It's a story of four beautiful female New Yorkers who gossip about their sex-lives and find new ways to deal with being a woman in the 90's.

The fourth series of Sex and the City is just as smart and sexy as ever, mixing caustic adult wit and sharply observed situation comedy on the mean streets of Manhattan, though this time the quartet of singleton city girls must endure even tougher combat in the unending war of love, sex and shopping. Carrie (Sarah Jessica Parker) finally seems to have found her ideal life partner when she is reunited with handsome craftsman Aidan. But can their relationship survive trial by cohabitation? Meanwhile Charlotte (Kristin Davis) seems to have both her dream Park Avenue apartment and a solution to her marital problems with Trey (Kyle MacLachlan), as well as conquering his fearsome mother. But when the subject of babies comes up everything starts to unravel for her, too. It's not just Charlotte having baby issues either: after what seems like an eternity of enforced sexual abstinence, Miranda (Cynthia Nixon) is horrified to discover she's pregnant. And as for the sultry Samantha (Kim Cattrall), she's on a quest for monogamy, first with an exotic lesbian artist then with a philandering businessman, with whom to her utter dismay she just might have fallen in love. --Mark Walker

The fourth series of Sex and the City. Caustic adult wit and sharply observed situation comedy on the mean streets of Manhattan. The singleton city girls endure in the war of love.

It was a short but sweet fifth season for Sex and the City, as HBO's resident comediennes found themselves affected by forces beyond their control--the pregnancies of both Sarah Jessica Parker and Cynthia Nixon. A truncated shooting schedule to accommodate the actresses forced this season to be reduced to a mere eight episodes, but they and the writers forged ahead, creating a handful of episodes that if short in content were long on emotion and laughs. Carrie and Miranda wrestled with their solitary lifestyles, albeit with new attachments--Miranda had new baby Brady and single motherhood, while Carrie found herself in the world of publishing as the author of a real-life book of her columns. Charlotte wondered if she'd ever find another man, while Samantha finally got rid of the one that had been vexing her far too much. If the season as a whole felt less than the sum of its parts, those parts were some of the best comedy in the show's history. The season's climactic episode, "I Love a Charade", was one of the series' best episodes ever, equally touching and funny, and grounded the show in an emotional maturity that announced that, after all their wild travails, these women had truly grown up. --Mark Englehart