Susan Seidelman’s Sex and the City : TV Authorship and Feminist Possibility

This chapter examines Seidelman's work on Sex and the City as a case study of a particular kind of career trajectory for women directors of the era, who often worked—by choice, but more often from necessity—within the distinct context of television, as well as film. This chapter suggests—based in the evidence of the three episodes she directed for the first season of SATC—that Seidelman in particular (and female filmmakers in general) have been poorly served both by the auteurist frameworks of film studies and the TV industry's deprecation of the director as an authorial force. Instead, I advocate for a more flexible and capacious model of authorship responsive to women's work across media and in serial formats. Framing Seidelman as one of the many "authors" of the show's first season not only helps surface the strong thematic continuities between, say, "The Baby Shower" and her first two feature films, but it also helps consolidate her auteur status by more accurately reflecting the full range of her contributions.