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From 2002, Lee Siegel’s essay on Sex and the City: Relationshipism, in The New Republic.

“With Sex and the City, the folks at HBO have created just this kind of cold and remote object of desire; a commodity eternally alluring, like the show’s conception of Manhattan itself. “I’m dating the city,” reveals Carrie, with typical wide-eyed cynicism, in a recent episode in which, after (yet again) having been humiliated in the rain by a stranger she tried to pick up, she seems resigned to the fact that she is chronically single. But Carrie is played by an actress in a television series called Sex and the City who transparently is playing an actress acting the part of Carrie, who writes a column called “Sex and the City,” which in the course of the series becomes a movie called Sex and the City, which is about a columnist named Carrie who writes a column called “Sex and the City,” which becomes a movie, and on and on.

“In other words, Carrie is really dating the idea of New York purveyed by Sex and the City; she is really dating her television. And it is beyond significant that this relationship–between a person and an appliance that projects the illusion of other people without exacting from the ego a price for being with other people–seems to be the only relationship in which this wildly popular series’ creators, who have fashioned the show in their own image, actually believe.”