The end of the affair Will Sex and the City’s heroines live happily ever after? BY JOYCE MILLMAN

During its six-season run, which ends February 22, HBO’s Sex and the City has been hailed and hyped as a pop-cultural phenomenon, and deservedly so. Sex and the City made Prada, Manolo Blahnik, and Cosmopolitans household words, even in households that couldn’t afford Prada or Manolo and didn’t have the leisure time to sip Cosmos.

The romantic adventures of four single women in Manhattan, the sit-com inspired Sex-alike packs of female friends who took the boyfriend-hunting examples of the show’s heroines very seriously. And we have star Sarah Jessica Parker and stylist Patricia Field to thank for the ubiquitous fashion trends, which were both charming (Carrie’s name necklace) and clownish — remember her fabric-flower accessories?

But the truth is, as dizzily entertaining as it was, Sex and the City will be remembered less as a great TV show than as a glossy slice of turn-of-the-century social anthropology. Premiering in the summer of 1998, it was based on Candace Bushnell’s New York Observer relationship columns. For the TV series, Bushnell and her friends were transformed into four post-feminist archetypes: romantically battered but still chipper writer Carrie (Parker), the show’s narrator; career-driven lawyer Miranda (Cynthia Nixon); prim, husband-hunting art-gallery manager Charlotte (Kristin Davis); and unapologetically slutty and single publicist Samantha (Kim Cattrall).

These characters had more freedom and more choices than any previous generation of American women. Like most of their contemporaries, they were trying to figure out how to prioritize these choices, how to put all the pieces of their lives together. What’s more important, sex or love? Career or motherhood? Independence or marriage? Sex and the City kept circling back to the same ages-old question: can a woman in her 30s afford to be choosy or agonize about priorities while the clock is ticking and the marriageable male pool is shrinking? The sit-com had no answers. But the life-sized quandaries of its characters rang true.

Bushnell had fashioned a self-conscious Jane Austen parallel out of her tales that the series (created by Darren Star and Michael Patrick King and overseen by a staff of female writers and producers) picked up on. The show brought the economics of love — a favorite theme of Austen — to the fore. Miranda was self-sufficient and, at the beginning of the series, wouldn’t consider dating anyone who made less money (or worked fewer hours) than she did. Then she fell in love with Steve, a bartender from Queens, but it took her years to shake the feeling that he was beneath her. Charlotte (the most Austenian character on the show) aspired to make "a good match"; marriage for her was the avenue of upward mobility. Carrie almost fell into a pre-feminist marriage when she accepted a proposal from her crafty beau Aidan, which came with strings attached — he bought her apartment that was going condo but that she couldn’t afford. The arrangement suffocated her and she broke the engagement.

The women’s sexual mishaps are what brought the show its naughty buzz; everyone remembers the episodes about Miranda’s bedmate the "messy eater" and about Samantha’s guy with the "funky spunk." For a mainstream sit-com aimed at women, Sex truly was groundbreaking, with its unblushing depiction of nudity, sexual acts, and raunchy talk. (Of course, it was on a premium cable channel, so it had the freedom to be racy.) Samantha, the most cartoonish character on the show, embraced feminism with open legs; she approached sex as a power trip the way a man (some might say, a gay man, of more carefree times) would, with no messy emotions to get in the way of pleasure.

But the heart of the show wasn’t sex at all, it was the model relationship among the four characters. On Sex and the City, no problem existed — divorce, unintended pregnancy, infertility, even cancer — that couldn’t be lessened by talking about it with friends. Sex depicted a kind of sisterliness that hadn’t often been seen on TV except among elderly women (The Golden Girls) or children (The Facts of Life). Carrie, Miranda, Charlotte, and Samantha were supportive and non-competitive; they put one another’s needs ahead of their own desires and didn’t dump a friend if a man came calling.

The four women formed the sort of family substitute that had been popular on sit-coms since the 1970s in everything from The Mary Tyler Moore Show to M*A*S*H to Cheers to Friends. Their friendship was both timeless (it harked back to Austen and Louisa May Alcott) and feminist in its ideal of women forming emotional, nurturing ties with one another. There were few sweeter scenes in the run of Sex and the City than the moment this season during the wedding of Miranda and Steve when Carrie — who had just learned that Samantha has breast cancer — silently slipped her hand into Samantha’s during the vows of "sickness and health."

Fans of the show know that these friendships will endure, even if all of the characters find mates. And since Sex and the City has styled itself so obviously after Austen, marriage — specifically, Carrie’s marriage — is really the only way the series can end. Carrie’s final romantic fate is a closely guarded secret. There are three possibilities: she’ll remain single, married to New York City, so to speak; she’ll marry Aleksandr Petrovsky (Mikhail Baryshnikov), the older, Russian painter she’s been dating; or she’ll marry "Mr. Big" (Chris Noth), the real-estate mogul who has been her big love and big heartache throughout the show’s run.

The right ending is crucial. Seinfeld had a dreadful finale, but the rest of the series was brilliant enough to overcome that last misstep. Sex and the City has always wobbled on stilettos and air kisses. It’s been funny and poignant, but it’s also been cliché’d (the 11th-hour "Samantha gets breast cancer" plot), cartoonish (Charlotte’s lightning-quick conversion to Judaism), and the victim of its own celebrity (Parker’s ever more distracting clotheshorsing-around). So, what would be the right ending for Sex and the City?

Speaking as someone who has followed the show faithfully from the beginning, I will be very disappointed if Carrie doesn’t end up with Big. I mean, Petrovsky is all wrong for her (and vice versa). Watching the episode "The Ick Factor" last month, I knew that either I had become terribly old or the show had hit a disastrously wrong note. Carrie complained about how uncomfortable Petrovsky’s gentlemanly wooing made her; at the end, she refused to let him dance her around Lincoln Center in the Oscar de la Renta ballgown he’d surprised her with, telling him that she was an American girl and unaccustomed to such romantic gestures. Instead, she took him to McDonald’s (!), where she fed him fries and they danced in their evening clothes.

The ick factor indeed! Mikhail Baryshnikov wants to read you poetry and composes a piano étude for you and you’d rather go to McDonald’s? Hello? Was this the same Carrie who was devastated last season when her previous boyfriend broke up with her via Post It note?

Anyway, back to Big. Is he a good match for Carrie? And what is "a good match" nowadays, especially for a woman approaching 40? In the early days of the show, Big was called a "toxic" bachelor, a "serial modelizer" who couldn’t stay true as long as there were leggy cover girls to conquer. Yet he and Carrie continue to set off sparks when they’re together. He’s swaggering, confident, and joky; she’s mock-swaggering, sweetly-sorta confident, and joky. He may not have been faithful to her, but he’s always treated her with tenderness. He’s older and wiser now, having been through marriage to a model, a divorce, and angioplasty. When last they met, he showed a glimmer of desire to cast off his boyish bachelorhood and settle down with Carrie. I think he might be redeemable.

As for Carrie, she’s always been in love with New York City, its glittering possibilities, its infinite variety. But you can’t marry a city, can you? Big has always been wreathed in New York symbolism — he listens to Sinatra and "Moon River," he smokes cigars, he’s not above a hansom cab ride in Central Park. Big is New York personified; he’s an attitude, a state of mind. Big can give Carrie what she wants: bright lights, big city, and, more mundanely, maybe the baby she’s starting to think about (Petrovsky has had a vasectomy). And Carrie can give Big what he needs: responsibility, the reality of attachment, someone to spar with emotionally and sexually. They may not be a match made in Heaven. But they’re a match made in Manhattan.