If I said to you “picture a show that’s set in the mid-90s where a bunch of twenty-somethings navigate their lives and relationships and constantly hang out in their favorite coffee shop, set in New York City,” well, you’d know I was talking about Friends
A lot of people do still go to TV, just not recorded/live broadcast TV. I know people for whom endless talent show clips are their feel-good timesuck. And judging from this article, people will still have Friends (or The Office or whatever) running in the background.
'it seemed to defy the impulse to dramatize or comment on any of the trends or social commonplaces of its day.'
Getting excited about politics is for losers. There's very little of interest that is happening today, and of whatever is happening, most people shouldn't concern themselves with it. Time is much better spent at a coffee shop or with friends.
As the Stoics said, you don't need more than a basic understanding of current events.
The media keeps trying to teach us this lesson by wasting our time with nonsense, but we aren't able to learn it.
Imagine a version of Friends that was actually a combination of Reality Bites, Metropolitan and MTV's Real World....
Friends is generic by its soundstage, studio audience, catch-phrase-y existence.
I think though it's more 90s in its look than you give credit for: on the women especially. The makeup, eyebrows, necklaces. Very very 90s. But the 90s of suburban malls, not NY high fashion.
I first saw Metropolitan a few years ago. Somewhat funny to see these characters calling themselves downwardly mobile in 1990 when those character types are all now millionaires in ESG finance or whatever.
That’s the point - the haircut was called “The Rachel” - influence may have gone into the real world from Friends. They did not flow from the real world into the show.
The essay is somewhat trying to have it both ways though. He says "it's like the costuming department had a specific mandate to express no taste" but the stylists had the characters both reflect the styles of the time and influence them. If they were not tapped into the specific zeitgeist of the era that would not have happened. Nobody in the 90s watched the show and felt they looked in any way out of place
Fair enough, but the generic nature of the plots and characters and sets taps into today’s zeitgeist in the very same way, or it would not be watch so widely on streaming by Gen z, which is the argument that he’s making
My ex-wife had The Rachel in the 90s. Yet our kids 30 years later are obsessed with the show. The show does not stand out against the zeitgeist of either time because the show is not of ANY time. it’s like the degree to which it stands out gets cancelled out because Friends is always equidistant of “cool” in whatever time you are in.
The women (ok, Rachel and Monica) were completely fashionable. Everyone copied their hair and brows, and their clothes were quite 90s. It was just mainstream fashion, not bohemian or counterculture fashion.
Similarly, the Central Perk reflected 90s Starbucks culture, when coffee shops stopped being artsy or hipster and went totally basic. That’s what Friends did - capture mainstream culture. Most people aren’t hipsters and don’t go to hip underground spots.
"Most people aren’t hipsters and don’t go to hip underground spots."
I've noted above/below that I wasn't a fan of the show, but I definitely agree with that, and agreeing with it, I can see the appeal of the show. Around the time the show came out, I was a recent college grad, trying to make do with a no benefits part time job and living with my parents. While that might be a recipe for hipsterism, I can assure you it was mostly boring and frustrating and I certainly didn't get a chance to hang out at coffee shops, etc. (That came later, for me at least.)
I can certainly see how someone then, in my situation (or similar), would have found Friends or a Friends-type show appealing. The characters were actually living a life. Their jobs aren't great, but they were getting out there, sometimes having sex and sometimes going to parties, and all the while being a part of an, err, friend group, which had some petty rivalries at time but the members of that group were mutually supportive of each other. I had pretty much none of that, but a half-hour of escapism watching people who do and who aren't withal hipsterly pretentious would definitely have an appeal.
Yeah completely agree. In fact I’m not sure I even understand the premise of the argument. The biggest show of the late 90s/00s is almost by definition a reflection of that period. It may not be a reflection that you recognise, but thats irrelevant.
Also they were all hot. Being hot is itself a fashion. Plus the show was infused with optimism and innocence, which is very much a reflection of time and place. Yeah I really think this article misses a lot.
"This is not an open platform, but a space for you to share thoughts and argue about stuff I’ve written."
"Be good to each other or leave."
As you know, these two quotes come from you. I feel like I was simply entering into a good faith argument (in agreeing with another comment) about my understanding of the article and my feeling that the article misses a lot of what people find enjoyable about Friends and what it reflects of the time it was made.
Your above comment is really disheartening. Either ignore my comment, or engage with me on why I've misunderstood the article and why my points are invalid.
What you've done is just passive aggressively dismissed me, which seems counter to your "be good to each other" rule.
I've subscribed to your writing for a while now because you are clearly one of the best writers around. Apologies if you found my original comment rude, but I feel like you've probably had worse criticism come your way. Not sure it warranted such a catty response.
Well, for starters, I'm the boss around here. I rule my comments section as I see fit. You can take that or leave it. As for your comment, the point is not that Friends is literally entirely untouched by the hands of time, which would be impossible, but that to the extent possible the team behind the show appears to have gone well out of their way to ignore generational issues relating to the characters and to defy any sense of what was cool or trendy from the time. This creates, in my opinion, a kind of antistyle. I mentioned two other writers who have expressed similar feelings. You are of course free to disagree.
As for the "I'm the boss" comment, I know. I know I can take it or leave it. I'm an adult, I understand the internet, I understand subscription services. I wasn't calling into question who pays who here, I was simply questioning the curtesy of your response, which is irrelevant to you being the boss, unless you believe human interaction should differ based on hierarchy - either real or perceived.
