Summertime guilty pleasures Geri-rigged The artist formerly known as Ginger Spice slips out of the Union Jack drag-queen glad rags with her debut solo effort, "Schizophonic." By Charles Taylor "Sex and the City" (9 p.m. Sundays, HBO; 8:30 Wednesdays) "The Man Show" (10:30 p.m. Wednesdays, Comedy Central) "The Chimp Channel" (10:05 p.m. EDT/7:05 PDT, Thursdays, TBS)   Joyce Millman Joyce Millman's's column appears every other Monday in Salon Arts & Entertainment. + Biography + Archives

In another era, Parker would have been a Hollywood comedy goddess, like Claudette Colbert, Barbara Stanwyck or Carole Lombard, playing characters who were smart, wily, ambitious, sexual beings. But where Hollywood has failed Parker, TV has come to the rescue. In HBO's super-glossy adult comedy "Sex and the City," which has just begun its second season, Parker is at her gawky, sexy, sly best as a 30-ish sex columnist observing the mating rituals of New York singles. Based on Candace Bushnell's droll New York Observer columns, "Sex and the City," like its screwball comedy forerunners of the 1930s and '40s, appreciates the humor in the complicated socioeconomic dance of marriage-seeking. Parker's Carrie and her three best friends work the problem of finding a mate as if they're plotting a complicated bank heist -- which, many unhappily single people in major metropolitan cities will probably tell you, is easier to accomplish than finding a non-psychotic person to date.

OK, I admit it -- at first I was put off by "Sex" for reasons succinctly articulated this season by Carrie's friend, feminist lawyer Miranda (Cynthia Nixon): "How does it happen that four such smart women have nothing to talk about but boyfriends?" But gradually, the show won me over. Producer Darren Star ("Melrose Place") and regular writer Michael Patrick King juice up Bushnell's pseudo-anthropological premise with dazzling guilty-pleasure voyeurism.

"I love a big dick. I love it inside of me. I love looking at it. I love everything about it," exclaims Carrie's 40-ish, well-worn, publicist pal Samantha (Kim Cattrall). But to appreciate the comic force of that speech, you have to realize that the sexually voracious, not-to-be-denied Sam is out of her mind with frustration because the otherwise perfect guy she's dating is, as she somberly puts it, roughly the size of a gherkin. Let's face it, you're not going to hear dialogue like that on "Providence." "Sex" is horny and witty, goofy and wise. Imagine Edith Wharton and Jacqueline Susann meeting for drinks at Moomba and you have some idea of its smart girl allure. "Sex" is literary sociology with a graduate degree in smut, and, boy, is it fun.

"Sex" revolves around the romantic misadventures of Carrie, Miranda, Sam and their refined, relatively naive art-dealer friend, Charlotte (Kristin Davis). The show's structure is pretty straightforward -- narrator Carrie taps away at her Powerbook, composing columns about such puzzlers as, "Are there certain things one should never say in an intimate relationship?" and "Are relationships the religion of the '90s?" These dilemmas are then depicted in story lines involving the quartet and its acquaintances. Throughout the ensuing chaos, the girls still have many opportunities to gather 'round the bar or the coffee shop booth and debate Topic No. 1, the difficulty of finding marriageable men in New York who aren't asses. Watching "Sex" is like eavesdropping on a conversation in the ladies' room, and not a unisex bathroom, either -- "Sex" knows the value of boundaries. Which is why "Sex" may be horny, but it's never crude.

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