Why You Love F.R.I.E.N.D.S.

(It's not because it's funny)

I can still remember the night of the Friends finale. It was May 6, 2004 which means that I was twelve. Nobody else in my family wanted to watch (I think my sister was still technically too little, though we watched approved reruns together often) and I was locked away in the office on the big leather couch absolutely sobbing. It is beyond embarrassing to remember this now but seriously when Rachel opened the door - “I got off the plane” - my preteen heart skipped a beat, or twenty, and tears streamed down my face.

Friends was an odd show in part because underneath the humor was an almost distracting level of earnestness. This was not Seinfeld, with Larry David’s famous “no hugging, no learning!” rule. While Friends may have started out as an offbeat yuppie show in a coffee shop it went into full-on soap opera romance in the early Ross-Rachel years and then morphed into a strange simplification of the original format, with exaggerated caricatures of all the characters (Monica, originally just kind of type-A and neat, becomes absolutely pathologically shrill and cleaning obsessed / Joey, originally a bit of a space cadet and a pretty boy, becomes an actual Neanderthal who Chandler and Monica have to adopt and keep above their garage like a troubled relative, and so on, and so on…).

I have a lot of issues with Friends. I think it’s a pretty flawed show. I remember my Mom, perhaps in a fit of parental guilt, turned to us on one of our many Friends marathons and said ‘it’s really normalized on this show but it’s really not a good idea to date so recklessly and casually.’ She may have been right to be concerned. I truly did think this is just how life went: you dated endlessly through your twenties, maybe even through your thirties and forties, and then maybe had a baby! (Yes, I also read a lot of People magazine so having babies *somehow* at 55 was normalized and never exactly explained). I certainly didn’t see that the flawed way in which The Friends approached dating was maybe impeding their supposed goal (or at least, Monica’s supposed goal) of marriage and children. But my main problem with Friends isn’t of the tsk-tsking morality variety.

(Look, my favorite show ever is Seinfeld and they end up in prison for not helping a guy who is getting mugged. They also date a new person every single episode, far exceeding the Friends relationship quota which at least usually had a couple-episode trajectory. I don’t need my sitcom stars to be paragons of virtue, but I do need them to be funny.)

I know I’ve lost a lot of you here.

People love Friends. Like, they really, really love it.

And I get it, because there is a deep part of me that is still sobbing on that leather couch with a torch held for Ross+Rachel4eva and I know all the words to “Smelly Cat”(the full music video version, of course) and Chandler Bing couldn’t BE any funnier!! Really!

So I say this with love, but especially in the later seasons, the writing can be lazy and fall into cliches and caricatures. There’s a lot that just isn’t funny. YET, I still will turn on Friends, especially if I’m extra tired or if I’m sad or if I just need the equivalent of a TV-hug. I still consider it ‘a good show’. And yes, there are episodes that still make me laugh out loud, but I think my enduring fondness for Friends has very little to do with whether or not it’s funny.

definitely one of the LOL episodes

Friends gained a great deal of traction at a specific point in history for one clear reason — And I’ll give you a clue: It’s right there in the theme song.

“Your job’s a joke, you’re broke, your love life’s DOA, It’s like you’re always stuck in second gear, When it hasn’t been your day, your week, your month or even your year, but…

I’ll be there for you.”

Friends aired in 1994, smack-dab in the middle of the turbulent 90s. Like most 90s kids I have pretty idealized memories of my analog childhood, jamming to Smash Mouth, eating Gushers, watching Scooby Doo, emulating some early Avril Lavigne fashion a la Sk8ter boy. But in truth the 90s was a time of rapid change — divorce was at a highpoint, there was a stark rise in only-children, and people started to move far away from their families. The bond of blood and place that held communities together for centuries began to crumble. This was modernity - we had CD players, TiVO, Nintendo! We had apartments in New York City and waved a half hearted goodbye to families of origin, ready to make our mark in this big, wild ‘material girl world.’

But human nature is deceptively and stubbornly consistent. At our core, we’re social animals, primed to create family-based groups and tribes where we find meaning, purpose, protection, and support. The 1990s 20-something may have been released from the nagging relatives and gossip at the local watering hole, but they still sought that same sense of familiarity, place, and relationship in their new (mostly urban) locales.

The Friends are the prime example of this. Though some are native New Yorkers (at least, adjacently - Queens, Long Island, etc.), they’ve all moved to The Big City for a big break or at least A Big Change. Phoebe has an estranged twin sister and father, a deceased mother, and a (later reunited with, but quickly pushed off screen) biological mother. Joey’s large, boisterous Italian family live a hop away in Queens but only show up on rare occasions, and usually in crisis — an unintended pregnancy, a cheating father, as the recipient of a drunken Chandler’s overtures, but then fade into the background. Not one of his seven, nosey sisters pops into his apartment on the regular, and neither does his mother (!) which I find unrealistic, or at least telling.

