Did Sex and the City help kill off the 1990s culturally

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If you had any residual affection for SATC, please read how it supposedly killed the 1990s in America but especially in New York City:

There were two types of people in the ‘90s: losers, and people who didn’t know they were losers yet. As such, it was a challenge to choose a true decade-killer among these weak specimens. However, the dishonor 100 percent goes to Sex and the City, a television program and cultural phenomenon that premiered on HBO on a date that will live in infamy as the precise moment the ‘90s were summarily impaled on a fur-covered Manolo Blahnik stiletto.

SATC had the subtext-bereft sincerity of both a Puff Daddy record and a post-9/11 second-person disaster narrative. It had the career ambitions of an ‘80s child and the unattainably expensive, cynically sexualized yet hideously ugly fashion of the Justin-and-Britney-era denim abomination. It had the incomprehensible acquisitiveness and brand-name obsession of Winona shoplifting in Saks, and the accompanying murder of the nuanced heroine who cared about anything besides pleasing men and cutting carbs.

Sure, early-era Carrie was vaguely, disingenuously ‘90s: She smoked, and wore the same ratty fur coat with every outfit in a kind of upscale-Courtney Love homage. She didn’t have a real job (even at an extraordinary $1 a word, a weekly column at the New York Star would pay $3000 per month, or $36,000 per annum before taxes). And she always accessorized with that dumbass nameplate necklace, itself an ironic and ill-advised co-option of black urban culture, rendered in what Carrie later described as, and I quote, “ghetto gold.” (A lovely example of the unapologetic and often unbearable whiteness of SATC’s being.)

The worst part of Sex and the City was that it existed in the liminal space between the ‘90s’ reverence of anti-materialistic coolness and the total disappearance of cool as concept in the 21st century. As a result, Carrie and her rich, vapid friends were cool, and the show’s nearly instantaneous status as appointment television meant that everyone else wanted that kind of cool, too. Unlike the cool of the ‘90s, which depended upon the rejection of anything commercial and popular, you could purchase SATC’s cool at Barney’s and the Patricia Field store on West Broadway. (As a sweet bonus, the show also ushered in the destruction of the island of Manhattan as a remotely interesting place to be.)

Now, suddenly, you had to be a size two and date investment bankers. Cool metamorphosed from an attitude into a commodity. By the time the openly craven marathon of product placement masquerading as the series’ feature film hit cinemas in 2008, the very concept had bought, sold, and processed itself out of existence.

Sex and the City may have started before the turn of the millennium, but there is nary another lone cultural entity that both caused and represented the aughts’ vile self in such dominant and equal measure. Carrie, Samantha, Charlotte, and Miranda may have come of age in the ‘90s, but I Can’t Help But Wonder: Are they also the four horsewomen of its apocalypse?