Statistically though, I am one of the very few people who thoroughly despised Friends. |
I genuinely never saw the appeal and repeatedly tried to watch the episodes, because the mass hysteria around the series convinced me I must be missing out. It is remarkably peculiar that a 20-year-old sitcom still holds such an alluring appeal. After all, why do so many 20-somethings want to stream a 20-year-old sitcom about a bunch of 20-somethings sitting around in a coffee shop? The level of mass marketing required to keep Friends on air for so long is rather concerning though.
Friends experienced resurgence when Netflix decided to offer all
the episodes through its service on 1st January, 2015. This ushered in a new breed
of younger fans, leading to a situation of manufactured nostalgia. Indeed, it
is strange to see people experience a manufactured nostalgia for cultural
products even before their time of birth. All culture always goes back and feeds off the past, it can't help it, but
there are two ways of doing it. One is to go back and get inspiration from the
past and create something genuinely new, which is the whole history of all
sorts of things – not just art and music. The other is to create a distorted parallel universe with tenuous connections to the real world.
Somewhere along the line in
the world of television, soap opera, drama and comedy seamlessly merged into one another. It's fairer to call
shows like Law & Order and CSI ‘sitdramas’ than it is to call
Friends a sitcom. Law & Order's commercial success hinges on how
each episode is neatly packaged. One can shuffle them all together and deal
them out in any order, and viewers won't even notice. But if one shuffled
episodes from Friends' 10 seasons and aired them in random order, the
viewer wouldn't have the slightest bit of continuity from show to show.
The sanitised, airbrushed version of New York life led by the perfectly coiffed sextet |
What do you recall most
about Friends? Was it the story
lines, the social commentary, the quirky personalities portrayed, or other
analytic construct? Friends is rarely
recalled for all those attributes written about it when it survived purely
because it had a cast of attractive people. The fanatics fans make no
claims about the quality or critical reception of Friends, only its popularity. It very
quickly came to rely on soap appeal- regular viewers' need to know what's
happening to the characters they've emotionally invested in over the years for
its popularity, rather than actual competent writing and acting.
The show's enduring
popularity had more to do with how so many people seem to like trite,
predictable, safe, shallow entertainment completely free of real consequences
or any challenge to their delicate sensibilities. It is absolutely
non-threatening and uses comfortable cultural references most viewers
understand. Any conflict is resolved by the episode ending and magically
resolved by the next one.
Allowing that the
occasional episode provided a few laughs, what can explain the success of a
one-joke sitcom, where the joke was always just this: Middle-aged adults
speaking and acting like seven-year-olds? Because that is basically what Friends
boils down to: silly, strangely ignorant, self-unaware people blurting out
childish remarks and behaving with infantile motivations. All it shows to me is
a bunch of rather stupid, narcissistic and immature people clutching to each
other for succour.
The
premise and the plot do not hold up. Every three or four episodes you wonder
why any of them are friends with each other, they just serve to antagonise and
undermine each other all the time. There’s the clueless, amiable imbecile Joey;
Monica with her predictably one-dimensional obsession driven behaviour;
Chandler—well, not acted at all; Phoebe belonging in a mental hospital; the
gratingly obnoxious whining Ross Geller; Jennifer Aniston alone showing some
intermittent signs of a character. Most of the actors inhabited their roles so
well that it is difficult to imagine them being any different in real life.
It offered a parallel
Universe in which the viewers could vicariously enjoy a world surrounded by these
ever so cute, sparky twenty somethings who were somehow always lovingly quirky
friends. One could move to the big city but, rather than be alone in a rickety
bed with no money living on cup noodles, as would be the reality, be surrounded
by reassuring mates and live in a great flat and still have enough money to
shop at The Gap every week and spend
a fortune on haircuts despite working as a waitress. It was very far-fetched 20
years ago, but would seem woefully out of touch with reality if it was made
today and it reinforced the fantasy for an entire generation (and seemingly the
next generation too) it seems; who though single life in the big city would be
just like Friends.
In hindsight, the real legacy of Friends is all these people who start
their orders in coffee shops with the words "Can I get a coffee?” I still blame Friends mainly for the start of conversations
using puerile derision as a standard mode of communication and for that daft
way of narrating just a statement but making it sound like a question called...
upspeak? Also, I'm absolutely certain the usage of “Oh... my... God” (said as
cringingly as possible) spiked due to the series.
And yet it's because of Friends every other high street shop around
the globe is now a coffee shop. The spawning of them happened around
the same time as Friends hit and it's hard not to see a correlation. Now every superficial-boisterous yuppie spends
their time quaffing tepid and sub-par brew in Costabucks.
Is Friends the worst offender? Not at all, but most American sitcoms seem to be written by either a committee or a software application- no big words, thick guy line followed by ditsy girl line followed by straight male lead line, etc.; textbook definition of mechanical humour. The dialogue was consciously minimalist to appeal to the largest number of young adult viewers: "Hey you guys, why don't we… just… like… hang out?”
Here
comes the joke. Can you see it? It’s coming. Get ready. Almost there. Here we go. Bam. Music. Next 30 second scene. Repeat. |
Laugh tracks feed directly into emotion – certainly strongly enough to set the tone of otherwise ambiguous material, but perhaps strongly enough to override emotionally non-ambiguous
material as well. Smoke, mirrors and CGI create optical illusions; laugh tracks create emotional illusions.
Sure, Friends was a stereotypical bubble-gum soap-opera/sitcom with one-dimensional
characters that become caricatures of themselves and never develop. It's a very
commercially successful template for a sitcom which lacks creativity. Big Bang Theory, How I Met Your Mother and Two and a Half Men are similar.
The population like happy programmes, nothing wrong with that. There is no problem with fluffy light comedy. Fluff doesn't have to mean bad or brain rotting. It can be enjoyable light things that you want to read when you've only got 3 minutes, or you're fatigued and can't read an 8,000 word treatise on Russian literature. Friends is the ultimate equivalent of junk food.
Let’s demand a bit more
reality, and present a more honest version of pop culture in response. We might
find that there is no need to aspire and emulate a life that reaches us only through a
heavily sterilised script. Will Friends ever
die? I doubt it. But when I die and instead of seeing a light at the end of the
tunnel, I start hearing the Friends
theme, I'll know I'm on the fast track to hell.