There's no better time to revisit or watch the show for the first time

I never planned to watch Sex and the City. Nothing I heard about the series particularly attracted me to it. My main familiarity with it was being loosely part of conversations where friends assigned themselves characters, like being "a Miranda" or "a Carrie." But on a sleepy Friday night my partner had turned it on to watch them cooking. Satisfied with trying something new, I plopped down on the couch with a chocolate martini in hand.

The fact that I would condemn Sex and the City is not that surprising. In a 2013 essay for the New Yorker, Emily Nussbaum wrote about how even critics have historically excluded the show from the canon of TV greats and relegated it to the side of TV. And its supporters were not immune. She writes: "By the show's fifteenth anniversary, this year, we fans had trained ourselves to relegate the show to a 'guilty pleasure', to mock its puns, to engage in self-flagellating conversations about these blinkered and tossed out movies," conversations that I more or less absorbed over the years.

But after watching the show, Carrie's quick tongue immediately ensnared me in her world and I couldn't stop watching. I wrestled with the toxic push and pull of her romance with Big, staring at the absurdity of this depiction of life in New York City in the 90s and 2000s. But even more than any of this, the series contained a warmth that surprised me. Watching the series in this day and age – when the premise of a woman being single and having sex in her 30s is ostensibly less provocative – strips it of any sort of "shock" factor that comes with sex. Instead, what stood out to me was a story edged with the generosity and messiness of unconditional female friendship and love.