Television

Friends – Then and Now

On New Year’s Day 2015, Friends was finally made available in its entirety for instant streaming on Netflix.

One test of a truly great TV series is whether or not it stands the test of time. Will the jokes fall flat ten years later? Will the outfits be a dead giveaway that this was made in (and for) another time? Is the writing good enough that outdated hairstyles don’t matter? (Note: hair always matters.) In 50 years, will the alien invaders understand why we loved it? Will they love it? Friends, a sitcom about six twenty-somethings living in New York City, was created by David Crane and Marta Kauffman, and pitched to NBC with this premise: “It’s about sex, love, relationships, careers, a time in your life when everything’s possible. And it’s about friendship because when you’re single and in the city, your friends are your family.” The writers, both thirty-somethings, were “looking at a time when the future was more of a question mark,” Kauffman told Matt Lauer in a Dateline interview in May 2004, the day before series concluded its ten-season, 236-episode run. On New Year’s Day 2015, Friends was finally made available in its entirety for instant streaming on Netflix. There were some morning hiccups in the searchability of the title, but once they found it, no doubt many a hung over twenty- or thirty-something rejoiced and indulged in a good old-fashioned binge. I set out to determine if a late twenty-something—who was six when it premiered, and just shy of 16 when it ended—could still identify with the struggles, jokes and triumphs of the Friends gang. Netflix-Friends-copy In the pilot, we first meet all six friends in the warm confines of their neighborhood coffee shop, Central Perk. With its beat up, mismatched couches and chairs, and its colorful, mismatched dishware, the Central Perk is a setting familiar to many millenials. Though the serving of refills at your seat, like at a diner, is a bit foreign to those of us used to self-serve/counter service places like Recess Coffee, the local coffee shop is still a place that twenty-somethings meet for business and pleasure alike. According to Kauffman, NBC executives initially feared that the coffee shop setting was “too hip” and that the characters were “too young” to resonate with audiences. They wanted to move the setting to a diner, like on Seinfeld, and include an older character to offer “sage advice to the kids.” Thankfully, both ideas were dropped.
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