Ross and Monica seem more rooted than the rest of the Friends - of course, they are siblings, so that in and of itself keeps their family life more at the forefront. We do also see a fair amount of Jack and Judy throughout the series (and for all their flaws they actually seem to have a close, loving home life - if a little overly critical of Monica). Rachel left her fiance (and all his ties to her family of origin) at the altar. Rachel’s sisters show up occasionally, but only to represent the ditzy lifestyle Rachel has left behind (I do have to give full props to Christina Applegate and Reese Witherspoon, both of whom are hilarious). Early in the series Rachel involves her parents a fair amount in her life, but with sad and fraught consequences during their divorce.

So despite the occasional appearances (and flashbacks), by and large, The Friends have created A New Family, a real live Village (literally, a la New York!). In many ways, they are living the dream, the one anyone who’s ever felt isolated in the suburbs is longing for: a friend always on call, and in many cases a walk away. Chandler and Joey jump back and forth between Monica and Rachel’s apartment multiple times a day, sharing breakfast and coffee, dinner and pizza nights. Phoebe, the one who lives the furthest away (“come on you drop right out!”) seems to station herself (and her guitar) at Central Perk so frequently she may as well be their neighbor. And Ross eventually finds his way to the apartment directly across the street, a situation that causes its fair share of hilarious upsets, from poor bagpipe playing to awkward revelations.

The Friends share holidays together (who could forget the Thanksgiving episodes?). They are the ones to drive Phoebe to the hospital to deliver the triplets (a family situation I won’t even try to discuss here). It is the faces of The Friends, not his mother and father, that greets baby Ben - a swath of Aunts and Uncles ready to care for him (or lose him on a city bus).

I’m giving them a hard time here, but really, it’s great. It’s so great that many of us who grew up with Friends fantasized about exactly this scenario. My best friend and I had visions of a shared apartment in a big city (probably New York) and a swath of friends nearby. Of course, I met my would-be husband at 18 and settled into traditional life much sooner than anticipated so it was not to be. (I also tried to convince myself I could live in a city during my twenties but eventually had to abandon ship and get back to the countryside.)

I had a few years getting close to the Friends lifestyle in college — sharing a room with a good friend, my boyfriend one dorm away, walks by river at night, friends on every floor, a small college where everyone knew my name (wait, that’s Cheers, I’m getting mixed up here!). And the same studying in the UK - we had our pubs, and our lunch spots, and coffee every morning, and Mass at the Oratory and buses to Blenheim and walks in the Cotswolds and a cozy knock at the door, Are you still writing that essay? Want to come to the JCR and have some tea? Yes, yes, yes I do! Curl up, watch a movie, all living life in and out, day by day, together.

I’ll be there for you. For all the flaws of Friends we get to witness a group of people living life together — getting married (or at least, almost getting married), having children, so yes, the big things, but also going on runs together (and avoiding going on runs together -ahem- Phoebe ‘running from Satan’ [the neighbor’s dog!]), cooking meals (and messing up meals - The trifle!!), playing games (“We were going for LEAFY, LEAFY!”), getting fired, getting hired, telling jokes, crying, dating, the whole nine yards.

And certainly this is a living situation emulated in many other sitcoms of the 90s, including my favorites — Frasier and Seinfeld. Frasier moving back home to Seattle from Boston (back in proximity to his brother Niles) and then Martin moving in with Frasier (along with home healthcare worker Daphne) is the impetus for the whole show. Seinfeld - I mean, who could imagine the show without Kramer staked out at Jerry’s fridge, or the discussions of the dreaded parental and girlfriend pop ins? (They also all have a shared ‘third place’ for community life - Nervosa, Monks, Central Perk…) So many of these shows are about the complexities, hilarities, and general life that happens when people live (quite naturally) near and with one another.

It’s almost like there wouldn’t be a story otherwise.

For the 1990s soul — and maybe even more-so now for the lonely Millenial and Gen Z souls streaming on whatever platform has lately paid the bazillions for the Friends rights — this universe is a comforting, if abstract, one. It’s a world where people live together - really, physically live together in proximity. I truly think this is one of the great appeals of Friends, because to have a life together you actually need to be together.

