As the continued presence of tour buses parked throughout the West Village and lines outside Magnolia Bakery prove, it’s hard to ignore the effects of HBO’s “Sex and the City” on Manhattan, even four years after it went off the air.

Michael Patrick King’s film of the series, which opens next Thursday, is well aware of this fact.

“Sex and the City: The Movie” begins with Carrie Bradshaw (Sarah Jessica Parker) reminiscing about the descendants of the show’s characters: “Year after year,” she narrates, “20-something women come to New York City in search of the two ‘L’s: labels and love.”

And year after year, television shows and marketing directors try to capture these women’s attention. The HBO series’ iconic images and storylines — the mere mention of the phrase “He’s just not that into you,” by Ron Livingston’s character, spawned a best-selling book and a movie out later this year — had an undeniable impact on the fashion- and beauty-obsessed women who watched the show. And trying to recapture that audience has become something of a cottage industry.

But the show’s progeny are not quite as expected. “Sex and the City” popularized the idea of extended adolescence for adult, single females, but the show was fading into reruns as the main characters’ dispositions transitioned from feminist rebelliousness to transparent immaturity.

The show’s creators, author Candace Bushnell and TV producer Darren Star, went on to split their differences and their success rates with separate series about a clutch of 40-something New York females whose lives picked up where “Sex and the City” left off. Despite all the right accessories — Lucy Liu and Patricia Fields in “Cashmere Mafia” on ABC, Brooke Shields and Andrew McCarthy in “Lipstick Jungle” on NBC — both shows failed to gain much traction.

These two shows latched onto the fashion-forward friendships anchoring “Sex and the City,” but in a city now replete with Manolo Blahnik purchases, huge flower accessories, and overexposed sex columnists, it takes more than a few expensively clad women to retain viewers.

And as much as “Sex and the City” promoted the product worship and aspirational ideal of living in New York City, it also depicted the subtle and blatant indignities of urban life in the nation’s cultural capital.

For every success that its characters experienced, a counterbalancing failure was around the corner: Carrie won the opportunity to walk in a fashion show, only to fall on her face on the runway; Samantha (Kim Cattrall) proudly flaunted her materialism with a plan to get breast implants, and ended up with cancer, and Charlotte (Kristin Davis) gave up her career for motherhood only to learn she was barren.

But for the shows that attempted to duplicate the success of “Sex,” bringing the realities of the single woman to married 40-something life proved more difficult than expected. The imagined worlds of Ms. Liu (whose “Cashmere” character dressed in chainmail to walk her dog) and Ms. Shields (whose beautiful husband in “Lipstick” got sad sometimes) never gained much traction.

Instead, television producers have found more success by abandoning extended adolescence in favor of premature adulthood. The stars of shows that have internalized the lessons of Carrie Bradshaw track even younger than the women with whom Carrie fought to gain Mr. Big’s (Chris Noth) attentions. Beyond 20-somethings, it’s teens on television who trade in fetishizing labels and lusting after true romance.

But the popularity of shows like the CW’s “Gossip Girl” and MTV’s “The Hills” puts the original intent of “Sex and the City” into high relief. The HBO show set out to reclaim the value of the aging single woman, but in a world where beauty and glamour are the marketable commodities, an aging woman’s prospects for superficial sex are still in decline.

These newer shows prove that an unquenchable desire for high fashion and sexy men seems just as watchable on a young face as on an older one. As the underage characters of “Gossip Girl” sip martinis in the Campbell Apartment and reserve tables at exclusive restaurants, they have both subsumed the vocabulary of “Sex and the City” and added a cutthroat element to the story. Blair Waldorf (Leighton Meester) and Serena van der Woodsen (Blake Lively) bask in the wealth of their parents’ labor while the show’s plotlines revolve around girls knocking each other down. The power struggles in “Gossip Girl” keep viewers thirsting for more, while the fantasy New York of the show steers clear of pesky questions, like how a struggling writer can leave a Dior store with anything more than a sample.

On-screen depictions of life in New York have always tended toward the fantastical, but the teenagers of “Gossip Girl” have an advantage that 40-something women with children do not: It’s much easier to overspend other people’s money. And by pitting the main characters against one another, these shows simultaneously keep audiences in thrall of the luxuries afforded these girls and disdainful of their consequences. The carefree, immature decision-making process of a woman living beyond her means seems to have more cachet when her nightmare scenario is not the specter of a ballooning mortgage payment, but the parental revocation of a charge card.

Toward the end of “Sex and the City: The Movie,” the film gets to the heart of the television show’s demise. The four main characters have come full circle, and return to their first love: cosmopolitans.

“Why’d we ever stop drinking these?” Miranda (Cynthia Nixon) asks.

To which Carrie replies, “Because everyone else started.”

The film happily returns to themes created during the series without making much progress toward forging new “It” status. The two-and-a-half-hour nostalgia trip will please fans looking to see the culmination of Carrie’s love drama, but in capturing the future of females in New York, audiences have moved on.