"You didn't sit on my kit-kats, did you?”
Almost 20 years since it ended, Friends has, if anything,
gotten more popular.
Its portrayal of a world with daily irl interactions with friends,
and without social media or the threat of global collapse,
makes it perfect escapist TV.
“Okay, should we get some coffee?” “Sure. Where?”
Aside from its comfort food merits, the 90s and early 00s show
was actually ahead of its time in many ways:
normalizing gay marriage before it was legal in the US,
“You know, nothing makes God happier
than when two people, any two people,
come together in love.”,
asserting that women deserve pleasure in sex,
“Seven! Seven! Seven!”,
depicting alternate forms of family
“And here's this little baby who has like three whole parents
who care about it so much that they're fighting over
who gets to love it the most.”,
and showing women thriving in the workforce.
"I LOVE MY NEW JOB!"
On the other hand, it’s set in a lily-white New York,
"Welcome to our country!" "Thank you! I’m from New York!",
and chock-full of casual misogyny, homophobia and fatphobia.
"Shut up, the camera adds 10 pounds"
"Huh, so how many cameras are actually on you?"
So rewatching Friends can be equal parts cringy and heartwarming.
It’s both a product of its time and a font of timeless wisdom --
because its unreal New York captures the oh-so-real truth
that in your 20s, your friends are your family.
"No one has been more like a sister to me."
"I know what you mean. You're like a sister to me too."
Going through the “mixed messages" of an old TV show can be
a great way to examine what lessons --good and bad--
we’ve taken away when we thought our brain was turned off.
Here are the mixed messages of Friends.
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Let’s start with a great takeaway.
If Friends is about anything, it’s about not marrying until
you’re a fully formed adult.
“See... but Joanne loved Chachi! That's the difference!”
The show starts with Rachel running away from her wedding,
because she realizes she’s never been her own person.
“Everyone has always told me, 'You're a shoe!
You're a shoe, you're a shoe!'
And then today I just stopped and I said,
'What if I don't wanna be a shoe?”
When Ross gets married hastily, it goes as bad as it’s possible
for a wedding to go.
“I Ross..." "Take thee Emily..."
"Take thee Rachel.”
And the show recognizes that this is because he rushed into it:
“You got married too fast.”
Monica and Chandler learn from Ross’ mistakes
and slow their roll after Ross’ next hasty marriage in Vegas,
to Rachel.
"It’s too fast, I’m happy the way things are!"
"Me too!"
"I don’t want things to change! Do you?"
"No!"
Phoebe plays the field for years, and seems to feel no pressure
to rush into things.
"You just go from guy to guy having fun…
and not worrying that it never turns into anything serious."
Then, after she decides in her own time that she’s ready to get married,
"I think I need to be with someone who wants what I want",
her honesty about what she needs is why she and Mike
can go from broken up to wed in under a season.
“You are my family.”
Friends emphasizes that real “adulting”
is about earning true emotional maturity and knowing thyself.
Decades later, the show’s portrayal of a slow journey
into adulthood resonates in a world where people are getting married later,
having kids later, and possibly never pulling a Chandler
and Monica and moving to the suburbs to raise said kids.
“What is wrong with raising a kid in the city?”
This series, created by a woman and a gay man,
was groundbreaking in its attitude toward women having sex.
"Have you ever thought about being there for her?"
"What do you mean?"
"You know, just be there for her."
The Friends writers had to fight for the female characters
to be as horny as the men.
"The beginning, where you know,
it's all sex and talking and sex and talking and..."
"Yeah, you gotta love the talking"
"And the sex."
Saul Austerlitz’s book. Generation Friends,
reports that NBC exec Don Ohlmeyer flipped out over Monica
sleeping with Paul the Wine Guy on the first date in the pilot
"I had a really great time last night."
And Ohlmeyer insisted on giving test audiences a questionnaire
that Kauffman said boiled down to asking whether Monica was
“A) a whore, B) a slut,
or C) easy.”
The audience, and history,
was on Monica’s side.
Whether directly, or through innuendo and metaphor,
Friends centered female pleasure.
“There are seven?”
And the episode where Rachel and Monica argue over the last condom,
“Rock paper scissors?”
was -- according to a study in the Official Journal
of the American Academy of Pediatrics --
an effective tool for safer sex education.
“Fine, go have sex.”
The show also incorporated co-parenting and blended families.
And although Friends didn’t show the first gay marriage on TV,
that honor goes to Fox’s Roc.
As Austerlitz put it, “In its embrace
of the aggressively normal in its storytelling,
it was able to expand the spectrum of normalcy
until it could also include a lesbian wedding.”
"Friends, family,
we're gathered here today, to join Carol and Susan
in holy matrimony."