My friend is an English teacher at a majority hispanic HS in NYC. At the start of every school-year, he has students fill out a worksheet where they answer questions about themselves and share with the class - where were you born, what's your favorite subject, etc. For favorite TV show, Friends has been the most common choice for years running.
With a quick Google search, you can also find several articles about how popular "Friends" has been in India for years! These articles all offer explanations but none seem convincing beyond the point that the show is light and hopeful or something along those lines (e.g. not challenging in any way).
Friends came out when I was in early high school and I hated it (was a Seinfeld fan during the must-see TV era). But, I hated Friends because the "popular" kids that I hated really liked it, and all the girls I would never have a chance with got the "Rachel" haircut closer to junior / senior year. No point here really, just chuckling a bit to myself thinking back about how stupid and angry I was at times.
My girlfriend, who is Indian, said she liked Friends because she enjoyed the physical comedy of the show. I couldn't really disagree with her even if it wasn't my cup of tea.
The Friends reunion recently (which I watched with my mother, who falls asleep to the show every night still) did a reflection on its global popularity, with fans from around the world doing appearances.
I grew up in Western Europe and was a teenager when Friends was on. Home internet was a luxury beyond most of us in the early years of the Web, but our local community college used to have evenings where teens could come and use the internet computers. I distinctly remember - and I'll try not to be patronizing here - at those internet nights, even the less smart kids from the rougher side of town having collections of Friends screengrabs and GIFs that they'd download, put on floppy disks, and take back to their own computers (if they were lucky enough to have one) or the offline computers at school. We'd all collect images of soccer, wrestling... and Friends.
It's both ultra-surprising and not that this remains a thing three decades on.
Hugely popular in so many countries, including Poland, and I have a pet theory about why - it's simplistic enough that learners of English can still find it funny. Most comedy shows require solid cultural knowledge to identify jokes, and you need a very solid grasp of language to pick up on surprising turns of phrase.
Friends needs none of this. It's so basic it rewards an intermediate English speaker with access to a cornerstone of American culture, and it helps you improve your English in an entertaining way. My Polish friends all loved it as teenagers; Seinfeld or even Frasier, which needed you to find humour in pretentious phrasings, basically doesn't exist here.
Friends is not cool, and I think you're right to say it has no generational sensibility... but aren't those things, almost by definition, pretty shallow, if not just totally fake?
No. I think the fact that they're transitory doesn't make them any less real, and arguably makes them more - they reflect a passing moment in time, but all that there is is passing moments in time.
Love this view. I recently listened to an interview with Steve Vai where someone made fun of his 80s outfits and he said something like "I swear back then it was really cool to dress like this and a lot of fun!"
I liked hearing someone actually point this out instead of saying "how could I have worn that???"
1. In the internet era I increasingly wonder about the word "cool." Like, I went back and read some recent Pitchfork "Sunday Review" stuff after your recent blog, and it's funny how openly they are obsessed with a popular band like DMB being "uncool." Or, I vividly remember when the Washington Post called Deadspin the "cool kids" of the sports internet.
I agree that Friends is "uncool." But, like, it was insanely popular -- doesn't that by itself almost make it cool? Every attractive and popular kid at my school in the 90s loved DMB -- and yet I'm nodding along to this Pitchfork review flatly stating they were uncool. At a party where the celebrities there were Jennifer Aniston, Matt LeBlanc, Dave Matthews, and the writers from 2018 Deadspin, who is going to by acclaim be "coolest"?
2. Friends may have debuted in 94 but it is not "of" 94 like MSCL. My memory of early episodes (my wife loves the show but I don't) is that they try to be more 90s and have a bit more of a talk-y, watered-down early 90s Linklater/Reality Bites vibe. It hits its stride later as a post-grunge mid-90s show, which is why the Hootie ep is so important -- Hootie was for me the defining mid 90s act. After Cobain people decided all that stuff was too emotionally heavy.
Also I dislike the show but find Joey legitimately funny. I also mostly dislike Parks and Rec but find Andy Dwyer hilarious. If anyone out there shares these two uncommon opinions please let me know.
Lol, I have never seen Joey. Maybe Joey would be my favorite show of all time. Hopefully there's a thriving Joey fanfic community so I don't have to stop living in the Joey universe after that one season.
Never a fan of the show either. I guess it did have some sitcom “craft” going for it - goofy characters and bits often well executed, definitely some skill there. Generally appealing characters and sitcom “polish” can stand out.
But your post made me thing of a book I read recently that I can’t remember - I think it was non-fiction (or maybe it was a time travel novel) - where the author argued that more recent decades have become fashion-generic such that, if transported back in time, you wouldn’t necessarily know when you were transported to by looking at what people are wearing.
Jaron Lanier makes the same point about popular music from the early 2000's onwards. Not that the music is bad, but that the last few decades of popular music are hard to distinguish from previous styles in a way that wasn't true for much of 20th century.
That is so interesting, I was a teenager/twenty-something in the mid-2000s to 2010s and I don't fully agree with that take. I can tell the difference between music of the aughts and 10s, but I have heard that as people get older they have less time/drive to keep up with music trends, so that's why they always think "new" music all sounds the same. I already sense it happening to me! haha
I think the point is that the shifts in sound were radical from decade to decade prior to the 2000's. Think of big band music in the 1940's versus rock and roll in the 1950's to psychedelic/acid rock in the 1960's, etc. It's stunning just how radical the innovation was in a very short period of time.
