Friends turns 30 and proves it’s still a cultural icon despite its low key problematic flaws
Friends turns 30 this week. Growing up, I religiously watched the daily double bill on E4. Eventually, I accumulated many seasons on DVD, which I would watch whenever I was home ill from school. I remember distinctly the first time I saw the season finale. Channel 4 wouldn’t air ‘The One with the Free Porn’ episode so it wasn’t until the show came to Netflix that I officially finished the series.
I haven’t watched the series for a while. Sure, on my last rewatch, I found some plotlines a little dated. However, it was more due to the sadness following Matthew Perry’s sudden death. Friends never quite existed in the real world, and Perry’s highly publicised death shattered that illusion.
In my opinion, Friends has aged far better than most people would expect—even better than many more recent shows. Let’s be clear: the show’s lack of diversity is awful. It’s set in New York City and yet everyone is white. Like most network sitcoms in the US, Friends remains strictly apolitical: the president is never mentioned, and neither is 9/11, although one episode was edited in the wake of the attacks and dedicated “to the people of New York City.”
The convenient fact that these characters all live in beautiful, spacious apartments while juggling low-paying jobs is never addressed. That being said, it can’t be. These are sets designed for studio sound stages—they’re not meant to be realistic, they’re meant to be aspirational. Nonetheless, in ‘The One with Five Steaks and an Eggplant’, the group explicitly talk about class and the disparity in income between Rachel as a coffee shop waitress and Chandler as an executive in statistical analysis and data reconfiguration for a large multinational corporation.
As we all know, Phoebe spent time living on the streets after her mother committed suicide and her stepfather ended up in jail. This particular storyline could have been explored in more depth, but that would be perhaps too gritty for a primetime sitcom. However, there’s something to be said about the fact that the writers never shied away from tough topics such as infertility and grief.
In ‘The One with Phoebe’s Husband’, Phoebe’s gay ice dancer husband (a Canadian she married to help him get a green card) ‘comes out’ as straight. They challenge a litany of homophobic stereotypes but also rely on some. It’s not quite as subtle as, say, ‘Homer’s Phobia’, a 1997 episode of The Simpsons that expertly lampoons casual, cultural homophobia. And while Carol and Susan are more often than not the butt of the joke, ‘The One with the Lesbian Wedding’ includes, well, a lesbian wedding. Same-sex marriage wasn’t legally recognised in New York until 2011, yet this episode first aired in January 1996. In it, the casual homophobia of some of the guests is unambiguously criticised.
Chandler’s dad is described as a drag queen but we might understand her as a trans woman: the part is played by Kathleen Turner, rather than, say, a man in drag. And while this isn’t ideal, I’d still deem it as relatively progressive in the grand scheme of 90s sitcoms.
Throughout the show’s ten seasons, they dealt with some socially taboo and relatively progressive themes, especially in 90s America. For starters, there’s casual sex, for both the men and the women. They joke about STDs and condoms. Phoebe’s pregnancy explores the experiences of surrogacy and IVF. Divorce becomes a prominent theme throughout the show’s run: Ross’ three divorces, Rachel’s parents’ separation; and secondary characters like Janice and Richard navigating dating after divorce.
Ross deals with amicable shared custody—first with Ben, then with Emma—and an unusual, thoroughly modern family setup. It should be noted however that the writers did often forget about Ben: he didn’t get an invite to his dad’s own wedding. It’s only at the series finale a conventional nuclear family is formed within the core cast (two, in fact) and this is precisely why the show has to end. It’s about friends, not family, as was key to the show from the outset, a groundbreaking decision at the time.
Since Friends, single-camera shows, often in a mockumentary format, have become more dominant: The Office, Parks & Rec, Modern Family, and Abbott Elementary. The quality of the writing remains a high watermark for comedy writing: the density of jokes is ridiculous. The six core characters, for the most part, feel like real people, which remains unusual for multi-camera sitcoms, which often become cartoonish.
Compare Friends to the lazy, puerile humour of The Big Bang Theory—which took several seasons to introduce a second significant female character. Or How I Met Your Mother—that was in many ways a rip off of Friends, with added smartphones—which is laced with cruel misogyny. The first season aired a year after Friends and still, there is no improvement in diversity within the main cast. They tried to make up for this in the spin-off sequel, How I Met Your Father, which includes Black, brown, and gay main characters, but the show was cancelled after two seasons, with the identity of the eponymous father left forever unknown.
Friends isn’t perfect but to expect perfection is to invite disappointment. It still serves as a template, offering what to do as well as, occasionally, what not to do. I doubt it will ever fully go out of fashion.
