Neo Aristotelian Analysis of Sex and the City Essay

Neo Aristotelian Analysis of Sex and the City - Essay Example According to Bushnell, the main characters of the story are based on her and her friends in real life (Degtyareva, 2005). This inspiration from real life makes the series believable and identifiable. The story is told in first person by Carrie in the form of a narration. Carrie often talks to the audience in the middle of a scene to make a specific point. The first person narration also means that we see the lives of the four women through Carrie's perspective. This is important since it impacts the "character" aspect of the Neo-Aristotelian Analysis and will be discussed in details below. The entire series is set in Manhattan and so the overall character of the city also influences the characters and their actions. At the start of the series, the audience is introduced to the four friends who are all single and looking for love. Carrie is a writer, Samantha is in public relations, Miranda is a lawyer and Charlotte works in an art gallery. The four friends have contrasting characteri stics. For example, while Samantha is assertive and aggressive and has a number of short lived affairs, Charlotte is much more traditional and believes in marriage and relationships. The four main characters hope to find love and marriage and so are shown dating a number of men through the series in an attempt to find the right life partner. The main theme repeated several times through the series shows someone of the main cast finding what seems to be the perfect man but then realizing that the said man is not the right one. Keeping this overall theme in mind, we shall now attempt a Neo-Aristotelian Analysis of the Sex and the City series. Action: The Neo-Aristotelian Analysis defines action as "any occurrence performed by a character, be it physical, mental or emotional that furthers the plot, delineates character, or explains or dramatizes a theme" (Taflinger, 1996). Action consists of eight parts. These are exposition, problem, point of attack, foreshadowing, complications, cris is, the climax and the denouement. In Sex and the City, we see these eight parts of the action being repeated in every episode, every season and in the series as a whole. In other words, every single episode had an exposition which establishes the status quo at the beginning of the episode. This is quickly followed by the problem definition as we were introduced to an issue that needs to be solved. Some kind of complication furthers the story to the crisis point which is than solved by the characters in the climax. As such, each episode is a complete story on its own and any person not following the series could still enjoy a particular episode. Just as each episode is complete on its own because it follows the eight parts of action, similarly, each of the six season is a complete story on its own. And the whole series also follows the eight actions to form a complete story which can be said to have an exposition, a problem, a complication, crisis, climax and denouement. This charac teristic off Sex and the City is common to all sitcoms wherein every episode is a complete story on its own and the entire series also tells a story. This action is extremely important for the success of a sitcom because every audience, irrespective of whether or not he/she is regularly watching the show, should be able to enjoy the episode. The aim of each episode is to hook any new viewer as well as keep the old