By contrast since 2000 the differences in style have been much more muted. Even a complete amateur can instantly place what decade Glenn Miller worked in versus Jimi Hendrix. Now though?
Yeah I can watch a couple of minutes of an unfamiliar 80s movie and almost immediately know *exactly* what year it was filmed just from the styles. But that gets harder to do as the 90s wears on and certainly by the early 2000s
Oh I totally agree with that. The 80s are the last recognisable decade driven by casual clothing, and there were even multiple styles. I have idea what the 90s style is or was, and I was there.
Damn this is so true, I forgot about this. I remember in like 98 reading a style article in Rolling Stone and seeing some actor in baggy cargo pants and being like wow I wish I had cool clothes like that.
There was a 2000s "style," at least for girls: low rise jeans, long "tunic" shirts, long skinny scarves, club outfits with bizarrely large belts, shirts with sassy words, chunky highlights. It was awful, but distinct.
This is true, I withdraw my claim! The boy band and Britney Spears era definitely felt different and I could identify that in an instant. I guess maybe like... mid 2000s it stopped? Unless someone is about to point out another thing I've forgotten!
Looking at my Facebook photo albums from 2007-2014, there were a lot of coloured tights, vests, fedoras, pashmina scarves, ballet flats, cardigans, thick rimmed glasses...and so many of my friends did the chunky sideswept bang. The 500 Days of Summer/hipster/quirky era when Zooey Deschanel was It.
After a point, I kind of aged out of trends and so (as long as they fit) the clothes I wore in my mid twenties are still the clothes I wear now and am like "this is the death of fashion eras!", but there are endless TikTok videos about "how to convert your Millennial clothes to be cool" and it's all about substituting the regular jean jacket for an oversized one, wearing bucket hats, etc. So clearly fashion hasn't stopped even though I have.
Interesting -- ballet flats and big glasses still seem in style, mostly, but the rest I guess I don't remember as 2010 fashion. Except you mention it as hipster stuff, so I could see that. I guess I think of hipster style as a niche culture more than an era-defining thing, but maybe all types of fashion is mostly niche culture?
ETA: Actually I guess ballet flats are probably not in "style" anymore and I have revealed myself to be totally fashion oblivious and unqualified to make any of the my initial fashion claims!
Same. I've seen clips of episodes, and that's enough for me to know I find it aggressively unfunny, and completely without any real personality. I'm not really a fan of the sitcom as an entertainment form though, and many people are. There are some I have liked, but overall, that's not how I like my comedy or entertainment delivered.
I agree with this almost entirely - but I do think it mildly understates the writing. I reckon it's fairly high up in the jokes-per-page ratio - and while many of jokes may be rote snark, my recollection was there were some clever exchanges - or at least exchanges which made the audience feel clever, which is probably more important.
The characters are also extremely well defined. You can imagine what each of them would do placed in any scenario -and where the comedy would arise. This could be partly due to familiarity but I don't think that it's necessarily easy to pull off.
I have a feeling that he answer is there. It’s the first modern comedy in terms of jokes per page. The cast was good too. It was truly an ensemble piece.
I find shows like mash and cheers slow. And anything pre 1980 unwatchable - the MTM show? A joke a series. I watched it fir the first time on some streamer last year and gave up after 2 episodes.
Nobody in the 1990s except nostalgics, would willingly watch anything from the 1960s, even the 70s. 30 years after friends it holds up.
On the cusp of the 90s I checked out of my pop culture habits because all of a sudden I found myself a married father with a real job. My music, TV and movie habits were preserved in amber. But before that I’d written off primetime almost entirely. One already obvious truth about the Hollywood sausage factory was that it overproduced vanilla because it was ea$ily marketable. That angle has durable appeal because the cultural touchstones it produces exist to push advertising, and in the pre-web and streaming era the target audience for it all was bigger and had fewer options. (My old crowd of art-house cinephiles wasn’t big enough to constitute a target audience.) Living in geographic proximity (LALaland) to the people who decided what was worth producing encouraged apathy about their output, which was almost entirely schlock. At least now we’ve got some choices.
I was, a few years ago, working in an office with 4 young women in their twenties. One from India, one from Malaysia, two from London, which was where the office was. I generally got on with them but didn’t engage in their conversation - I was in my late 30s then.
But then they started talking friends and we all had something to say about particular episodes, or whether they were on a break (yes). The Malaysian girl was the biggest fan. She was 10 or younger when it ended, and obviously from a different country. Everybody was a fan. I’m a fan, although I admit it’s bland, it works.
The funny thing was they seem to think it was their show, that their generation had discovered it. “Oh, you watch friends!”, they said. Surprised. To be honest I didn’t know most of the streaming shows they mentioned, I didn’t have Netflix then. They knew that.
This tracks with my experience of watching the show come out. Not watching the show, per se, because as a genuine Xer I didn’t have a television set, but catching an episode at a house gathering and just taking in the frankly bizarre idea that it was a generational representation. It came off exactly as you say here and we’d snark, at real coffee shops, that we didn’t watch Friends because we had friends.
One of the things that stuck out to me, though, was the soundtrack’s seeming attempt to catch the alternative music wave. R.E.M. wasn’t underground anymore, but they still stood for that and they had a track on that CD. Lou Reed! Not one but two songs by Paul Westerberg. The fact that they were raiding our team’s B-sides made it seem like they were actually trying to connect with us lmao.
