Let's Talk Sitcom II: Friends

I was a bit too young to fully experience the frenzy that was Friends while it was on air. I watched the show, but from a child's perspective where I couldn't truly understand what was going on. Friends was funny adults doing funny stuff and it was a hopeless task to get any significant amount of the references and general vibe of the show. Still I got that this series would be a defining example of what TV was for my generation or at least the one right above my own. Everyone knew Friends, everyone remembers it. Fondly or otherwise. 

Yes, it's a bit tricky writing about Friends because it's a show so many have had opinions on. Either because one can't get enough of it or precisely because one has gotten enough of the thing. This is a show people love to hate, so much so that they kind of forget to judge it fairly. To my mind, they hate more on the hype and the general frenzy that was Friends than the actual content that the show brought out. The latter is the only thing the creators of the show had any control over, the effects of their success or the times in general isn't anything they could do anything about. People may nowadays dislike the somewhat dated tropes of the show, the fact that there is an annoying laugh track and the general cuddly feeling of the show. Add to that, that few hateful critics are aware of the complexity of humor as in its dependency on subjectivity and I must conclude that most of the criticism given from the modern era is highly misplaced. 

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Let's back up a little. 

Friends is a show that is very true to its name. The focus of the series is on a group of friends in New York and their daily struggles and adventures living as young adults in a (the) big city. At the start of the show they're all around 25 years old and all in a similar situation - single, in the beginnings of their careers and living a life style where friends is a social category higher and more important than that of family or relatives in general. The six friends are functionally a family, both for themselves and for us in the audience. 

People sometimes point out how fantastical the setting of the show is. Complaints like: "How can they sit in a coffee shop so often and in so long sessions?" "How can they live in so expensive apartments on such low salaries?" and "No one lives like that, no group of friends is tight with one another to that degree" pops up now and then and I always think that this misses the point entirely of what the show tries to be. It is a fantasy, a complete feel good low-fantasy that we as an audience are supposed to submerge ourselves into and wherein we can forget the real world for a minute. Their New York is not ours, the social and economical rules of their world function is differently than ours and they are supposed to be unrealistically good friends to one another so that they also can become our friends. Besides being funny and generally entertaining I sincerely think this is the purpose of the theme - to display a deep and wide image of what human friendship can be and look like and to offer that imagery to anyone who is in need of remembering themselves about it. 

And also to those who are in dire need of any friends at all. I think many fans of Friends can attest to that the gang in certain episodes of one's life has been the best, or only, friends that they had around. Friends in many ways strive to be the ultimate comfort show and with those who need such a show, Friends often hit their target outstandingly well. 

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So, why is there, relatively speaking, so much negativity thrown at Friends? Is anything of it deserved? It might be a good comfort show, but is it a good comedy show? Was the insane hype it got around it something we can understand by the quality of the show in general?

My answer to these questions is that in the ten season long run of Friends there are actually a few different sub shows one can pick out if one likes and not everyone of them is of equal quality. For one, the show suffers heavily from flanderization - it's like a vast abyss of lower, simpler in quality writings opens up somewhere around the sixth season and pretty much everyone of the main characters jumps head first into it. Friends with comical caricatures as protagonists instead of relatable human beings is still a quite decent show but it is not a show worthy of being the number one TV-series on the globe. That statue is something they earned earlier and in the latter part of the series they are surfing on the extremely high waves caused by their success trying to find a safe place to land all the stories that have been planted out in the earlier part of the show's run. If someone jumps on the hype at this stage of the series it's understandable if they don't get why people in general are so amazed by this.. mediocrity. Friends from circa season six and onward compared to what was earlier are two entirely different things. The characters share the same names and universe, yes, but almost everything else differs. 

Except one thing and it is a point which deserves repeating. Regardless how sloppy the writing got and how shallow the gags may have turned out the show kept this intimate feeling in their way of telling the stories that radiated an inclusion to the audience which said: This is your friends and whatever happens, we will always be here.. I will persist in my conclusion that this must have been what the creators wanted the show to be all about in the end and regardless if I'm right on that or not, they succeeded from the first frame to the last in keeping this atmosphere of universal friendship intact. An impressive act, but also, for late newcomers to the show I can imagine that this style of a comedy show could just feel rather awkward. A bit like being the fifth wheel in a social situation, something very comfy and intimate is going on but I'm not part of it and no one is caring too much trying to include me. Late Friends had everything set up and if you didn't buy it you weren't really considered or persuaded. There were already enough of crowds of people enjoying the show to bits. So, today, if one happened to be one of these outsiders - Friends surely runs the risk of being looked at as a basically unfunny show revolving around sappy sentiments and sloppy writing in general. It's a bad take if one tries to be objective but I can sort of get where all the relatively vitriol emotions toward Friends are coming from...

