Television is incestuous. Every prestige drama is a sitcom’s bastard child, every reality show has a soap opera godparent, and sometimes a cartoon rabbit is secretly raising your favourite feminist antihero. TV doesn’t evolve in straight lines — it cannibalises itself, mutates, and dresses the same archetypes in new costumes.
That’s where Unhinged TV Family Trees comes in. Each week, I’ll trace one absurd but undeniable lineage: how Buffy gave birth to Glee, why The Sopranos is just The Flintstones with panic attacks, how The Crown owes a debt to Keeping Up With the Kardashians. These aren’t jokes (okay, they’re also jokes). They’re arguments: messy, campy, occasionally deranged, but always defensible if you tilt your head and squint.
Because the truth is out there: your favourite “groundbreaking” show is probably just recycling a cartoon, a soap, or a stoner dog with a mystery van. Welcome to the family tree. Grab your red string.
First cab of the rank is…
We Wouldn’t Have Sex and the City Without Scooby-Doo
At first glance, Manhattan brunch and a psychedelic van have nothing in common. But look closer. Scooby-Doo set the template: four archetypes, endlessly rerunning the same mystery, always learning more about themselves than the monsters. Carrie is Shaggy — perpetually frazzled, narrating the chaos, and somehow stumbling into revelations. Samantha is Daphne, all glamour and one-liners, weaponising her beauty while everyone underestimates her. Miranda channels Velma’s skepticism and biting intelligence. And Charlotte? She’s Fred — uptight, traditional, desperately steering the group toward order while everyone else unravels.
Like Scooby and the gang, the Sex and the City girls never really solved the mystery of men; they just kept pulling masks off different versions of disappointment. The true monster was always heteronormativity — and much like Scooby’s villains, it looked ridiculous once unmasked.
Stay with me. One is HBO’s cultural juggernaut about four women navigating love and friendship in Manhattan. The other is a Saturday morning cartoon about a stoner, a dog, and some meddling kids. But scratch the surface, and the overlap is wild: Sex and the City is just Scooby-Doo with Manolos instead of Scooby Snacks.
Four Archetypes, Infinite Mysteries
Scooby-Doo gave us a template: four archetypes, running around solving mysteries. Fred (the straight man leader), Daphne (glamorous and fashionable), Velma (smart, skeptical, queer-coded), and Shaggy (the neurotic narrator, often hungry).
Now line that up with Sex and the City. Carrie is Shaggy: frazzled, narrating chaos, never fully put together but somehow central. Samantha is Daphne: glamorous, sexual, never afraid of danger. Miranda is Velma: skeptical, brainy, perpetually done with everyone else’s antics. Charlotte is Fred: uptight, traditional, trying to impose order on the madness. It’s a direct lineage of archetypes, just with more cosmopolitans.
The Monster of the Week
Every episode of Scooby-Doo brought a new monster. A swamp creature, a ghost, a masked villain. Every episode of Sex and the City brought a new monster too: the emotionally unavailable artist, the guy who won’t commit, the Wall Street shark, the “he’s just not that into you” archetype. Different monsters, same pattern. And by the end, the mask is always pulled off: the monster wasn’t supernatural, it was just another man in disguise.
Camp Sensibility
Both shows thrive on camp. Scooby-Doo gave us outrageous costumes, pratfalls, and chase montages set to pop songs. Sex and the City gave us outrageous outfits, pratfalls (Carrie falling on the runway, anyone?), and chase scenes through Manhattan’s dating pool. Both revel in excess, exaggeration, and the absurdity of chasing the same mystery week after week.
Queer Subtext, Overt and Otherwise
Velma was queer-coded long before HBO gave us Samantha Jones. Queer audiences saw themselves in the brainy sidekick who never got the boy. By the 2000s, HBO was giving us queerness out loud — Samantha sleeping with women, Stanford as comic relief. The line is clear: Scooby smuggled queerness in subtext, SATC brought it into the open with stilettos.
Same Map, Different Mask
So yes, one group ran through haunted mansions, the other through Manhattan clubs. But both told the same story: four archetypes navigating absurd situations, solving mysteries that weren’t really mysteries at all, and always returning to each other in the end.
Because Sex and the City didn’t reinvent the wheel. It just swapped Scooby Snacks for Manolos and ghosts for men who ghosted.
