FAMOUSLY a show about nothing, Friends took a whole lot of nothing and turned it into something:
something enduring, sentimental, ingrained and loved.
Despite the modest hoopla about the show's latest milestones - the 10th anniversary of its final episode and 20th anniversary of the first episode - it's not something I've watched in a long time. Sure, the last three of my own friends I've been to visit have had full box sets nestled on bottom shelves, but it's a show perched in the recesses of my mind - Rachel's hair, Ross's marriages, Phoebe's evil twin, who on earth were all those people in the party scenes?
It turned out Friends and I were just on a break. To mark the anniversary, one of the Sky channels began running the show from pilot episode right through to finale. I was hooked.
Watching Friends as a Lanarkshire teenager gave life a little bit of promise: one day we could live in New York City, one day we could have a steady income without seeming to actually work, we could be glamorous, we could drink coffee. And friendship would give us all this. One's 20s seemed impossibly far away and so all that was realistically impossible, or at least improbable, seemed attainable. With 10 years to play with we could absolutely have a chic apartment and a handsome date every other weekend.
Watching Friends as an adult, an adult who never made the move to Greenwich Village, the show still resonates: Rachel is no longer an aspiration but a peer, exploring relationships, carving out careers, settling down - all things that resonate and will always resonate, and perhaps which explain the 77,700 Friends DVDs sold in the UK last year.
Rewatching Friends, I remembered something about the show: it's really funny. In that way, it's the Fleetwood Mac of television. A collective with a cult fanbase large enough to keep it touring and, while it's touring, allow new fans to discover its quirks and foibles and that it's surprisingly good.
It was good at representing those weird and unexpected moments in life. The unexpected comments from friends who should know better, life's many tiny embarrassments that no one's there to see (Rachel: "I sat down where there wasn't a chair."), the moments help comes from unusual places.
Yes, it's sentimental, but for a country practising its stoicism, sentimental is good. Yes, it's innocent - no swearing, no sexting, no nudity - and fairly twee but that makes it comfortable. Co-creator Marta Kauffman said of the show: "Friends was about that time in your life when your friends are your family and once you have a family, there's no need any more."
I wonder if that's the key to its success: that comparable television now is about relationships, not friendship and friendship is where real interest lies. There's a million and one representations of love but where do you go to learn the secrets of friendship?
Romance only runs so far. Successful romances do not successful television make - the thrill's in the chase. Viewers want to see successful friendships but we don't care much for happy couples because, be honest, happy couples are boring couples.
Friends, making this point, sends its characters into a more mature phase of life, happy marriage and delighted parenthood, and ends. Friends is still the bellwether depiction of being twentysomething. Hitting its own 20s, it still holds up for telling the universal story of the incremental successes of your 20s that carry you on to your 30s - working hard, scraping along, working harder, scraping less, falling out, falling in, loving widely, getting sacked, owning a pet monkey.
But then, as aspirational as it is, it's only a television programme. As Joey would say, it's a moo point.
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