Still the Fairest ‘Sex’

“When you are single and live in New York ...”

The voice, the attitude, the romantic vibes that make you almost forget the black hole of Sept. 11. It could be, it may be. It happily is Manhattan dating maven Carrie Bradshaw, revving up anew on Emmy-winning--and renominated--”Sex and the City” with another funny, affectionate ode to the Big Apple of her eye.

Even Woody Allen doesn’t blow as many kisses to New York as Carrie. She soaks up her favorite town’s vapors like a sunbather at Jones Beach in this marvelous series, whose resumption Sunday comes appropriately just a few days after the latest Emmy nominations. “Sex and the City” was meant to cohabitate with awards. Especially after a sublime 2001 finale whose dreamy fondness for New York somehow acknowledged the city’s grief, even though it was made before the terrorist attacks.

“Sex and the City’s” fifth HBO season will be its slimmest, cleaved to eight episodes from the usual 13 to accommodate executive producer-star Sarah Jessica Parker’s pregnancy. That is nothing to have kittens over, though. Based on Episodes 1 and 2, the series is as plump with urbane, sneaky humor and creative juices in 2002 as in the past, when this witty-tender hybrid delivered some of the fullest, roundest comedy on television. That earned it an Emmy in 2001, nominations for Parker last year and again Thursday, along with her ensemble partners, Cynthia Nixon and Kim Cattrall. The fourth actress in the group, Kristin Davis, is just as award-ripe, as are those who direct and write for “Sex and the City.”

Few shows have so fluidly mingled big laughs and sentiment through the years. Belying the sound-alikes of NBC’s Emmy dominant “The West Wing,” moreover, the women of “Sex and the City” have truly distinctive voices.

New ‘dos for them this season, new men and new baby, too. It’s not Parker’s Carrie but Miranda (Nixon, also pregnant in real life) who’s the new mom, her drooling Brady looking on from his baby seat Sunday during the group’s regular luncheon forum on men.

When anatomy connoisseur Samantha (Cattrall) utters a vivid synonym for a female body part while angrily relating the cheating ways of her boyfriend, Richard (James Remar), there’s instant panic around the table. All eyes are swiftly on the reclining Brady, as if Samantha’s raunchspeak could destroy his infant brain through osmosis.

After a pause, Miranda assures her friends about their habitual coarse schmoozing: “It’s all right. Nothing has to change.”

Wrong, of course, for despite being rigidly lustful, “Sex and the City” is precisely about change, and growth. A bit later, Brady’s nursing mommy flips out a breast in a scene featuring memorable nipple talk, with Miranda fearing that her cherished friendships are lapsing as her motherhood is starting.

This worry about babydom severing her own umbilical cord to her pals is a reminder that “Sex and the City” is less about women needing men to complete themselves than about Carrie, Miranda, Samantha and Charlotte (Davis) finding pleasure in being with one another.

And naturally, finding joy in New York, where, Carrie maintains in her newspaper column, “the city is your date.”

It surely is Sunday when “fleet week” hits Manhattan, the women take a stroll, and hotblooded Samantha lasers in on three naval studs swaggering nearby like Gene Kelly, Frank Sinatra and Jules Munshin in “On the Town.”

Samantha: “Ladies, seamen at 12 o’clock.”

Miranda: “I pray when I turn around there are sailors, because with her you never know.”

Think about it.

Think also about the fine script (a sort of reverse Tailhook) by executive producer Michael Patrick King and its direction by Charles McDougall.

And continued meticulous casting of small parts, in this case wonderful Lynn Cohen back as Miranda’s Old World housekeeper and Sylvia Myles, uniquely noisy as a deli eater who sprinkles lithium on her ice cream.

In Episode 2, written by executive producer Cindy Chupack and directed by McDougall, Anne Meara makes her own few minutes count as the very Catholic mother of Brady’s father, Steve (David Eigenberg), lobbying hard for a christening to stop her grandson from “burning in hell.”

A reluctant Miranda wants a secular baptism, and there’s no full-court press from the church, which these days, godmother Carrie notes in a sideways jab, settles “for anything it can get.”

Also here is a book deal for Carrie (who contemplates dropping her pessimistic voice for more salable optimism) and, of course, more on the dating scene that inevitably threads “Sex and the City.”

At some point even the best of long-running series outstay their welcomes and become guests who refuse to push away from the dinner table after filling their bellies. It happened to NBC’s great “Seinfeld,” whose once-transcendent singles whined about their juvenile obsessions even as the guillotine of middle age loomed visibly above them.

So it’s more than a footnote when Carries wonders at lunch Sunday if she and her friends will have dating dialogues even “in our 50s.” A thought to file away as “Sex and the City” picks up another well-deserved Emmy nod.

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“Sex and the City” can be seen Sunday night at 9 on HBO. The network has rated this week’s episode TV-MA (may be unsuitable for children under the age of 17).

Howard Rosenberg’s column appears Mondays and Fridays. He can be contacted at howard.rosenberg @latimes.com.