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