Plenty of slapstick with the lipstick

By FIONA RAE

The women of Sex and the City (TV3, 9.30 last night) have done a lot in the pursuit of love and sex and, well, anything in between, but now they're taking their Manolos and tottering off into the sunset for the sixth and final time.

As anyone who has been within cooee of a newspaper knows, it's the final season of the HBO drama series, in which sex columnist Carrie Bradshaw and her three gal pals search, and search, for Mr Right. And you can't help wondering: has the search been worth it? The answer would have to be yes.

In the drama, the four women talked about their sex lives as openly as if they were shopping lists (in Samantha's case, the two are nearly the same thing) and, almost better than that, they ate at every new restaurant in town while remaining rail thin.

Impossible, sure, but what a dream!

But just as the series has worshipped at the altar of the young, single and extraordinarily well dressed, it has also delighted in taking its goddesses off their pedestals. For a drama featuring four sophisticated women, there's been a surprising amount of slapstick along with the lipstick in Sex and the City.

Last night's two-episode opener was no exception, with Carrie (Sarah Jessica Parker) doing a pretty good drunken fall into her closet. Whether it was slipping in the mud at ex-boyfriend Aidan's farm, or slipping up on the catwalk, the series writers have enjoyed sending Carrie crashing on to her heinie. I guess we should have known from the opening sequence in which Carrie has her tutu splashed what was to come.

In addition, the writers have paired Waspy, Episcopalian Charlotte (Kristin Davis) with a bald, sweaty Jewish guy - and are turning her into a Jewish princess; they have made career-woman Miranda (Cynthia Nixon) a single mom who sometimes gets poop on her face and has realised too late that she's really in love with the father of her baby, Steve; and even Samantha (Kim Cattrall) will have a health scare this season.

In the meantime, Sam finds, in that witty, punning dialogue that is so much fun, something else to complain about, namely the gentrification of the meat-packing district in New York: "It's all gotten so sanitary. No smoking in bars - what's next, no f**king in bars?" Later, as she walked past a line of bondage-clad gays, including one on a leash, she sees something really horrifying: Pottery Barn is coming to the neighbourhood.

At least they have given Carrie her perfect guy: a fellow writer who is just as witty as she is, is cute in a rumpled, writerly way, is ... uh-oh, not so good in the bedroom. "No throwdown," laments Carrie, "more like slowdown."

Sex and the City's creator, Darren Star, initially pitched the show as a female Seinfeld, but with more sex. He failed the first part, instead creating a four-headed beast that has explored many aspects of modern female life, some too impolite to mention in a family newspaper.

Sure, they may have done it in outrageously expensive clothes no normal woman could afford - but isn't that the point? Why can't we have our cake and Blahniks too?