The One With...

Like many young people from my generation, I loved Friends.

I got hooked on the NBC sitcom mid-way through its first season and, in the style of the day, caught up via reruns, TV Guide articles, and synopses from friends (real life, actual ones) in lieu of the ability to stream episodes or, at that point, even go online to read episode summaries.

The show lasted for ten seasons, and I can’t claim to have watched the last few in real time. Leaving for college, and a drop-off in the show’s quality--all but inevitable for how long it was on--meant I caught episodes here and there, and followed the big plot points, but didn’t follow the last two or three seasons faithfully.

And so, while I got in on certain shows from my youth like Buffy the Vampire Slayer and My So-Called Life--buying the DVDs and re-watching every episode periodically, Friends most slipped from my consciousness for a period of years. It aired in syndication with enough regularity that I couldn’t help but see it here and there in those latter days of channel surfing, or in waiting rooms, but in thinking back on the show it felt sort of quaint, and best left in the past.

More recently, however, Friends came to Netflix. First, I read articles about the show’s discovery by a new generation of viewers—teenagers and early-twenty-somethings fascinated by this relic of an era largely before cell phones (let alone smart phones), online dating, or streaming video services (bear in mind, the final episode of Friends aired in May 2004; YouTube first launched in February 2005).

There came a point when Heather and I re-indulged. We’d both liked Friends a great deal in our respective youths and thought it might be a fun trip down memory lane.

We’ve now watched the full series twice through and large chunks out of sequence on top of that.

There are parts of the show that don’t hold up so well. Ross’s sense of entitlement and insistence on being a nice guy don’t translate well to a contemporary context, and the whole gang is awful quick to make homophobic quips.

All the more so, on the second viewing, it clicked to me why the show resonated so much with my teenage self. Despite playing twenty- and then thirty-somethings in the big city, despite Ross boasting a PhD and the lot of the Friends characters working grown-up jobs, they otherwise conduct themselves like teenagers.

Particularly in the show’s middle to later years, Chandler’s stories tend to revolve around variations on the idiot’s plot--simple miscommunications that, if simply clarified up front would resolve all complications. Ross’s pining after Rachel and over-eagerness to commit his life to women with marriage proposals? Totally the awkward melodrama a teenage boy like myself would rush to. There’s Monica’s body image issues and the running gag that it’s funny she used to be fat, and Rachel’s avoidance of responsibility. Joey eats like a teenager and scarcely demonstrates the emotional maturity of anything but one. Phoebe--despite my dismissing her as an airhead in my youth--may actually be the most adult member of the core cast, though her flights of fancy don’t exactly make her a reassuringly grown-up figure.

And maybe this was the magic of Friends--a show with a teenager’s sensibility, featuring a more adult cast in superficially adult situations, such that grownups could watch it to without a sense of guilt at their own immaturity.

I write all of this from a place of love. For as much I can’t in good conscious call Friends a great TV show, the way I would have in high school without any sense of irony, I still do have a soft spot for it. I don’t doubt I’ll watch the show straight through again, nor that I’ll do so multiple times. Like Mountain Dew or Skittles, it remains sweet, associated with external memories, and appealing after a certain late hour of the night. I’m not proud to be a fan of Friends--an overrated show that over-stayed its best-by date by at least a couple years. And yet Chandler waving his finger from inside a wooden box on Thanksgiving, Phoebe singing “Smelly Cat,” Rachel fumbling with the Central Perk locks before Ross gets in to kiss her for the first time--for better or for worse, these moments stay with me, as warm and nostalgic as plenty of times from my real life.