Looking up the list now, those songs are there, but Hootie is too, along with other acts that were more ‘90s than underground-spawned, like Toad the Wet Sprocket and Barenaked Ladies, although they mingled on decent radio stations at the time. Also, and I’m just clocking this now, a bunch of these songs are Boomer stuff — “Big Yellow Taxi” is there, but the Grant Lee Buffalo song is a Beach Boys cover, the Pretenders do “Angel of the Morning,” etc. Even one of the Westerberg tracks is a cover of “Sunshine (go away today)”. Even the memory that this soundtrack was “good” despite the frame evaporates as I look at it now.
“Stain Yer Blood” is truly great, but now it feels like they just didn’t have room for it on the (legitimately great) “Singles” soundtrack. Or, as someone once said about The Replacements end credits hang on SNL, it’s like the nerd who gets invited to the popular kids party and was dumb enough to show up. To that, I’d add that it’s quite obvious who the cool kids then actually were and it wasn’t those Friends.
Whether its characters were uncool and whether it communicated a New York flavor depends on how old you were and where you lived when it was airing. To a junior high kid in flyover country, certainly Rachel could pass for cool with her (intermittent) fashion-industry jobs and her trend-setting haircuts. Joey too. Ross was, of course, aggressively uncool; his generally simpering tone, and the utter implausibility of Rachel pining for him, are big impediments to me enjoying that show. Phoebe communicated a boho sensibility to suburban kids who had no real idea what hippie-ish big city counterculture actually looks like. Sit-down, hang-out coffee shops were really just taking off around the country in the early to mid 90s, even if they were old hat in New York, so that idea was new and hip-seeming to many people as well. I'm sure it was laughably inauthentic to people who actually know New York, but I do think it maybe communicated a tiny taste of NY flavor to people who knew nothing about the place, in terms they could understand and find appealing.
I think this is a huge part of its popular appeal across America, and maybe its global appeal as well. Friend's wasn't actually "New York hip" -- but it was very much a middle-class Midwesterner's idea of what "New York Hip" was.
The aesthetic of Friends is commercial -- literally. It resembles the world conveyed by television commercials for mass-market products: big comfy apartments; interesting but not particularly distinctive clothing (not cheap like JC Penny, not luxurious like Nordstrom's, but upscale, like Dillard's or something -- "stylish" but no style); neutral-tone offices and a "funky" coffee shop with lots of paisley.
Just like in commercials, the aesthetic world of Friends conveys a "New York City" feeling of aspiration, comfort, sophistication, and classiness while deliberately avoiding specific signifiers that might limit its audience's engagement.
I think you’re right. But it did make me think about how I’d probably prefer to be around a “Friends New York hip” person than a real one; decidedly less pretentiousness. ;)
The last time that a human's life has open possibilities is in their twenties. In many ways, this is also when possibilities are most open and available choices are greatest, kittenhood is over and they are finally setting out into The Real World and testing themselves in The Real World.
By their thirties, those choices have led to consequences, and the result is that a lot of things that a few years ago Might Just Come True now Ain't Gonna Happen. If that human is ever going to have a Great Romance, he probably will have had it (and has the scars to prove it), his career path is pretty much set, his kittens and mortgage mean that he can't leave the cubicle farm. Humans are rarely as nostalgic for their thirties as they are for their twenties.
I don't know that I have ever seen an episode of Friends or Seinfeld, neither is of any interest to a cat, but my pure SWAG is that the generic nature of the characters and set is part of the appeal of Friends, because this allows the viewers to project themselves onto the characters and into the show and to capture that atmosphere of choice and possibility.
What do you make of Ross’ doppelgänger, Russ? The only episode I remember particularly has him in it decrying the six of them for their vanity, insecurity, insincerity and utter dependence on the approval of others; “Define me! Define me!”.
His inclusion seems odd to me as his only purpose seems to have been to highlight the shallow superficiality of the characters, their concerns, the show itself and, by extension, it’s audience.
Needless to say, he was my favourite character. Needless to say, I have never been tempted to rewatch Friends.
Oh I remember, Fisher Stevens played Phoebe's psychiatrist boyfriend of the week (his name was Roger). Russ is a guy Rachel dates for one episode, and she's oblivious to the fact that he's Ross's doppelganger in both appearance and manner.
A lot of people do still go to TV, just not recorded/live broadcast TV. I know people for whom endless talent show clips are their feel-good timesuck. And judging from this article, people will still have Friends (or The Office or whatever) running in the background.
Is there a mass cult, is that a thing.
Yep
'it seemed to defy the impulse to dramatize or comment on any of the trends or social commonplaces of its day.'
Getting excited about politics is for losers. There's very little of interest that is happening today, and of whatever is happening, most people shouldn't concern themselves with it. Time is much better spent at a coffee shop or with friends.
As the Stoics said, you don't need more than a basic understanding of current events.
The media keeps trying to teach us this lesson by wasting our time with nonsense, but we aren't able to learn it.
It's hard to ignore riots when they land at your feet.
Fair
Touché good sir 🤘
Imagine a version of Friends that was actually a combination of Reality Bites, Metropolitan and MTV's Real World....
Friends is generic by its soundstage, studio audience, catch-phrase-y existence.
I think though it's more 90s in its look than you give credit for: on the women especially. The makeup, eyebrows, necklaces. Very very 90s. But the 90s of suburban malls, not NY high fashion.
I first saw Metropolitan a few years ago. Somewhat funny to see these characters calling themselves downwardly mobile in 1990 when those character types are all now millionaires in ESG finance or whatever.
The monologue from the slightly older guy at J. G. Melon synthesizes this: How people with so much end up realizing they’ve done so little.
