Carrie Bradshaw (born October 10, 1966),[citation needed] is the literal voice of the show, as each episode is structured around her train of thought while writing her weekly column, "Sex and the City", for the fictitious newspaper, The New York Star.
A self-proclaimed shoe fetishist, she focuses most of her attention and finances on designer footwear, primarily Manolo Blahnik, though she has been known to wear Christian Louboutin and Jimmy Choo.
[citation needed] Although her only income is from her freelance weekly newspaper column, she often overspends her limit and maxes out her credit card in a single shopping trip.
To some viewers, her lack of shoe-shopping self-control and overall seemingly immature spending might be a flaw, [citation needed]and her money management misadventures follow her through a few episodes.
Her apartment is her home for the entire series and is another source of pride; it is an open-planned studio in an Upper East Side brownstone that is enviable for its stabilized rent, space, large closet, and good location.
Charlotte York (born January 23, 1967),[citation needed] is an art dealer and graduate of Smith College with a wealthy Connecticut blue-blooded upbringing.
She is the most conservative and traditional of the group, the one who places the most emphasis on emotional love as opposed to lust, and is always searching for her "knight in shining armor".
Presenting a more straightforward attitude about relationships, usually based on "the rules" of love and dating, she often scoffs at the lewder, more libertine antics that the show presents (primarily by way of Samantha), but despite her conservative outlook, she makes concessions (while married) that even surprise her sexually freer girlfriends (such as her level of dirty talk, oral sex in public and "tuchus-lingus").
Miranda Hobbes (born July 27, 1966)[citation needed], is a career-minded lawyer with extremely cynical views on relationships and men.
In the early seasons, she is portrayed as masculine and borderline misandric, but this image softens over the years, particularly after she becomes pregnant by her on again-off again boyfriend, Steve Brady, whom she eventually marries.
The birth of her son, Brady, brings up new issues for her Type A, workaholic personality, but she soon finds a way to balance career, being single and motherhood.
Of the four women, she is the first to purchase an apartment, (an indicator of her success), which she leaves in the final season to move to a larger home in Brooklyn with Steve and Brady.
Samantha Jones (born April 28, 1958)[citation needed], the oldest of the group, is an independent publicist and a seductress who avoids emotional involvement at all costs, while satisfying every possible carnal desire imaginable.
In season two they start to date again but it, again, ends badly due to Mr. Big moving to Paris with work and not telling Carrie until a few days prior.
A couple of months later, they reconcile when she discovers romantic emails written by him that Louise, her assistant, put in a special folder.
In Sex and the City 2, six years later, Carrie runs into Aidan in Abu Dhabi at a market where he is buying samples for his furniture company.
He refuses to enter Carrie's apartment because it rekindles memories of their previous failed relationship and his attempt to turn it into a shared home.
Her relationship with him brings up all sorts of questions in Carrie's mind about finding love past "a certain age" and whether or not she wants to settle down as a family woman.
Maria Diega Reyes (Sônia Braga) is a Brazilian sensual artist that Samantha meets at a solo exhibit while admiring her work.
Jerry "Smith" Jerrod (Jason Lewis) is a young waiter Samantha seduces in a trendy restaurant called "Raw."
In the final episode, Smith flies back from a film set in Canada just to tell her that he loves her, which she counters with "You have meant more to me than any man I've ever known," which, for Samantha, is a far greater statement.
On the day when Charlotte succeeds in projecting the ultimate marital bliss—a photo spread in a magazine featuring her Park Avenue apartment—she and Trey split up and he moves back in with his mother.
In And Just Like That... the couple is still happily married, though dealing with various family challenges, including Charlotte going back to work and Harry having to help out at home.
Introduced in the second season, Steve Brady (David Eigenberg) is a bartender who has an unconventional on-again, off-again relationship with Miranda Hobbes throughout the remainder of the series.
He befriends the former boyfriend of Carrie, Aidan Shaw, and accidentally becomes the father of Miranda's baby boy, Brady Hobbes (Joseph Pupo).
They decide to get married in one of the parks in the City after Miranda broke up with Dr Robert Leeds and both moved out from Manhattan to Brooklyn, in New York.
Miranda, frustrated by her lack of work-life balance and feeling underappreciated at her job decides to quit and spend more time with her family.
A gay talent agent from an aristocratic family with a sense of style paralleled only by Carrie's, viewers receive the impression that they have a long-standing relationship built within their younger, wilder days in the New York City club and bar scene in the 1980s.
We are led to believe this relationship does not last, however, as in the film he arrives at a New Year's party alone and has no one else to kiss except long-time rival Anthony Marentino, whom he weds in the sequel.
During the last episode of Season 5, the girls meet aging socialite Bitsy von Muffling (Julie Halston) right before and during her Hamptons wedding to flamboyant, and presumably gay, cabaret entertainer Bobby Fine (Nathan Lane).