Almost 30 years after Sex and the City premiered on HBO, the old “Are you a Carrie, a Miranda, a Samantha, or a Charlotte?” game still reigns supreme at bachelorette parties and girls’ brunches the world over. Yet I never saw enough of myself in any one of those characters to confidently play along. Even the work-smart, man-dumb lawyer Miranda—designed to be manna from heaven for us weird girls—always seemed too confident, beautiful, and all-around empowered to properly capture the complexity and frequent self-doubt of modern womanhood as I understood it.

Happily, the post- SATC television landscape has seen a proliferation of messier-than-Miranda protagonists; think Phoebe Waller-Bridge’s eponymous Fleabag, or Megan Stalter’s Jessica from Too Much . But to really understand t

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