Carrie Bradshaw

Carrie Bradshaw writes a weekly column about love and sex in Manhattan, using her own dating life and her three best friends' as material. She's a hopeless romantic dressed in avant-garde fashion, forever theorizing about men over brunch while chasing the elusive, unavailable Mr. Big and wondering aloud, in voiceover, if she's asking the right questions.

Parker plays her as clever rather than wise, which is the joke and the point — Carrie's columns sound insightful while her actual choices are a mess, and the show trusts us to notice the gap. The narration, the clothes, the friendships all serve one idea: a woman working out what she wants by writing about it, badly and honestly, in public.