Still, because it addressed issues
of gender and sexuality when it did, its approach to these same topics
can sometimes come off as super dated.
"This was Carol's favorite beer. She always drank it out of the can.
I should have known."
"Are you gay?"
"So you're, you're just, like,
a guy who's a nanny."
Every man on Friends is a walking crisis of masculinity.
"We *did* go out."
"Really? You two?"
"Not only did we go out… we did it 298 times!"
"Ross!"
The show ended up espousing pretty rigid gender roles
by always going for an easy joke about a guy acting effeminate.
Joey using a handbag is the main source of comedy
for a whole episode.
"It's got compartments for all of your stuff:
your wallet, your keys,
your address book."
"Your makeup."
And even though Ross rightly gets called out
over losing his mind because his son likes Barbie
"So he's got a doll, so what?”,
Ross’ “comeuppance” is the supposedly huge embarrassment
that he dressed up in women’s clothing as a young boy.
"So he has a Barbie. Big deal.
You used to dress up like a woman.
Wasn't there a little song?"
Oh, please, God, let there be a song."
As the least masculine man as well as “the funny one” of the group,
Chandler was a major source and target of gay jokes.
"Oh, What a Beautiful Mornin"'? "Surrey With the Fringe on Top"?"
Are you trying to tell me we're moving to Oklahoma
or that you're gay?"
Homophobia was kind of background radiation in 90s comedy,
“Not that there’s anything wrong with that”,
but Chandler’s barbs were extra painful
because many of them were directed at his own father.
“And nobody is gonna be staring at the bride
when the father of the groom is wearing a backless dress.”
While Marta Kaufman has confirmed that Charles Bing/Helena Handbasket
is a trans woman, the show mostly refers to her
as a man in drag,
reflecting its time’s widespread confusion
over the difference,
"Has someone taken your order yet?"
"Uh, Oh yeah! She did- uh, he did.
She? Uh, I'm sorry, I'm new.",
and subjecting Chandler’s dad to a lot of transphobia and disrespect.
“Don't you have a little too much penis
to be wearing a dress like that?”
This portrayal of the “Bad Dad” who abandoned the family
to sleep with the help is terrible representation.
"Just because your father and I are getting a divorce
doesn't mean we don't love you.
It just means he would rather sleep with the house-boy than with me."
"More turkey Mr. Chandler?"
The 90s also saw a flourishing of a bro-y casual misogyny in comedy,
best personified on Friends by Joey.
"My ad came out today."
"Wanted. Female roommate, non-smoker, non-ugly."
Joey perpetuates the damaging mindset that sex is a prize to win,
something to trick women into, and boast about after.
"Each woman is different. You have to appreciate their uniqueness.
"Really?" "No! I do six things."
He leads countless women on with false expectations,
then ghosts them after sex.
"We had a really great night. And in the morning,
he promised he would call me and he didn't."
"Rat bastard!"
And he tries every trick in his tiny little mind
to see the hot women in his life naked.
"Why did you take the shower curtain down?"
"That thing was a hazard! I'm very safety conscious."
"Why don’t you move in with me? It’ll be great!
We can like stay up late talking, and watch movies,
and you know about Naked Thursday’s right?"
"Your apartment is like a hundred degrees!"
"Did-did it make you wanna walk around in your underwear?"
Worst of all, Joey’s supposed “success”
with women is presented as aspirational.
We’ve got a whole video about Ross’s toxic version of maleness
"Let me get this straight. You attacked your ex-wife?"
"Oh, no, no, no. Heh. I tried.",
but for now let’s focus on his bad case
of main character syndrome.
Insecure Ross feels threatened when his girlfriend
has a male colleague and a job she likes,
"It was like you were *marking* your territory.
I mean you might as well have just come in
and peed all around my desk!",
when he can’t name all 50 states,
"Let me tell you something. I have 49 states…
and there are no more!",
and when his girlfriend hangs out with a lesbian,
“Susan's gay. They're being gay together!”.
And if Ross has a problem, everyone has a problem --
as we’re told from his first line in the pilot.
"Hi."
"This guy says hello, I wanna kill myself."
The show often walked a line between pointing out
Ross’ male obnoxiousness,
"What are you being such a weenie for?",
and indulging him through plots that did center on him intermittently
overcoming his self-centeredness or self-pity to perform
what a nice sweet guy he could sometimes be.
But despite his bouts of big-heartedness,
Ross is plagued by a poorly developed Theory of Mind
--he can’t understand that anyone else might have
a different but valid point of view.
"This is not your old mom, this is a cat!"
For Ross, there is always an objective
right answer.
"WE WERE ON A BREAK!!!!!!!",
and he’s the authority on it.
