The Sex And The City Creator Didn’t Want Carrie & Big To End Up Together

It’s been 20 years since the Sex and the City finale — not including the two movies and buzzy revival — and this week, creator Darren Star revealed that he never wanted Carrie and Big to end up together.

In the show’s finale, which aired in 2004, Carrie and Big reunited in Paris. Big tracked down Carrie, swooping in as the romantic hero right as her relationship with Aleksandr Petrovsky broke down. “It took me a really long time to get here. But I’m here. Carrie, you’re the one,” he professed.

The tidy ending had its fans, but Star wasn’t among them. After Season 3, he had transitioned from showrunner to a consultant on the show, and in a new interview with Vulture, he shared his gripes with how it all wrapped up.

“That’s A Traditional Romantic Comedy.”

In the interview, Star praised Michael Patrick King (who went on to helm And Just Like That...), saying that “he did an amazing job” with his creative control of the series as it entered its final stretch.

However, Star had a different perspective on the show’s central couple. “Shows evolve and Carrie certainly evolved. But I always felt the show was never about a woman getting her man: That’s a traditional romantic comedy,” he said. “It was about how women can define themselves 100%, that they didn’t have to be defined by marriage.”

That was a recurrent theme on SATC — recall Charlotte’s suggestion that the women be each other’s soulmates, “and then we can let men be just these great, nice guys to have fun with.”

Star would have preferred an ending where Carrie chose herself. “But if that were the ending, I’m not sure the audience would’ve loved it,” he acknowledged. “The show had a real audience-pleasing ending.”

Sarah Jessica Parker Weighed In

This isn’t the first time Star has spoken out about Carrie and Big’s ending. He expressed similar sentiments in a 2016 interview, after which Sarah Jessica Parker offered her perspective.

“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,” she told Yahoo Style in 2016. “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. If that’s Darren’s feeling, I think it’s interesting!”