Generation Friends

by Saul Austerlitz

  The desire for more, and better, and different Friends was epitomized by director Alan Yang, who pointedly recast the show with an all-star black cast in his music video for Jay Z’s “Moonlight” (2017). In this brisk recap of “The One Where No One’s Ready,” Jerrod Carmichael was Ross, Issa Rae was Rachel, Tessa Thompson was Monica, Tiffany Haddish was Phoebe, and Lil Rel Howery and Lakeith Stanfield dueled over their favorite easy chair as Joey and Chandler, respectively. The set is remarkably realistic, and the actors deliver their lines crisply, but a horror-movie buzz of dread lingers, prompted by a recurring musical drone in the background.

  Hannibal Buress shows up to tell Carmichael the video idea, which Carmichael described as potentially “subversive,” is “wack as shit . . . episodes of Seinfeld [sic] but with black people.” Carmichael and Rae eventually slip off the set and into a private dance of their own, away from the show’s stifling whiteness. “Moonlight” (the title itself a reference to Hollywood’s grudging, belated kudos for African-American artistry) is a critique that poses as a celebration.

  Much of the Internet’s Friends energy was devoted, like “Moonlight,” to revisiting the show in the light of the societal, political, and cultural changes of the past twenty years. Had Friends aged well? What were its blind spots? Much virtual ink was spilled over Friends’ perceived sexism, its racism, its transphobia, its curiously blinkered view of 1990s New York. A Slate article from 2015 looked at Chandler Bing and wondered: “Could he be a bigger creep?” It made for a fascinating virtual colloquium, in which devotees and newcomers studied a much-loved artwork of the recent past and assessed its limitations.

  Some of it was intended to mourn the deficiencies of a show they loved; some was intended to attack fans for admiring a show that they believed failed to treat everyone with dignity. Both began from the same position of silently acknowledging that Friends was that rare cultural expression that had mattered for as long as it had, continued to matter now, and would likely matter deep into the future. Friends was relevant in a way that other products of the 1990s mostly were not, and its supporters and detractors were beginning from a place of hushed or grudging respect for that reality.

  There was still a pent-up desire to argue with Friends, to insist that better decisions should have been made. For younger audiences, Friends was not a museum piece; it was a living text, to be wrestled with, pondered, reimagined.

  The anti-Ross sentiment held by Willett and others was born out of a hard-eyed look at the character’s often-juvenile and insecure behavior, but it also attested to a desire to tear down some of the traditional scaffolding that surrounded Friends and watch it afresh. If Friends was insistent that Ross and Rachel were destined to end up together, some fans wanted to push back by arguing that they wanted nothing of the sort. Ross was the whipping boy for many members of the new generation of Friends fans, who found his often-callous treatment of Rachel (from his jealousy regarding her coworker Mark to his secretly delaying their divorce) too much for them to handle. It was also reflective of a latent need to make Friends their own, to experience it differently from those older fans who had watched it live or recorded new episodes on fresh VHS cassettes.

  It is unlikely that when the writers hired to staff the show first gathered in the spring of 1994 they imagined their plot decisions being investigated for contradictions or mistakes nearly a quarter-century later, but the likes of Cosmopolitan were on the case, wondering how it could be that Rachel and Chandler have to be introduced in the pilot when later flashbacks demonstrated that they had met on at least four occasions in high school and college. They had even made out: “It’s unlikely they wouldn’t recollect any of this, no?”

  This was nowhere near the most obscure point dredged up in the story. How had Rachel been able to use an old key to unlock Chandler and Monica’s door in “The One with the Late Thanksgiving” when the locks had been changed two seasons prior? How could Ross have said that he had only ever been with Carol when he had also apparently slept with the cleaning lady in college? Did Phoebe know French or not? And what was up with Ross’s telling people he didn’t like ice cream when he had been witnessed, on two separate occasions, eating ice cream?

