Over the course of the six seasons and 94 episodes of Sex and the City, the quality that has most defined Carrie Bradshaw (played by Sarah Jessica Parker) is not her diehard romanticism or her fiscally irresponsible love of shoes, but her constant tendency to act like a grade A jerk.
While some might argue that the lifeblood of the HBO series are its female friendships or its spicy romantic entanglements, there’s no denying that much of the series actually centers on Carrie’s narcissism: her self-absorption, her lack of self-awareness, and her ability to make any and every situation all about herself, her love life, and her feelings. Since she first graced our screens in 1998, Carrie has flaked on friends, broken up marriages, and shirked responsibility for her actions. As a sex columnist, she was surprisingly prudish and woefully judgmental, exhibiting casual biphobia and even slut-shaming her best friends; in her personal life, she was selfish and often oblivious to anything outside of her world—she couldn’t even be bothered to vote!
The sentiment that Carrie is a bad person has long been widely held, despite the character’s beloved status as an aspirational New Yorker. In a 2013 piece, Emily Nussbaum hailed her as a complex antihero akin to fellow HBO main character Tony Soprano, while an entire blog has been devoted to explaining just why It’s not something that’s lost on Sarah Jessica Parker, who’s played Carrie for the past 25 years. For Parker, Carrie’s flaws and shortcomings, as annoying or selfish as they might be, are what make her a relatable character.
“The most relatable part about her is her friendships and how real and important those were to her,” Parker said in an interview with . “Her friendships are complicated and she often failed like we all do — you fail at love, you fail your friends and yourself. We were never afraid of those flaws in Carrie and they were illustrated often and accurately. Sometimes people judged her harshly for that, but I was always happy to tell those stories because that’s what made her human and what made people connect with her.”
Though Carrie’s problematic behavior persists in the two SATC movies and on the SATC spin-off , for the purposes of this list, we are only considering the episodes of the original series. Here, in chronological order, are all of the times that Carrie Bradshaw was the worst on Sex and the City.
When she judges Amalita for having transactional relationships (S1, Ep. 5: The Power of Female Sex)
One of the most puzzling aspects of SATC is Carrie’s deep-seated prudishness, in spite of her job as a sex columnist. In Season 1, her moralism is at an all-time high after she receives $1000 in cash from hot French architect Gilles (Ed Fry) after they spend a passionate night together. Instead of enjoying her unexpected windfall as her perpetually broke ass should have done, Carrie blames the friend who introduced them, international party girl Amalita Amalfi (Carole Davis), for Gilles mistaking her for a call girl. In Carrie’s estimation, Amalita’s jet-setting lifestyle and fabulous wardrobe, which appear to be funded by her rotation of wealthy boyfriends, makes her a “professional girlfriend.”
Never mind that Carrie willingly allows Amalita to buy her a pair of very expensive Dolce & Gabbana heels after her credit card is maxed out or that she’s gotten her into a very exclusive restaurant, Carrie still looks down on Amalita for having seemingly transactional relationships, despite Carrie reaping the benefits. The only person we can count on in the episode to have any sort of smart take about Amalita and the larger idea of sex work as real work is, of course, sex-positive Samantha (Kim Cattrall), who logically concludes that, “Money is power. Sex is power. Therefore, getting money for sex is simply an exchange of power.” Why Samantha wasn’t the sex columnist in SATC is possibly the show’s biggest loss!
When she ditches Miranda to eat veal with Big (S2, Ep. 8: The Man, the Myth, the Viagra)
Though the major conceit of SATC is that your friends are the true loves of your life, Carrie still commits the cardinal sin of female friendship in Season 2 when she scraps her plans with Miranda (Cynthia Nixon) to have dinner with Big (Chris Noth), who is cooking her veal. Miranda’s enraged response rightly takes Carrie to task on two accounts: first, that it’s uncool that she blew her off for a “piece of politically incorrect meat,” and secondly, the more troubling fact that Carrie had no problem rearranging her life at a moment’s notice to fit Big’s, a pattern that first emerged when she began dating him. As Miranda tells Carrie, “It’s all about him.” Miranda isn’t the only person who Carrie slights in the episode; when Samantha considers dating septuagenarian multimillionaire Ed (Bill McHugh), Carrie is horrifically ageist.
When she goes to therapy for the wrong reasons (S2, Ep. 13: Games People Play)
After Carrie’s obsessive ranting about her breakup with Big forces her emotionally exhausted friends to stage an intervention, she reluctantly attends therapy, which she has every intention of ditching after the first session, but then she runs into Seth (a celebrity cameo by Bon Jovi), another patient, in the waiting room. She continues to go to therapy just to flirt with Seth, without doing any self-reflection on why she’s actually in therapy, until he asks her out on a date. After their first date, which includes a seductive game of Twister and ends with the pair sleeping together, Carrie discovers that actually listening to her therapist might have been a good idea: while her therapist told her she had a tendency to gravitate toward the wrong men, Seth reveals that the reason why he’s in therapy is because he loses interest in women once he sleeps with them. While Carrie’s self-serving motivations for going to therapy are bad, what’s worse is that beforehand, she expected her friends to carry the full brunt of her emotional labor, with absolutely no remorse or apology—and when they called her out, she joked that she needed “new friends” instead of therapy.
When she ignores the boundaries of an alcoholic love interest (S2, Ep. 16: Was It Good For You?)
After Carrie has a meet-cute with Patrick Casey (Richard Joseph Paul) on the street and gives him her number, she’s dumbfounded that he wouldn’t automatically be head over heels for her. Turns out, he’s in recovery for alcohol addiction, a reveal that Carrie jokes about tactlessly: “I love alcoholics…hell, I hope to be one some day!” Though Patrick tells Carrie that as part of his recovery, he’ll
