An alternate ending. Candace Bushnell, the author who inspired the Sex and the City series believes that characters Carrie and Mr. Big wouldn’t have chosen to remain together.
In a candid interview with The Guardian on Monday, July 3rd, Bushnell said: “Well, I think, in real life, Carrie and Big wouldn’t have ended up together. But at that point the TV show had become so big. Viewers got so invested in the story line of Carrie and Big that it became a bit like Mr. Darcy and Elizabeth Bennett.”
Bushnell went on to address pressures she felt to appease fans who had become deeply invested in Carrie and Big’s relationship. “They had become an iconic couple and women really related to it; they would say, ‘I found my Mr. Big’ or ‘I just broke up with my Mr Big.’ It became part of the lexicon. And when people are making a TV show, it’s show business, not show art, so at that point it was for the audience and we weren’t thinking about what the impact would be 10 years later.”
Carrie and Big married in the first big-screen Sex and the City movie in 2008.
Series creator Darren Star shared similar feelings to Bushnell’s in an interview with Kindle Singles in 2016.
“I think the show ultimately betrayed what it was about, which was that women don’t ultimately find happiness from marriage. Not that they can’t. But the show initially was going off script from the romantic comedies that had come before it. That’s what had made women so attached.”
Sarah Jessica Parker, who played Carrie Bradshaw in the iconic series, also weighed in on her character’s choices.
“I don’t think of it as someone diminishing herself by letting a man marry her — it always felt that she had arrived at that on her own, but the beauty is we can all have lots and lots of opinions about lots of choices Carrie made that we object to or that we stand by,” she told Yahoo Style in February 2016.