“And by the way, Y-O-U-apostrophe-R-E means ‘you are,'
Y-O-U-R means ‘your!'”
Joke’s on you, Ross.
People are coming to understand that fixed rules of grammar
are racist and classist constructs laid upon an ever-changing system.
"There’s the added mystery of, you know,
who gets who."
"Who gets whom."
Nobody says whom anymore; get over it.
"I don’t know why I do that."
“I'm, I’m okay, really."
"To the green. To the green. To the green."
"I’ve got magic beans.”
Ross may be a terrible boyfriend, but to give him credit,
he’s actually a pretty good friend.
By the end of season 1, Ross has accepted that Rachel
isn’t interested in him,
“'Kay? She looks at me and she sees a friend,
that’s all.”,
and treats her just as well as when he’d been actively crushing.
Friends invented the term “the friendzone,”
"You waited too long to make your move, and now you're in the friend zone."
which has not been a great pop culture legacy.
"No, you've every right to be upset. She put you in the 'friends' zone."
But Friends didn’t actually make “The Zone”
out to be that bad of a place.
It also acknowledged that women can be friendzoned.
"So while I land in China, guess who's in charge of the dig?"
"Julie!"
Most importantly,
Friends is an entire show about men and women being friends,
rejecting the longstanding idea in popular culture that:
“Men and women can’t be friends because the sex part
always get in the way.”
Sure, a lot of the friends kiss each other,
and two thirds end up pairing off.
But plenty of male-female relationships result in zero kissing,
zero marriages, and zero babies.
Joey and Rachel even choose not to explore a romantic relationship
because their friendship is more rewarding.
"Well, how come Monica and Chandler could do it?"
"I guess they weren't as good friends as we are."
“Yeah, well, Hurricane Gloria didn’t break the porch swing,
Monica did!”
One of the things that has aged the worst on Friends
is the treatment of Fat Monica.
“Some girl ate Monica!”
Monica is made out to have been some out-of-control food monster
in high school, who luckily found the motivation
to transform into a hot, thin woman after her crush
made fun of her.
“I just don't want to be stuck here all night with your fat sister.”
Her fat past is constantly thrown in her face
as a source of shame.
"Remember Dad bought every one of my boxes and I ate them all?"
"Uh, no, Mon. Uh, Dad *had* to buy
every one of your boxes...
because you ate them all.",
with the casual implication that the world was right to see her
as undeserving of love until she lost weight.
Whereas actual Monica is a sexually confident
and desired woman.
In "The One That Could Have Been"
episode, where Monica never lost the weight,
she’s a virgin well into her adult life.
Body positivity writer and Friends scholar Kelsey Miller
wrote in Vox, ”Fat Monica isn’t even a person.
She’s not Monica, fat. She’s a cartoon character...”
"Why don't you finish off these pies? I don't have any more room
in the fridge."
Monica and Chandler are the epitome of the truth that true love
is being with your best friend.
"I mean two best friends falling in love,
how often does that happen?"
"Not that often!"
Even though the two make fun of each other constantly,
they’re far from the stereotypical
bickering sitcom spouses --
they accept each other for who they are
and actually enjoy each other’s company.
Even in the world where Monica never loses the weight,
she and Chandler still get together.
And they do so specifically because they like hanging out together. [
“Absolutely! It would just be one friend
helping out another friend.”
When Monica and Chandler both make big mistakes
after their wedding,
"You opened all the presents without me?!"
"You kissed another woman!",
they just skip the predictable fight
because Chandler and Monica just like each other too much
for that mess.
"Call it even?" "Okay!"
They’re a counterpoint to the show’s more centered
but more toxic relationship role model: toxic Ross & Rachel.
Ross and Rachel, who spend very little
of their actual screentime happily together,
and are always trying to “be right” or get the upper hand over each other.
"We are *so* over!" "(pretends to cry) FINE BY ME!!"
“Hey, you two, that ain't the Friends fountain."
"People think it is, but the real one
is in a studio lot in Burbank. It looks totally different.”
The whiteness of Friends’ NYC was glaring,
both then and now.
In 2020, David Schwimmer told The Guardian,
“I was well aware of the lack of diversity
and I campaigned for years to have Ross date women of colour.”
Yet this tokenism in the form of disposable love interests
was about as much diversity as the show ever achieved.
Monica even works in unrealistically white kitchens,
while immigrant characters are mostly included
in short-lived guest or bit parts.
“Kidney stones!”
Many have noticed the similarities between Friends and Living Single,
the Fox Sitcom which predated it by a year.
“Warren Littlefield that used to run NBC,
they said, 'Could you, If there's any show you could have,
which one would it be?'
And he said, 'Living Single.'"
"Wow, and he did the white version."