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But. The show wasn't always the top runner show on the globe sliding slowly down the slope of quality, it actually got there from somewhere and I wish to talk a bit about that too. As with most shows the beginning is tricky to get fully right and the pilot season of Friends is in my mind all over the place. The key ingredients are absolutely there from the get go, the atmosphere of the show is rather thin at this stage but is nevertheless noticeably present. The writing style doesn't feel very coherent yet, the show is still experimenting but yeah, when you return after seeing it all you can recognize Friends already at season one - it's just not fully grown yet. 

After the first season the magic of Friends is starting to walk in full steps and it's not taking many seasons or episodes before it can be seen as up and fully running. I see Friends from say season two up to the wedding in London as the best seasons and episodes ever produced within the sitcom-genre. There is a main plot, the one exploring the romance of Ross and Rachel which we quickly learn is going to go up and down, up and down (and up and down and up and down...) for quite a while. In the later seasons this story line is getting rather tiring but in this segment of the show's run everyone in the production still knows what they want to do with it and the finale at the wedding is just epic in a proportion that defines the show in so drastically many ways. 

If you know you know, but also in other metrics than just in the overarching storytelling the show during this period just gets things right. Every character is just so incredibly likable in their own silly and different way with respect to one another. Everyone in the group compliments each other and it allows for different comedy styles to shine through and blend together. As I see it this era of Friends is not a single comedy style being hammered on episode per episode but it is a pleasant mix making it possible to connect to the characters in ways that are going deep. Again, I wasn't a grown up watching the show unfold so I can't say anything for certain but I can imagine that this way of portraying characters in a TV-show must have felt quite fresh. The gang was hip, the gang was rather cool at the same time as they were goofy, lovable and just... I don't know... Real?

This era of the show is the reason it blew up and to my mind they deserve all of the praise and hype they got. It's a shame the production couldn't keep up the quality but if one sees it as two distinctive shows: Friends prior to and post London then I can't stay too angry with this fact. Of course they must try to ride this massive wave of hype facing them and even if they lost sight of a clear story to frame everything within and even if they didn't have too much interest in evolving their characters anymore their attempt isn't the worst imaginable. There is plenty of comedic gold in the seasons to come, but compared to the sharp universe of Friends prior to London it's simply something of a different series altogether. Still enjoyable, but in my opinion hardly comparable at all - barring the general atmosphere. 

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So. What were the worst offences in their way of dealing with the universe in Friends post London? Well, I can be genuinely sad thinking of how such a poor deal the characters got and that the interesting human beings of "prior to London" simply don't survive very well as the show marches on. 

Ross loses all of his dignity after the disastrous wedding ceremony with Rac..err.. Emily and becomes a pathetic know-it-all with rage issues, Phoebe goes from being a sunny quirky girl to a unlikable bitch with attitude issues even towards her friends, Joey gets stripped of all humanity whatsoever to be replaced with a deranged retard that shouldn't be allowed to live on his own as an adult, Chandler goes from being an interesting, slightly flamboyant, neurotic person to a complete loser that apparently hardly can talk to a female without losing his mind yet he is able to be the wittiest dude on the show. Ok? Monica turns into a loud, obsessive mess of a woman that lacks all kinds of nuance in her personality. Only Rachel doesn't devolve too much but that may be majorly because she is the less fleshed out character at the start so there isn't as much to tear down. 

I'm a bit, or a lot, hyperbolic in my descriptions above and these differences can in all honesty primarily be noticed after one has completed the show and goes back to some earlier seasons. It's only then you fully notice how starkly different the characters feel and behave and how richer the variance of the comedy styles were in the earlier seasons. In late Friends the comedy style often gets reduced to "classic [insert character] ha ha" and even if it's well done it wears out quickly. This is still somewhat of a simplification, there is genuine comedy gold to get also in Friends post London but something is clearly lacking. The show feels old, simply put. 

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All in all. I think most of the criticisms the show receives are severely unfounded or misplaced. It fails to take in the natural evolution of a show at this scale and scope and most criticisms I've seen doesn't even reflect on the primary aim the sitcom of Friends tried to have, namely: to bring a sense of universal friendship to the TV-watching world at large.

Their still living and vibrant popularity tells me they succeeded with this objective and honestly, I will forever be grateful that they did!  
























  

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