Ross is a brainiac but terrible at relationships. Monica is a talented chef but a control freak. Rachel dithers her way through her life and career with no real purpose. Chandler, for all his sarcasm, is a bit of a cipher. They really could be anyone. The friends as family trope – a staple of earlier sitcoms like The Mary Tyler Moore Show and subsequent ones like The Office – creates a hyperreal situation that was and still is easy to escape into. That helps explain the series’ global reach, into more than 100 countries. On the reunion special, members of the Korean pop group BTS say Friends helped them learn English. Ordinary fans from Ghana, India, Japan and Russia talk about how the show has inspired them or helped them get through dark times.
In its first run, Friends arrived alongside other NBC hits including Seinfeld and Will & Grace, during the last gasp of network television’s dominance over cable, long before streaming and binge watching. Yet the show has been rediscovered again and again, first in televised reruns, then on Netflix from 2015-2020.
It became a timeless fantasy by not trying to be timely. The show was created at a vastly different and sometimes volatile period in society and politics, but largely ignored the changes going on outside its bubble, from the Clinton impeachment and the 9/11 terror attacks to the birth of Google search and the rise of the internet and mobile phones.
Marta Kauffman, one of the series creators, explains on the reunion special why new episodes catching up with the characters would be a terrible idea. “If the show is about that time in your life when your friends are your family, once you have a family of your own it’s no longer that time.” Kudrow sanely says that being a ditsy Phoebe at her age would just be sad. Maybe so. But as the existence of this reunion suggests, the popularity of Friends persists, and where there’s money, there’s always the possibility of a television afterlife.
Friends: the Reunion is available now on HBO Max in the US and Now TV in the UK.
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