpants 360 days a year. Carrie, who never repeated a single garment across six seasons, would have stared at me with her mouth slightly open. But I told you—I’m a Sam. I’d rather have nothing on at all.