Yeah, very true . . Rachel had an era-defining haircut that young women everywhere suddenly wanted, it really could not be more mid-90s du jour
That’s the point - the haircut was called “The Rachel” - influence may have gone into the real world from Friends. They did not flow from the real world into the show.
The essay is somewhat trying to have it both ways though. He says "it's like the costuming department had a specific mandate to express no taste" but the stylists had the characters both reflect the styles of the time and influence them. If they were not tapped into the specific zeitgeist of the era that would not have happened. Nobody in the 90s watched the show and felt they looked in any way out of place
But the Rachel could not have become a phenomenon is it was not in some sense new.
new yes but tapped into the zeitgeist or it would not have been emulated so widely
Fair enough, but the generic nature of the plots and characters and sets taps into today’s zeitgeist in the very same way, or it would not be watch so widely on streaming by Gen z, which is the argument that he’s making
And that was incidental to the show. There was no Fonzie, or Marcia Brady or BA Baracus or other character presented as an exemplar of “cool.”
Not the argument in the essay I was responding to
My ex-wife had The Rachel in the 90s. Yet our kids 30 years later are obsessed with the show. The show does not stand out against the zeitgeist of either time because the show is not of ANY time. it’s like the degree to which it stands out gets cancelled out because Friends is always equidistant of “cool” in whatever time you are in.
The personal styling is certainly of the time, and kids liking it now has no bearing on that
Sitcoms fromthe 80s hit an uncanny valley for kids today in the way that friends just does not
The women (ok, Rachel and Monica) were completely fashionable. Everyone copied their hair and brows, and their clothes were quite 90s. It was just mainstream fashion, not bohemian or counterculture fashion.
Similarly, the Central Perk reflected 90s Starbucks culture, when coffee shops stopped being artsy or hipster and went totally basic. That’s what Friends did - capture mainstream culture. Most people aren’t hipsters and don’t go to hip underground spots.
"Most people aren’t hipsters and don’t go to hip underground spots."
I've noted above/below that I wasn't a fan of the show, but I definitely agree with that, and agreeing with it, I can see the appeal of the show. Around the time the show came out, I was a recent college grad, trying to make do with a no benefits part time job and living with my parents. While that might be a recipe for hipsterism, I can assure you it was mostly boring and frustrating and I certainly didn't get a chance to hang out at coffee shops, etc. (That came later, for me at least.)
I can certainly see how someone then, in my situation (or similar), would have found Friends or a Friends-type show appealing. The characters were actually living a life. Their jobs aren't great, but they were getting out there, sometimes having sex and sometimes going to parties, and all the while being a part of an, err, friend group, which had some petty rivalries at time but the members of that group were mutually supportive of each other. I had pretty much none of that, but a half-hour of escapism watching people who do and who aren't withal hipsterly pretentious would definitely have an appeal.
Yeah completely agree. In fact I’m not sure I even understand the premise of the argument. The biggest show of the late 90s/00s is almost by definition a reflection of that period. It may not be a reflection that you recognise, but thats irrelevant.
Also they were all hot. Being hot is itself a fashion. Plus the show was infused with optimism and innocence, which is very much a reflection of time and place. Yeah I really think this article misses a lot.
You're right, you don't understand.
"This is not an open platform, but a space for you to share thoughts and argue about stuff I’ve written."
"Be good to each other or leave."
As you know, these two quotes come from you. I feel like I was simply entering into a good faith argument (in agreeing with another comment) about my understanding of the article and my feeling that the article misses a lot of what people find enjoyable about Friends and what it reflects of the time it was made.
Your above comment is really disheartening. Either ignore my comment, or engage with me on why I've misunderstood the article and why my points are invalid.
What you've done is just passive aggressively dismissed me, which seems counter to your "be good to each other" rule.
I've subscribed to your writing for a while now because you are clearly one of the best writers around. Apologies if you found my original comment rude, but I feel like you've probably had worse criticism come your way. Not sure it warranted such a catty response.
Well, for starters, I'm the boss around here. I rule my comments section as I see fit. You can take that or leave it. As for your comment, the point is not that Friends is literally entirely untouched by the hands of time, which would be impossible, but that to the extent possible the team behind the show appears to have gone well out of their way to ignore generational issues relating to the characters and to defy any sense of what was cool or trendy from the time. This creates, in my opinion, a kind of antistyle. I mentioned two other writers who have expressed similar feelings. You are of course free to disagree.
I do disagree, but thank you for elaborating.
As for the "I'm the boss" comment, I know. I know I can take it or leave it. I'm an adult, I understand the internet, I understand subscription services. I wasn't calling into question who pays who here, I was simply questioning the curtesy of your response, which is irrelevant to you being the boss, unless you believe human interaction should differ based on hierarchy - either real or perceived.
🫰🫰
Agreed. After all, the styles of their jeans are now back in fashion for women.
My friend is an English teacher at a majority hispanic HS in NYC. At the start of every school-year, he has students fill out a worksheet where they answer questions about themselves and share with the class - where were you born, what's your favorite subject, etc. For favorite TV show, Friends has been the most common choice for years running.
Any clue why? Are Spanish-dubbed Friends reruns ubiquitous or something? That's so strange to me.
I don't really imagine they'd need to be for a high school in NYC, even if it's majority Hispanic.
With a quick Google search, you can also find several articles about how popular "Friends" has been in India for years! These articles all offer explanations but none seem convincing beyond the point that the show is light and hopeful or something along those lines (e.g. not challenging in any way).
