The Last of the Red Hot Mamas

Image credit: Cynthia Nixon: Photograph by Kenneth Willardt

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In season 3, ''Sex'' began moving beyond the doomed-date-of-the-week dilemma: Carrie became entangled in an affair with Mr. Big, while Charlotte's marriage unraveled. In coming seasons, Miranda would lose her mother and gain an unexpected baby, and most shockingly, Samantha would fall in love.

KING The biggest risk was Carrie not marrying Aidan. Like, ''What??? She had this great guy, and she didn't want to marry him?'' That's decadent. She broke Aidan's heart twice. Twice. Messy like life -- not like TV.
PARKER They had to pry Aidan from my hands. I was pretty seriously broken up about it. To this day, I wonder, Did we do the right thing?
KING [For Miranda], we thought, ''Okay, the most controlling, shut-down woman of them all will get accidentally pregnant and have to change.'' It was hard...but what was she going to do -- keep going to Korean delis and getting take-out food?

Season 6 brings big changes for Miss Bradshaw.

PARKER Carrie thinks her world is fabulous and big, and all of a sudden she meets somebody and it's revealed that her world is little and this whole new world has opened up to her. And I mean world, culturally and artistically.
KING It's not going to end with a four-wedding ceremony in Central Park. I would shoot myself. And single women would find us and kill us.
PARKER When Carrie walks out her door, there's just potential everywhere. The potential for great disappointment and great victory and love and loss and literature and poverty and overindulgence and insanity and beauty and architecture and art and dirt and shit, literally shit, and drugs and flowers -- that feels hopeful to me, and the show has always felt like that to me. And if it's the ending I think it's going to be, I feel like that will never be lost.

(This is an online-only excerpt from the cover story of Entertainment Weekly's May 30, 2003 issue.)