Sex and the City has always been aware of its audience. The first episode of the 1998 HBO series features a parade of characters talking directly into the camera about their dating lives. This device — characters talking interview-style into a camera about the topic of the day — remained in use through the first season of the show, putting its characters in one-directional but direct dialogue with the audience. Their monologues let us into a different world of fast-talking single thirty-somethings in New York City whose biggest concerns seemed to be their love lives.

By the second season, the device had fallen away in favor of hermetic storytelling, the audience looking in on the characters’ lives as the characters lived them. But the strong sense of awareness of the audience remained. The show was a success because it represented, however imperfectly and with a bias toward white upper-middle-class women living in cities, the minutiae that colored the everyday lives of many women, no matter who or where they were. Petty jealousies, infidelity, relationship-related confusion, extramarital affairs, dreams reached for but never attained — in the lives of Miranda and Carrie and Samantha and Charlotte, it was all there.

The show has aged unevenly. Some of its topical jokes, especially ones about race and sexuality, come off tone-deaf when heard twenty years later. But its concern with, and highly entertaining display of, the romantic lives of women allowed the show to retain its appeal over the course of the more than two decades after its first episode aired. If you related, you could laugh along with them; if you didn’t, you could laugh at them.