  It was too easy to poke fun at this investigative-journalism approach to a television show, and the show’s creators and writers could never have anticipated the sustained level of interest in quarter-century-old plotlines and jokes, but there was something remarkable in this level of attention to detail. The average viewer tuning in for a few minutes before bed was unlikely to spot all the times Ross had been described as being twenty-nine (which ranged across the third, fourth, and fifth seasons) and tabulate the discrepancies. It attested to the passion of Friends’ viewers both that they were able to raise these questions and that there was an audience interested in hearing them.

  At the same time, there was an urge to document Friends’ deviations from contemporary liberal orthodoxy. The era in which the show had been produced—the Clintonian nineties, complete with Democratic presidents enacting welfare reform and First Ladies railing against “superpredators”—felt impossibly distant to the young writers and lay television scholars intent on revisiting Friends. The show was to be studied in the light of changing attitudes regarding race, gender, and sexuality, and often found wanting.

  Compared to many of the shows of its era—and even of the current era—Friends did notably well at including its female characters on equal terms. Women were not relegated to supporting roles, nor did they lack for adventures that did not revolve around men and romance (this show easily passes the Bechdel Test), even though much of the show concerned itself with sex and relationships. In that regard, Marta Kauffman and David Crane’s desire to give equal play to their three female leads was prescient.

  But Friends was subject to withering criticism of its approach to homosexuality, and its gay jokes in particular. “Friends: 10 Times the Classic Sitcom Was Problematic,” read one headline from The Independent, and VH1 ran a blog post in 2015 that was pointedly titled “Sorry to Ruin Your Fond Memories, but Friends Was Homophobic AF.” The author points to moments where jokes leaned on gay and lesbian stereotypes, like Carol enjoying drinking beer out of a can, or Ross panicking when he saw his son, Ben, playing with a Barbie and swapping it out for a G.I. Joe. In the latter case, it seemed tendentious to argue that this was clear evidence of the show’s homophobia, as opposed to Ross’s. Other examples, like Ross’s quizzing Sandy (Freddie Prinze Jr.), the newly hired nanny, about whether he was gay, were perhaps more justified as evidence of homophobia, although again perhaps more of a black mark against Ross than the show itself.

  Fans wanted Friends to be perfect, wanted it to remain as shiny and stress-free as it had been in the 1990s. Glimpses of its political and social failings were troubling, particularly in a changed culture in which some viewed even a single misstep as enough to spell an end for a performer or artwork. The criticism stemmed from a broader initiative to take a hard look at the beloved materials of the past and highlight their shortcomings, but it emerged from the same place of reflexive devotion that buoyed its most passionate fans. Love it or hate it, Friends still mattered.

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  A pop-up version of Central Perk opened in Manhattan in 2014, with fans willing to wait for two hours to have their picture taken on the famous orange couch. As Adam Sternbergh noted in a New York magazine story, Friends—and more specifically the Central Perk set rebuilt on the lot—had become the prime attraction on the Warner Bros. studio tour. Couples would get engaged at Central Perk. Visitors would regularly burst into tears when first walking onto the set.

  With syndication and DVD boxed sets, Friends has remained in the public eye since 2004, but Netflix’s streaming deal elevated the show to new heights. Sternbergh estimated that Netflix had paid approximately $116 million for the rights to the show in 2014. It was a potentially counterintuitive decision, given
that Friends was still in syndication and was attracting an audience of sixteen million viewers a week—which would have made it the ninth-highest-rated program on the air in 2015, were it not a twenty-year-old sitcom in perpetual reruns. By all measurements, the Netflix deal should have been a dreadful miscalculation. Instead, it drove enormous numbers of new fans toward the show. In 2019, Netflix agreed to pay an eye-popping $100 million for one more year of streaming rights to the show, in advance of WarnerMedia’s likely reclaiming of Friends for its own forthcoming streaming service.

  What is it about Friends that speaks to teenagers and twentysomethings in the era of Black Lives Matter and President Donald Trump? Many of them had not even been born when Rachel first burst into Central Perk in her wedding dress. How is it that a quarter-century-old show still speaks to wave after wave of new fans?

