Sex and the City made its TV debut two decades ago, in 1998, in the same year as Dawson’s Creek and Will & Grace (in the UK, we saw the beginnings of The Royle Family and Dinnerladies – just as iconic, if more casually attired). Big Brother was yet to appear and change the very nature of what viewers expected from on-screen drama, but in the late 90s Sex and the City was a phenomenon, a foul-mouthed and frank hit, an aspirational template for living (if eating expensive cupcakes in designer dresses and going to slick parties full of icy rich people was the kind of thing you aspired to).

These strengths also became its downfall, at least in terms of its reputation. For many women of my generation, slightly too young to have anything to grab on to in those “are you a Charlotte or a Miranda?” conversations, Sex and the City became a spectre of the powerhouse it must have been and, at times, almost a punchline. The cupcakes, shoes and shopping that coloured its world became the focal point, beating the funny and sometimes brutal candour of what was happening to these women into a misremembered cartoonish shape. As is often the way with interests that are seen as more “female” – such as fashion and make-up – there’s an assumption of frivolity, that it must lack heft.

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By 2010, Sex and the City had been sunk further by a mediocre if massively successful film, and a truly terrible sequel which managed to betray everything the show had been and include a mortifying storyline in which Samantha “liberates” women wearing burqas and finds that they, like, totally love fashion too. In 2013, Emily Nussbaum wrote a brilliant essay for the New Yorker that argued for its restoration as a TV great. She pointed out that Carrie Bradshaw was the first female anti-hero, and that, until the very end when Carrie landed Big, it played with the conventions of romantic comedy, rather than adhering to them. In 2016, Sex and the City’s creator, Darren Star, admitted that its ending was not what he wanted for the series: “I think the show ultimately betrayed what it was about, which was that women don’t ultimately find happiness from marriage.”

I had not seen the show itself for a number of years, until a recent long-ish flight in which Sex and the City reruns were the only watchable thing on offer. (Even after all of HBO’s achievements, and all the great shows it has produced in the past 20 years, I still anticipate that the opening piano bars of the SATC theme tune will follow whenever I hear the fuzzy chord of the network play.) I settled in for six hours of it, and although the swearing and the sex had largely been chopped out – if you’ve ever tried to listen to a clean version of a Lil’ Kim album on Spotify, the experience is not dissimilar – it was a reminder that it was, and is, a brilliant, daring, pioneering show.

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It’s desperately dated, in many ways. It has a jarring lack of diversity, and plenty of its jokes would not pass muster in this era of scrutiny (at one point in the second season, Samantha locks horns with a housekeeper called Sum; “She wasn’t so dim, that Sum,” goes the voiceover). There’s a lot of smoking, and a lot of smoking inside. I was struck by the general lack of anxiety in the air, by the gleeful abandon of a wealthy lifestyle that, in these frugal times, seems even more removed and exclusive than it must have done when it first aired. It makes sense that Girls was considered its natural successor, and that the four younger women in that show were worried all the time, scrabbling for security, living in flatshares in Brooklyn, not apartments in Manhattan.

But what was most striking about seeing it again was its sharpness. The lines crackle with sly wit. Nussbaum explained that the four women were not particularly liked by men. Now, more than ever, that seems especially prescient and radical.

While many once-successful shows have been plundered for reboots, the deterioration of the relationship between the cast since the second film seems to position Sex and the City as The Smiths of the TV world, and now that Cynthia Nixon is, in a very Miranda move, running for governor of New York, a revival seems even more unlikely. Good. What worked then would not work in the same way now, and we’ll always have the reruns. Just be sure to find the ones with swearing.

• Rebecca Nicholson is a regular contributor to the Guardian