‘Sex and the City’ Paid Homage to ‘The Mary Tyler Moore Show’ With Its Intro
Sex and the City fans first met Carrie Bradshaw in a white tutu strutting across New York. The anti-heroine showcases much of her personality and the essence of the show in those opening credits. And the Sex and the City intro also paid homage to another classic sitcom: The Mary Tyler Moore Show.
‘The Mary Tyler Moore Show’ inspired the ‘Sex and the City’ intro
The indelible opening credits in SATC depicted Sarah Jessica Parker’s main character frolicking in the New York City skyline. The show detailed the life of someone constantly surprised by her life. Creator Darren Star felt the opening sequence “encapsulated who Carrie was.” In an interview with Entertainment Weekly, he said he looked to other female-fronted shows for inspiration.
“I was really inspired by the That Girl main title, which told the story of Anne Marie [Marlo Thomas] coming to New York and I thought about The Mary Tyler Moore Show,” Starr said. While Mary Richards [Moore] doesn’t get splashed by a bus with her image, she still walks around in New York admiring the city the same way Carrie does in SATC.
The tutu in ‘SATC’s opening credits was a point of controversy
There is no doubt that Carrie’s outfit in the opening sequence is iconic. It exudes confidence and class and speaks to who Carrie was as a person and her larger-than-life fashionable personality. While the pink and white ensemble has become engrained in the viewers’ minds, it almost never made it into the scene.
According to costumer Patricia Field, the crew didn’t get what the tutu represented and was indecisive about it. In the EW interview, Field revealed that she found the iconic outfit in a showroom floor bin going for $5.
The designer said she and Parker had to fight to keep the clothing item. After much deliberation, Starr gave in. He did so under the condition that Field would recreate it three more times to keep the options open. Field said she convinced Starr that if they wanted the show to become a hit, they would need “something completely original” — not just from that “season.”
In a different interview, Parker shared her feelings. “I felt it set the sequence up nicely, but it didn’t give away the joke. The pie in the face.” However, she wanted a different kind of tutu. Parker said that if she had been allowed to, the tutu would have had “a bigger silhouette” instead of the “tiered cupcake thing.”
‘SATC’ had an alternate opening sequence
Before they decided on the tutu officially, the cast and crew reshot another opening sequence in which Parker wore a blue dress. The opening sequence is entirely different from the one the audience knew because, in the alternate one, Carrie doesn’t get splashed.
However, she still sees an ad of herself which causes her to trip. Starr told EW that the alternate sequence was “a nod to The Dick Van Dyke Show,” but they decided not to use it. Parker said that the alternate credits “nodded to a person but wasn’t reflective of everything” her character, Carrie, was.