I have only recently realized just how much this physical proximity matters. My father, who used to live 25 minutes away (but a rural, winding, inconvenient twenty-five minutes) now lives directly across the lane from us - a short walk, gator ride, pony trek, etc. away. The girls and I can stop in while out on a stroll and the toddler can spill crackers all over his living room and his two German Shepherds can whine happily and we can all get cozy in a big blanket on the couch. I can ride my horse up the driveway and out into the big open fields. I can stop by with too many leftovers from our crock pot and get to scold him for how he’s eating (yes, Dad I know you occasionally read these and I know you say you don’t need the food, but you do!)

It feels so natural and correct and I only wish I could transport my entire family and all my friends to this 2-3 mile radius. I want to walk to my best friend’s house in the morning to share a cup of coffee. I want kids and cousins to run wild together in shared open spaces, yard to yard, farm to farm. I want my children to bike to relatives’ houses, the way I did when I was a kid living down the street from my grandmother.

And it’s not perfect, but this little area of the county I’ve found, seems to be building it’s own sense of place for me. Yes, we live in a rural area and besides the aforementioned treks to my Dad’s, we need to rely on a car to get places. But once I get to these places I know the people - one of the benefits of having ‘moved home.’ My dental hygienist has been seeing me since I was ten years old and at my latest appointment my dentist got teary-eyed remembering my Mom. We know the nice old lady, Fran, at the grocery store, who gives the girls the best stickers. We know the people at the tack shop where I worked for a summer before getting married. I run into people from hunting and from the Pony Club at the coffee shop down the road. My three year old recognizes a classmate from Nature School jumping on the rocks while we wait for our after-Mass quesadillas (what else would a Nature School classmate be doing!).

We go to a brewery and I talk with a couple with a young baby and we’ve already gotten deep into baby sleep and nursing when the mother and I realize we were in the same graduating class in high school. Then two days later, a different brewery, more high school and college classmates and their kids running around. And all feels safe and correct and like it’s working toward something at least a little close to how we’re meant to live.

Again - It’s not perfect. My best friend lives an hour away, though is often lured back to the area by her niece and nephew who are my daughter’s same age (and who live a mere 10 minutes away, and yes I did also just run into them out to dinner the other week). I have other friends scattered around the world — based in the Middle East, or living in the Midwest, or a few hours drive away in the Virginia countryside.

Selfishly, or rather, naturally - I want them all here.

Because we’re meant to do this together. Not online together. Not text together. Not WhatsApp together. Physically, right here, walk next door, how are you? can I watch a kid, grab a coffee, take a walk? Together.

I know it’s not possible. Modern travel and modern life has scattered us Tower of Babel Style and there’s no going back. Though I do think when it’s possible we should try to create those kind of in-person communities, whether it’s with your family of origin or your very own group of Friends. Because we can’t do this alone, we’re not meant to. The online world and text message check ins can fill a small gap, but you need the knock at the door from your neighbor asking to borrow flour. You need someone who can spontaneously stop by for pizza night. You need someone physically near you to help you take care of your kids.

And Friends helps us remember that.

I think it’s very telling that the series ends with A Move. And in fact, it is the most common and most alienating of moves: The Move to the Suburbs. Monica and Chandler finally have the babies and they need the yard. I get it! I’m a country girl and I’d be tempted to do the same. But closing the door on that apartment was also closing the door on a shared life and a shared family.¹

In many ways, I think it might have been a better setup for those kids to stay right there in that (crazy spacious!) apartment with a gaggle of sub-in aunts and uncles and a sense of history and place from their parents’ decade+ of living in the same neighborhood. I’m sure they could run downstairs and get greeted by Gunther and probably get a great first job as a barista. I’m sure they could play basketball in the same park where the infamous Thanksgiving touch football showdown happened. And I’m sure they could all hang out at Central Perk in the morning with their cousin Emma running around and learn to ride bikes in the same alley where Phoebe learned to ride one as an adult.

All I’m saying is we give it all up too easily. The places, the people, the history.

When really, that’s what makes life meaningful. Who cares if you have 5,000 square feet if no one knows your name? Who cares if you’ve got a great yard but no one to share it with?

And really, this whole essay has kind of talked me into remembering that I really do love Friends, flawed and imperfect though it may be. So I forgive you, writers, for the occasionally clumsy mixup of comedy and emotion, for the falling into cliches, for the lazy match ups (Joey and Rachel? what was that?), even for the most painfully awful proposal scene I’ve ever had to sit through.

Because, hey what are Friends for?

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1. And of course, in the same finale, Rachel had already decided no promotion - not even Paris! - was worth giving up the Village. (and granted I still just cannot get past that she was going to move to another country with Emma without even discussing if this was okay with Ross… but it’s okay! Another one of those “I love ya anyway” Friends moments. )