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
'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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
'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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.