Friends came out when I was in early high school and I hated it (was a Seinfeld fan during the must-see TV era). But, I hated Friends because the "popular" kids that I hated really liked it, and all the girls I would never have a chance with got the "Rachel" haircut closer to junior / senior year. No point here really, just chuckling a bit to myself thinking back about how stupid and angry I was at times.
My girlfriend, who is Indian, said she liked Friends because she enjoyed the physical comedy of the show. I couldn't really disagree with her even if it wasn't my cup of tea.
The Friends reunion recently (which I watched with my mother, who falls asleep to the show every night still) did a reflection on its global popularity, with fans from around the world doing appearances.
I grew up in Western Europe and was a teenager when Friends was on. Home internet was a luxury beyond most of us in the early years of the Web, but our local community college used to have evenings where teens could come and use the internet computers. I distinctly remember - and I'll try not to be patronizing here - at those internet nights, even the less smart kids from the rougher side of town having collections of Friends screengrabs and GIFs that they'd download, put on floppy disks, and take back to their own computers (if they were lucky enough to have one) or the offline computers at school. We'd all collect images of soccer, wrestling... and Friends.
It's both ultra-surprising and not that this remains a thing three decades on.
"vox populi dixit" The voice of the people have spoken.
Hugely popular in so many countries, including Poland, and I have a pet theory about why - it's simplistic enough that learners of English can still find it funny. Most comedy shows require solid cultural knowledge to identify jokes, and you need a very solid grasp of language to pick up on surprising turns of phrase.
Friends needs none of this. It's so basic it rewards an intermediate English speaker with access to a cornerstone of American culture, and it helps you improve your English in an entertaining way. My Polish friends all loved it as teenagers; Seinfeld or even Frasier, which needed you to find humour in pretentious phrasings, basically doesn't exist here.
Interesting 🤨
Friends is not cool, and I think you're right to say it has no generational sensibility... but aren't those things, almost by definition, pretty shallow, if not just totally fake?
No. I think the fact that they're transitory doesn't make them any less real, and arguably makes them more - they reflect a passing moment in time, but all that there is is passing moments in time.
Love this view. I recently listened to an interview with Steve Vai where someone made fun of his 80s outfits and he said something like "I swear back then it was really cool to dress like this and a lot of fun!"
I liked hearing someone actually point this out instead of saying "how could I have worn that???"
And some moments last, because they're worth remembering.
I have a hard time seeing anything meaningfully different in our various generational sensibilities.
Two comments:
1. In the internet era I increasingly wonder about the word "cool." Like, I went back and read some recent Pitchfork "Sunday Review" stuff after your recent blog, and it's funny how openly they are obsessed with a popular band like DMB being "uncool." Or, I vividly remember when the Washington Post called Deadspin the "cool kids" of the sports internet.
I agree that Friends is "uncool." But, like, it was insanely popular -- doesn't that by itself almost make it cool? Every attractive and popular kid at my school in the 90s loved DMB -- and yet I'm nodding along to this Pitchfork review flatly stating they were uncool. At a party where the celebrities there were Jennifer Aniston, Matt LeBlanc, Dave Matthews, and the writers from 2018 Deadspin, who is going to by acclaim be "coolest"?
2. Friends may have debuted in 94 but it is not "of" 94 like MSCL. My memory of early episodes (my wife loves the show but I don't) is that they try to be more 90s and have a bit more of a talk-y, watered-down early 90s Linklater/Reality Bites vibe. It hits its stride later as a post-grunge mid-90s show, which is why the Hootie ep is so important -- Hootie was for me the defining mid 90s act. After Cobain people decided all that stuff was too emotionally heavy.
Also I dislike the show but find Joey legitimately funny. I also mostly dislike Parks and Rec but find Andy Dwyer hilarious. If anyone out there shares these two uncommon opinions please let me know.
were you a fan of the spinoff, "Joey"?
Lol, I have never seen Joey. Maybe Joey would be my favorite show of all time. Hopefully there's a thriving Joey fanfic community so I don't have to stop living in the Joey universe after that one season.
Good point. ‘Cool’ is subjective and always morphing, just as language. Each era has a new definition.
Never a fan of the show either. I guess it did have some sitcom “craft” going for it - goofy characters and bits often well executed, definitely some skill there. Generally appealing characters and sitcom “polish” can stand out.
But your post made me thing of a book I read recently that I can’t remember - I think it was non-fiction (or maybe it was a time travel novel) - where the author argued that more recent decades have become fashion-generic such that, if transported back in time, you wouldn’t necessarily know when you were transported to by looking at what people are wearing.
Seemed like an interesting argument.
Jaron Lanier makes the same point about popular music from the early 2000's onwards. Not that the music is bad, but that the last few decades of popular music are hard to distinguish from previous styles in a way that wasn't true for much of 20th century.
That is so interesting, I was a teenager/twenty-something in the mid-2000s to 2010s and I don't fully agree with that take. I can tell the difference between music of the aughts and 10s, but I have heard that as people get older they have less time/drive to keep up with music trends, so that's why they always think "new" music all sounds the same. I already sense it happening to me! haha
I think the point is that the shifts in sound were radical from decade to decade prior to the 2000's. Think of big band music in the 1940's versus rock and roll in the 1950's to psychedelic/acid rock in the 1960's, etc. It's stunning just how radical the innovation was in a very short period of time.