  Friends was the ur-product of the 1990s, the long decade between the fall of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of the World Trade Center. In that span, there was a sturdy belief in the permanent triumph of capitalism and democracy, and a conviction that the American way of life was not only right and just but permanent. None of this was visibly present in Friends—there were no episodes in which Ross and Phoebe debated the efficacy of the free-market system—but it was the silent foundation that allowed Friends to take the form it did.

  When Friends premiered, its fixation on the emotional turmoil of its characters reflected a brave new world in which young Americans, no longer troubled by the Cold War and its harbingers of impending doom, could afford to concentrate solely on their own self-expression. The end of history meant that we could all now obsess over the one who got away, or the threat of permanent bachelorhood, without worrying about nuclear holocaust or totalitarian oppression. And New York had changed, too. This was not a show set in the grubby city of Taxi; it was a sitcom for the gentrification of Manhattan and its reclamation for white, middle-class arrivistes.

  By the time Friends premiered on Netflix in 2015, it reemerged in a changed world. The United States was about to enter a period of unprecedented turmoil, prompted by a former reality-television star who had promulgated racist lies about the president of the United States and was now campaigning for the presidency himself with a blend of racial animus, strongman bluster, and vaguely articulated promises directed toward the white working class of the country.

  The American economy had collapsed almost a decade earlier under the weight of its own hubris, a victim of its bad investments in abstruse deals no one had understood and a misplaced belief in the inherent wisdom of the markets. There was a peculiar idea going around the country, propelled primarily by some of the same baby boomers who had set off these interlocking crises, that the millennial generation was uniquely entitled and self-absorbed, unable to fend for itself or take responsibility for their lives. This was precisely wrong. Where the baby boomer generation had been assured, at every step of the way, that the path to future success would be smoothed for them, millennials knew that no one was going to help. The future would not necessarily be rosy.

  In this light, Friends is less a promise for the future than a pleasing fantasy in which to take cover. The country was in crisis, and there was no longer even the semblance of a guarantee that matters would not get worse before they got better—if they ever did. Friends has found a new audience searching for an escape from the cycle of news alerts and Twitter threads. It is a place in which bad news is temporary and friendship eternal. It is a place whose sturdiness stems from a belief in the idea of planning for a well-marked, easily achievable future that looked, in the second decade of the twenty-first century, increasingly remarkable.

  It is also—perhaps peculiarly for those of us who only recently lived through the era it seeks to depict—a nostalgic tour of the past, intended to siphon off some of the unbearable pressure of the present with a brief jaunt into a gentler moment. “The world of Friends is notable, to modern eyes,” wrote New York’s Sternbergh, “for what it encompasses about being young and single and carefree in the city but also for what it doesn’t encompass: social media, smartphones, student debt, the sexual politics of Tinder, moving back in with your parents as a matter of course, and a national mood that vacillates between anxiety and defeatism.”

  Sternbergh argues that Friends’ enduring appeal is related to technological changes that rendered American life substantially different from what it had been. “I admit, I do find myself occasionally nostalgic for that moment right before the internet became all-encompassing, when you could only ever hang out with your friends in real life—and you never said IRL, because what other life would you be talking about, if not your ‘real’ one?” Sternbergh was surprised that younger fans were embracing the show for similar reasons and concluded that Friends appealed to them by demonstrating an older model of companionship that felt cozy and intimate: “In hindsight, that era seems idyllic by comparison: a fantasy life where friends gather on a sofa, not on WhatsApp.”

  Moreover, Friends had been proven right in staking its fortunes on telling the stories of twentysomethings. Whatever its evasions and exaggerations, Friends touched on many of the milestones in the lives of young adults: first jobs and first serious relationships, marriage and child rearing. Its story line could serve as a model for younger fans to emulate or to imagine themselves into. This was how adulthood looked and felt, or at least how they wanted it to look and feel. Friends promised that whatever challenges maturity might bring—heartache and loneliness and professional turmoil—it would be experienced in the company of one’s bosom companions. All was change, but friendship was eternal. This was a powerful assurance in an era that lacked so many other certainties.

