The new Parker might stumble on her stilettos now and then just to remind us she's still human, still a little bit like the rest of us. But it isn't nearly the same. In one of the first-season episodes, she and Miranda, Samantha and Charlotte sit around a table eating takeout, grumbling about how so many men seem to want only supermodels. Samantha's self-image is solid, but Miranda and Charlotte are tough on themselves. "Look at you two, you're beautiful!" Carrie exclaims, annoyed and impatient with their nonsense -- she refuses to coddle them. With one hand, she holds a copy of Glamour magazine aloft, making a remark about its near-perfect cover model. With the other, she picks a piece of food from between her teeth. And in between all this, she barely stops talking.

Now that's our Carrie. More recently, though, a certain prissiness -- something that was never apparent before -- has crept into her character. Maybe the writers (the show uses a revolving team of writers and directors, with a few regulars) are mostly to blame for that, but you can't help wondering if Parker hasn't had a hand in shaping her character's direction.

The most blatant example is an early episode of Season 5, in which Carrie accidentally walks into Samantha's office just as Samantha is giving an impromptu blow job to the overnight-delivery guy. Carrie flees the office, embarrassed. Later, Carrie makes a sneering wisecrack about the incident, and when Samantha accuses Carrie of judging her for being "loose," Carrie admits that she would never behave as Samantha does. Samantha is understandably hurt. And while Carrie does eventually acknowledge that she had been judgmental toward Samantha, there's something a little superior about the way Carrie sits so comfortably in the role of the good girl who would never act like "that." Even the way she learns her lesson is a little smug; Carrie is magnanimous enough to have seen the error of her ways. But you still wonder if, deep down, she doesn't think Samantha is just a little cheap.

Carrie's persnicketiness about what she will and won't do in her sexual life is underscored by the fact that Parker is the only one of the show's four actresses who won't do nudity. At one point or another, Cattrall, Davis and Nixon have all stripped down to varying degrees; Cattrall has been the boldest of all, which makes sense, since Samantha's sexuality is so integral to her character.

But how many times have we seen Carrie in bed with this or that beau, making love well into the night with her bra firmly fastened around her torso, or with the sheet wrapped primly around her shape? Whether or not an actress does nudity is her choice to make. But when you're part of an ensemble of actresses as fearless as Cattrall, Nixon and Davis -- actresses who don't strip down wantonly, but who will do so when the script demands it -- there's something cowardly about Parker's effusive modesty. All actresses have to protect their image to some degree; but sometimes, in order to make a character seem real, you've got to bare more than your soul.

On the one hand, you could applaud Parker for her staunch principles. And again, her contract is hers to negotiate, after all. But there's a whiff of hypocrisy in the fact that she's the only member of an ensemble cast who will notably not take off her clothes. The show is called "Sex and the City," which means that it's sometimes going to be about dating, which means that it's at least occasionally going to be about sex (although, admittedly, the show is almost never as overtly about sex as its name would lead you to believe). In real life, sex often leads to nakedness. I wouldn't have wanted any other actress to play Carrie Bradshaw. But I think an actress's willingness to do nudity should have some bearing on the roles she chooses to begin with.

If a character is never seen naked, even when the setting would make nakedness seem completely natural and believable, doesn't that suggest that the actress playing that character is putting her image ahead of the demands of the role? Worse yet, I think Parker's unwillingness to strip down -- even in a modest way, as, say, Davis has done -- suggests an unspoken judgment about her colleagues.

An acquaintance of mine who worked as an editor of children's textbooks once explained the intricate rules of illustration to me: You can't show a bear wearing only a shirt, since that implies that the bear ought to be wearing pants, but isn't. By the same token, Parker's resolute modesty stands out, suggesting that her colleagues should be wearing brassieres or bedsheet bandeaus and simply are not. Parker obviously doesn't feel comfortable doing nudity. But the strictures she adheres to make us even more aware of the chances her colleagues willingly take.

I freely admit to being tougher on Parker than I am on any of her colleagues. That's partly because, in the past year at least, it seems that Davis, Cattrall and Nixon have been overshadowed by the Parker spotlight, even though their work has been much stronger than hers. I feel particularly protective of Davis: Charlotte, with those kitty-cat cardigans and that fetching schoolteacher smile, was pure genius last season. I can't wait to see what she'll do in this last one.

But I still hold out hope that Parker will turn herself around. The show's writers have hinted that Season 6 will feature plenty of Mr. Big -- a good sign, since Parker has always been funnier and more relaxed with Noth than with any of her other on-screen boyfriends. Parker won my heart long ago, perhaps around the time she played the bendy, spacey SaNDeE* ("and a star over the E!") in Steve Martin's "L.A. Story." I want her show to be as resoundingly vibrant in the end as it was at its start.

I can't begrudge Parker the desire to enjoy being, at last, a conventional beauty. She can keep the perfect hair and the meticulous eye shadow and the weirdo-chic wardrobe, the closet full of Manolo Blahniks and the New York apartment that could comfortably house a family of four. Realism be damned -- humanity is all that counts. I just want to see her pick her teeth.

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