By contrast since 2000 the differences in style have been much more muted. Even a complete amateur can instantly place what decade Glenn Miller worked in versus Jimi Hendrix. Now though?
Yeah I can watch a couple of minutes of an unfamiliar 80s movie and almost immediately know *exactly* what year it was filmed just from the styles. But that gets harder to do as the 90s wears on and certainly by the early 2000s
Yes 🙌
Oh I totally agree with that. The 80s are the last recognisable decade driven by casual clothing, and there were even multiple styles. I have idea what the 90s style is or was, and I was there.
Flannel, ripped jeans, grunge! But then yeah post grunge there are few distinct era styles... maybe skinny jeans?
Yeh, from 1994 on. Which, maybe not coincidently, was when friends started.
Cargo pants, my friend
Damn this is so true, I forgot about this. I remember in like 98 reading a style article in Rolling Stone and seeing some actor in baggy cargo pants and being like wow I wish I had cool clothes like that.
There was a 2000s "style," at least for girls: low rise jeans, long "tunic" shirts, long skinny scarves, club outfits with bizarrely large belts, shirts with sassy words, chunky highlights. It was awful, but distinct.
Don’t forget the “tramp stamp”
This is true, I withdraw my claim! The boy band and Britney Spears era definitely felt different and I could identify that in an instant. I guess maybe like... mid 2000s it stopped? Unless someone is about to point out another thing I've forgotten!
Looking at my Facebook photo albums from 2007-2014, there were a lot of coloured tights, vests, fedoras, pashmina scarves, ballet flats, cardigans, thick rimmed glasses...and so many of my friends did the chunky sideswept bang. The 500 Days of Summer/hipster/quirky era when Zooey Deschanel was It.
After a point, I kind of aged out of trends and so (as long as they fit) the clothes I wore in my mid twenties are still the clothes I wear now and am like "this is the death of fashion eras!", but there are endless TikTok videos about "how to convert your Millennial clothes to be cool" and it's all about substituting the regular jean jacket for an oversized one, wearing bucket hats, etc. So clearly fashion hasn't stopped even though I have.
Interesting -- ballet flats and big glasses still seem in style, mostly, but the rest I guess I don't remember as 2010 fashion. Except you mention it as hipster stuff, so I could see that. I guess I think of hipster style as a niche culture more than an era-defining thing, but maybe all types of fashion is mostly niche culture?
ETA: Actually I guess ballet flats are probably not in "style" anymore and I have revealed myself to be totally fashion oblivious and unqualified to make any of the my initial fashion claims!
You never shopped at Structure? The dirty white hats? The spiked hair and puka shell necklace? Adidas snap pants?
I'm a Gen X'er, and I will be proud to have "HE HAD NEVER SEEN EVEN A SINGLE EPISODE OF 'FRIENDS'" carved on my tombstone.
I think Freddie just meant that because it came out when Xers were largely in their mid-late twenties-ish
Same. I've seen clips of episodes, and that's enough for me to know I find it aggressively unfunny, and completely without any real personality. I'm not really a fan of the sitcom as an entertainment form though, and many people are. There are some I have liked, but overall, that's not how I like my comedy or entertainment delivered.
How do you know that is something to be proud of?
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I agree with this almost entirely - but I do think it mildly understates the writing. I reckon it's fairly high up in the jokes-per-page ratio - and while many of jokes may be rote snark, my recollection was there were some clever exchanges - or at least exchanges which made the audience feel clever, which is probably more important.
The characters are also extremely well defined. You can imagine what each of them would do placed in any scenario -and where the comedy would arise. This could be partly due to familiarity but I don't think that it's necessarily easy to pull off.
I have a feeling that he answer is there. It’s the first modern comedy in terms of jokes per page. The cast was good too. It was truly an ensemble piece.
I find shows like mash and cheers slow. And anything pre 1980 unwatchable - the MTM show? A joke a series. I watched it fir the first time on some streamer last year and gave up after 2 episodes.
Nobody in the 1990s except nostalgics, would willingly watch anything from the 1960s, even the 70s. 30 years after friends it holds up.
On the cusp of the 90s I checked out of my pop culture habits because all of a sudden I found myself a married father with a real job. My music, TV and movie habits were preserved in amber. But before that I’d written off primetime almost entirely. One already obvious truth about the Hollywood sausage factory was that it overproduced vanilla because it was ea$ily marketable. That angle has durable appeal because the cultural touchstones it produces exist to push advertising, and in the pre-web and streaming era the target audience for it all was bigger and had fewer options. (My old crowd of art-house cinephiles wasn’t big enough to constitute a target audience.) Living in geographic proximity (LALaland) to the people who decided what was worth producing encouraged apathy about their output, which was almost entirely schlock. At least now we’ve got some choices.
🤘🤘🔥❤️
😎
I was, a few years ago, working in an office with 4 young women in their twenties. One from India, one from Malaysia, two from London, which was where the office was. I generally got on with them but didn’t engage in their conversation - I was in my late 30s then.
But then they started talking friends and we all had something to say about particular episodes, or whether they were on a break (yes). The Malaysian girl was the biggest fan. She was 10 or younger when it ended, and obviously from a different country. Everybody was a fan. I’m a fan, although I admit it’s bland, it works.
The funny thing was they seem to think it was their show, that their generation had discovered it. “Oh, you watch friends!”, they said. Surprised. To be honest I didn’t know most of the streaming shows they mentioned, I didn’t have Netflix then. They knew that.
“Yes. I watched it when it aired”. I told them.
