A woman recently called in to the Larry King Show to say that Carrie Bradshaw was her absolute greatest role model. How sad. How scary.

Carrie, for all of her wit and joie de vivre, is a spineless, whining victim of arrested development. We'll let the superficiality--the outrageously expensive clothes, the promotion of animal abuse for shoes, cosmetics, etc.--go for now. No one ever said Sex and the City was about social awareness. No one ever said America was.

But there is the matter of Carrie's personality. Unable to form a relationship with a stable man, she does what thousands of women do--she settles. As delightful as he is, no woman in her right mind would give Big another try. No woman in her right mind would have more than one date with the self-absorbed, sexist Petrovsky, much less run off to Paris with him.

The final episode, which, according to Sarah Jessica Parker, proved that, as Carrie, she was "loved and loving," was an outrage. The "accidental" slap hardly looked like an accident, but Carrie just accepted it. The nastiest part of the final episode, though, was that Carrie was rendered so paralyzed by her dependence on a man that she failed to attend a party given in her honor. For the main character to display this incredible rudeness and lack of character and be called someone's role model is revolting.

All the same, Sex and the City was a clever, funny and endearing show. But when it comes to role models, Miranda, Samantha and Charlotte have it all over the insipid, psychologically impaired Carrie.