CARRIE BRADSHAW DRESSES LIKE RHODA (Or how I realized "Sex In The City " cribbed from "The Mary Tyler Moore Show")

A friend of mine got me every season of "The Mary Tyler Moore Show" available on DVD for my birthday. The minute I started watching the show, which aired from 1970-78, I realized it was the influence for single-gal-about-town blockbuster series "Sex and the City." That's a polite way of saying, "Sex In The City" ripped off MTM.

Maybe you, too, notice similarities:

* Mary is 30 at the beginning of the series..
* She is single and dates scores of idiosyncratic men.
* She works in the media (as an "executive producer" for the WJM Minneapolis news).
* She surrounds herself with other kooky females: Phyllis (Cloris Leachman) who plays the obnoxious married-with-a-kid friend, and the absolutely one-of-a-kind Rhoda Morgenstern, Mary's witty, neurotic Jewish friend from Queens.
* Rhoda, Phyllis and Mary are all fashion nuts.

In fact, on "The Mary Tyler Moore Show," Rhoda is a window dresser for a department store, but several years later, when she gets her own series( "Rhoda"), Ms. Morgenstern blossoms into a fashion maverick, moving back to Manhattan, opening a boutique and wearing badass gypsy scarves that twenty years later Sarah Jessica Parker's Carrie Bradshaw would try to pull off as her signature look.

Face it, "Sex in the City" is the same show -- except Mary and Rhoda needed only two characters to tell the same stories.

Proof: Check out the episodes: "Toulouse-Lautrec Is One Of My Favorite Artists," the show in Season One where Mary accepts a date from a guy and then realizes he is nearly a foot shorter than she is. (Didn't this happen to Samantha (Kim Cattrall) on "Sex"?) Or the episode where Mary starts dating the IRS man who is auditng her. (So very Carrie). Or "Just A Lunch", wherein Mary falls for a dashing foreign correspondent who's - naturally- married.