  Friends told its young audience that while adulthood could be frightening, its fears could be assuaged by the presence of one’s friends. We would face life’s challenges together. This was, to be sure, fanciful; who kept all their friends forever? Who had a spouse and children but hung out with their crew all the time? And yet there was a certain bedrock truth to Friends, acknowledging and amplifying the growing importance of young Americans’ social spheres to their quality of life. With Americans’ getting married older and older, or in many cases not at all, hanging out with your friends was less a brief interlude between periods of domestic harmony and more and more a reflection of a way of life. Younger fans were watching Friends and taking mental notes, accruing pointers and inspiration about how they might live.

  Friends is ultimately both fantasy and reality. It offers fans the opportunity to luxuriate in its vast empty spaces, left unfilled by professional, financial, or familial concerns. It allows young people to dream of a life in which the primary thing that occupied them would be their friends and relationships. Its outlines increasingly resemble the world young people reside in for a term roughly bookended by their college graduations and their wedding days. And who knew if either of those would ever come anymore?

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  Shortly after communing with the Friends pilgrims of the West Village in the winter of 2018, I was standing in a cramped hallway in the basement of a Lutheran church on Forty-Sixth Street, listening to Nirvana bash out “Smells Like Teen Spirit” one more time. The crowd was about 70 percent women and 95 percent white, and many of the people present seemed to be there for a celebration or a mother–teen daughter bonding experience. There were holiday lights and plastic plants strung along the walls, and the counter at the far end sold an assortment of alcoholic beverages, along with T-shirts that read “Ross-Rachel-Chandler-Monica-Joey-Phoebe-GUNTHER.”

  If the T-shirts were not indication enough, we were all gathered for Friends! The Musical Parody, performed nightly at the St. Luke’s Theatre, and twice on Saturday nights, for an audience of knowing Friends devotees. From a cursory look around at the audience, it appeared that many of those present had not been born yet in September 1994, when Friends premiered on NBC. Nirvana gave way to C+C Music Factory and
Stone Temple Pilots (what, no Hootie & the Blowfish?), and then the lights dimmed.

  The show was, in one sense at least, a remarkable accomplishment. It took ten seasons and two hundred thirty-six episodes of Friends and boiled them down to a single two-hour musical while maintaining the series’ rough emotional arc. Here were our six friends back once more, even if seeing the resemblance required some of our own goodwill. In his leather vest, Joey looked more like Fonzie from Happy Days, and a joke about “rehab weight” (presumably directed at Matthew Perry) was required to justify the presence of the heavyset actor playing Chandler.

  The performers took varying positions on the necessity of capturing the essence of the characters they were embodying. Ross sounded more like Woody Allen than David Schwimmer, and Monica, who had an impressive, full-bodied singing voice, did not do much of a Monica. But Rachel had clearly done her homework, getting Jennifer Aniston’s vocal inflections exactly right (while also still somehow sounding vaguely Southern).

  Was the acting troupe honoring the memory of Friends or burlesquing its excesses and flaws? The preshow musical numbers had been there to unwittingly set a mood. This was an evening of uncut 1990s nostalgia, an opportunity to immerse ourselves in an era before mass terrorism on American soil, before government-sanctioned torture, before a misbegotten war in Iraq, and before the celebrity Chandler and Monica had run into on their secretive weekend getaway became, impossibly, the president of the United States. Friends was our escape, and the show knew it.

  The audience was keyed in to all the references and on numerous occasions—encouraged, perhaps, by the booze they had purchased before the show—shouted out lines before the actors. When Rachel told Ross that she was over him now, echoing a story line from the second season, practically everyone in the audience began to unspool Ross’s response: “When were you . . . under me?” The biggest laughs were for the moments where the musical sought to talk back cattily to the show, as when Joey, in act 2, got noticeably and continually stupider, or when Rachel had a post-breakup burst of self-awareness: “Look at me. I’m out of control, I’m eating bread and staring out a window.”