Sex and the City: The Gossip, the Glamour, the Truth!

With the long-awaited Sex and the City movie hitting theaters, we dug deep for the juicy backstory on the show that changed our lives.

IN THE BEGINNING
Darren Star (SATC creator): My idea was that this could be sort of a Mary Tyler Moore Show for the new millennium. It wasn't about T&A. It would be R-rated, but it had to be funny.

Kristin Davis (Charlotte York): It was the talk of L.A. that there was a show coming from HBO that was going to have four women in it. That was not a very common thing. And then everyone's like, "Ooh, New York City!" All the actresses were buzzing about it.

Willie Garson (Stanford Blatch): At the beginning, it was our secret little show that no one knew about. No one was watching; no one had HBO.

Cynthia Nixon (Miranda Hobbes): When the show started, it was more bleak, and rarefied, and so New York. Who was this show for? It just seemed like an experiment, really.

Kristin Davis: We were kind of making it up as we went along. We just wanted to stay on the air. I remember having conversations with Darren about how if we ever got nominated for a Cable Ace Award, we would be so happy, that it would be the biggest deal in the world.

Cindy Chupack (executive producer): On HBO we could use language and show sex without pressure from sponsors — like when we wanted to do an episode about Miranda's deciding whether to keep the baby or have an abortion. I don't know how you could have done that on network television as honestly as we did. Have your main character admit that she'd had one? It felt like a luxury that there was no pressure other than what would be true for these characters.

Chris Albrecht (former chairman and CEO of HBO): It wasn't that we didn't have pressure. The show was expensive. There was a lot of attention. But no one should try to make a show popular — that's a foolish endeavor. You try to make a show good.

Chris Noth (Mr. Big): It started slow and then it just sort of exploded. All of New York just changed at the same time, really. It all became cosmos and the Meatpacking District. I remember being really sort of in shock and awe.

Kristin Davis: When Time magazine put the four of us on the cover and said, "Who Needs a Husband?" that's when I thought, Wow. I hadn't really realized larger cultural connections were being made. Then I was floored.

Cynthia Nixon: We weren't on the cover of a women's magazine; we were on the cover of a news magazine. We were so big that we were news.

Willie Garson: It was like being on the Yankees or something.