A teenage niece asked for Matthew Perry's book this Christmas. I was baffled, did not realize it had a renaissance
This tracks with my experience of watching the show come out. Not watching the show, per se, because as a genuine Xer I didn’t have a television set, but catching an episode at a house gathering and just taking in the frankly bizarre idea that it was a generational representation. It came off exactly as you say here and we’d snark, at real coffee shops, that we didn’t watch Friends because we had friends.
One of the things that stuck out to me, though, was the soundtrack’s seeming attempt to catch the alternative music wave. R.E.M. wasn’t underground anymore, but they still stood for that and they had a track on that CD. Lou Reed! Not one but two songs by Paul Westerberg. The fact that they were raiding our team’s B-sides made it seem like they were actually trying to connect with us lmao.
Looking up the list now, those songs are there, but Hootie is too, along with other acts that were more ‘90s than underground-spawned, like Toad the Wet Sprocket and Barenaked Ladies, although they mingled on decent radio stations at the time. Also, and I’m just clocking this now, a bunch of these songs are Boomer stuff — “Big Yellow Taxi” is there, but the Grant Lee Buffalo song is a Beach Boys cover, the Pretenders do “Angel of the Morning,” etc. Even one of the Westerberg tracks is a cover of “Sunshine (go away today)”. Even the memory that this soundtrack was “good” despite the frame evaporates as I look at it now.
“Stain Yer Blood” is truly great, but now it feels like they just didn’t have room for it on the (legitimately great) “Singles” soundtrack. Or, as someone once said about The Replacements end credits hang on SNL, it’s like the nerd who gets invited to the popular kids party and was dumb enough to show up. To that, I’d add that it’s quite obvious who the cool kids then actually were and it wasn’t those Friends.
Whether its characters were uncool and whether it communicated a New York flavor depends on how old you were and where you lived when it was airing. To a junior high kid in flyover country, certainly Rachel could pass for cool with her (intermittent) fashion-industry jobs and her trend-setting haircuts. Joey too. Ross was, of course, aggressively uncool; his generally simpering tone, and the utter implausibility of Rachel pining for him, are big impediments to me enjoying that show. Phoebe communicated a boho sensibility to suburban kids who had no real idea what hippie-ish big city counterculture actually looks like. Sit-down, hang-out coffee shops were really just taking off around the country in the early to mid 90s, even if they were old hat in New York, so that idea was new and hip-seeming to many people as well. I'm sure it was laughably inauthentic to people who actually know New York, but I do think it maybe communicated a tiny taste of NY flavor to people who knew nothing about the place, in terms they could understand and find appealing.
I think this is a huge part of its popular appeal across America, and maybe its global appeal as well. Friend's wasn't actually "New York hip" -- but it was very much a middle-class Midwesterner's idea of what "New York Hip" was.
The aesthetic of Friends is commercial -- literally. It resembles the world conveyed by television commercials for mass-market products: big comfy apartments; interesting but not particularly distinctive clothing (not cheap like JC Penny, not luxurious like Nordstrom's, but upscale, like Dillard's or something -- "stylish" but no style); neutral-tone offices and a "funky" coffee shop with lots of paisley.
Just like in commercials, the aesthetic world of Friends conveys a "New York City" feeling of aspiration, comfort, sophistication, and classiness while deliberately avoiding specific signifiers that might limit its audience's engagement.
Like Trump's enactment of "A poor person's idea of a rich person".
I think you’re right. But it did make me think about how I’d probably prefer to be around a “Friends New York hip” person than a real one; decidedly less pretentiousness. ;)
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Hmm, to me Hootie or DMB were very much 90s bands. Just normcore 90s bands, not hip ones. The cool 90s really ended around 1994.
The last time that a human's life has open possibilities is in their twenties. In many ways, this is also when possibilities are most open and available choices are greatest, kittenhood is over and they are finally setting out into The Real World and testing themselves in The Real World.
By their thirties, those choices have led to consequences, and the result is that a lot of things that a few years ago Might Just Come True now Ain't Gonna Happen. If that human is ever going to have a Great Romance, he probably will have had it (and has the scars to prove it), his career path is pretty much set, his kittens and mortgage mean that he can't leave the cubicle farm. Humans are rarely as nostalgic for their thirties as they are for their twenties.
I don't know that I have ever seen an episode of Friends or Seinfeld, neither is of any interest to a cat, but my pure SWAG is that the generic nature of the characters and set is part of the appeal of Friends, because this allows the viewers to project themselves onto the characters and into the show and to capture that atmosphere of choice and possibility.
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What do you make of Ross’ doppelgänger, Russ? The only episode I remember particularly has him in it decrying the six of them for their vanity, insecurity, insincerity and utter dependence on the approval of others; “Define me! Define me!”.
His inclusion seems odd to me as his only purpose seems to have been to highlight the shallow superficiality of the characters, their concerns, the show itself and, by extension, it’s audience.
Needless to say, he was my favourite character. Needless to say, I have never been tempted to rewatch Friends.
I think he was played by Fisher Stevens maybe? I don't recall him being the antithesis of Ross but I remember a boyfriend of Monica saying that
He was played by David Schwimmer, but credited under the pseudonym "Snaro".
Different characters, it seems. The Fisher Stevens character also did the "define me" bit.
Oh I remember, Fisher Stevens played Phoebe's psychiatrist boyfriend of the week (his name was Roger). Russ is a guy Rachel dates for one episode, and she's oblivious to the fact that he's Ross's doppelganger in both appearance and manner.