Sex and the City is many things: an iconic series, beloved by millions of devoted fans, as well as a bonafide televised bible for hopeless romantics everywhere. It is also perhaps one of the biggest culprits of unrealistic housing situations in both television and cinema. The six season series follows a tight-knit group of female friends as they navigate their 30s, showing the ups and downs of “real life”, from jobs to babies to romance to real estate.

Sex and the City excels in its ability to idealise life in New York City, effectively hoodwinking entire generations into believing that they, like the show’s quirky, curly-haired protagonist, Carrie Bradshaw, can afford a one-bedroom apartment, $40,000 worth of shoes, a designer wardrobe and hundreds of Cosmopolitan cocktails and eggs Benedict brunch platters on a newspaper columnist’s salary (and remain debt-free, no less). Of course, part of the enduring charm of Sex and the City is its romanticisation of womanhood and life in New York City, which smoothes over the less-appealing realities of real life, from roommates to loan defaults to less-than-fabulous outfits borne not out of a lack of style, but simply a lack of funds.

The magic of SATC is slightly lost when financial reality creeps in, or at least, is disproven by maths. If we take Carrie at face value regarding her purported journalist salary (in season 4, Carrie tells Charlotte that fashion magazine Vogue paid her the now-unheard of rate of $4 per word; for context, freelancers typically make between 20¢ to 50¢ per word – and that is likely what Carrie was earning pre- book deal and pre-Vogue column), we soon learn that Carrie could never have afforded her Upper East Side apartment at neither its market rate of $3,000 per month (equivalent to $5,520 today), nor at its rent-controlled rate of $700 (equivalent to $1,228 today). The majority of her closet, too, is fully out of reach: Carrie’s Manolo Blahnik shoes, for instance, cost minimum $485 a pair (equivalent to $892 today). For those calculating at home, this means that Carrie (writing at the humble, but normal, 20¢-per-word rate) would have to write columns in excess of 1,200 words per shoe and 3,500 words to just make rent (this article you’re reading now is roughly 1,900 words, or, in Carrie’s world, about three quarters of a pair of Manolos).