"And then he created 'Friends.'”
One of its stars Erika Alexander has written that Living Single
didn’t get the respect or audience of Friends because it was marginalized
as a quote “Black Show.”
But Friends depicted a smaller sliver of the American population:
half of its relatively affluent white friendship group
grew up as members of the same country club.
“What that Rachel did to her life... We ran into her parents at the club,
they were not playing very well.”
And in this fantasy New York, everyone seemingly works for 2 hours
a week but lives in giant apartments.
"I don't think my boss likes me either."
"Maybe... it's because you're all hanging around here
at 11:30 on a Wednesday."
On the other hand, the show doesn’t get enough credit
for the times it brought up class,
"I guess I just never think of money as an issue."
"That's because you have it.",
and the way that not having enough money comes between even close friends.
"Chandler and those guys just don't get that we don't
make as much money as they do?"
"Yes! it's like they're always saying
'let's go here, let's go there.'
Like we can afford to go here and there."
We watch struggling actor Joey, from working class roots,
go through a major health issue without insurance.
“Will you go to the hospital?" "Dude, hernia operations cost…
like a lot probably, okay?”]
It’s also cool that Chandler pulled off the small miracle
of paying for Joey’s rent and acting career,
“Chandler's always supported my career.
He's paid for acting classes, and headshots and stuff.”,
with no expectation of ever being repaid
and while harboring no resentment.
"You don't owe me anything."
Careers in the arts are often closed off to those
who don’t come from money, and Chandler used his passionless
office job cash to do
a little mutual aid for his friend who probably couldn’t have
kept acting otherwise.
The show also was one of the few on TV with a main character
who had been unhoused.
"But nothing that sad has ever really happened to me."
"Well, um, how about your mom dying?
Or having to live on the streets when you were 14?"
The show often plays Phoebe’s past housing insecurity
for laughs, but it didn’t use this
to define her and brought home the fact
that people without housing are just like your TV friends.
“But I never got to be in a club. I, I didn't go to high school.
But three of us would meet behind a dumpster to learn French.
Bonjour."
"99 cent steak and lobster dinner. Huh!"
"Phoebe, you don't eat animals."
"For 99 cents, I'd eat you."
As the group’s resident hippie, Phoebe is often framed
as the ethical friend who cares about social issues.
But she’s blind to a lot. [
"I, I have a perfectly fine coat that no innocent animal
suffered to make!"
"Yeah, just some 9-year-old Filipino kids who worked their fingers
bloody for 12 cents an hour.
Phoebe’s good deeds are usually somewhat impulsive acts
of personal kindness that make her feel good,
as even Joey calls out:
"It was a really nice thing and all, but it made you feel good, right?"
"Yeah, so?"
"Well, it made *you* feel good so that makes it selfish."
Her focus on how good deeds feel is evident in how often
she abandons her personal values when it gets hard.
“But I am mad! I am mad!
Because this stuff is everything that is wrong with the world!
And it’s all sitting up in my living room
and all I can think about is how I don’t have that lamp!”
Today, we’re more aware that being a good person
requires more informed bigger-picture thought
about how you’re contributing as a global citizen.
Friends illustrated that -- in your most formative
young adult years -- your friends are your family,
and one of the most profound, joyous romances
you’ll ever experience.
“Boyfriends and girlfriends are gonna come and go
but this is for life.”
And the friends show us what being there for each other means:
Rachel’s friends help her become an actual job-holding adult,
“Welcome to the real world. It sucks.
You’re gonna love it.”
Chandler and Joey let Ross crash despite his being
an insanely annoying roommate,
"Ross is our friend, okay? He needs us right now."
And when Phoebe’s dream wedding is ruined,
Monica organizes the perfect impromptu ceremony in a blizzard.
“Ok, go get your hair and make-up done, and I'll take care of everything.”
Our culture doesn’t place a concrete value on friendship,
so we can easily view friendships as an afterthought,
second to more seemingly “important” priorities
like families and jobs:
“They're plenty of people who just see their sisters
at Thanksgiving and just see their college roommates
at reunions.”,
But the show reminds us of the simple truth that life is richer
when we have great friends and we make the effort
to be there for them.
The things we watch affect us -- we learn from TV even when
we’re not paying attention.
Friends is a mixed bag: a combination of tired gay jokes,
"So how goes the dancing?
Gay yet?",
forward-thinking blended families, and ... Joey.
“How you doin?”
As viewers, the more conscious we become
of the mix of messages being sent our way,
the better we can absorb the ones we find useful
and discard the ones that fail the test of time.
"Come on in. We're knitting potholders."
"No, thanks, Josephine."
Reexamining Friends shows us where we’ve been,
how far we’ve come, and what we learned along the way.
"Has it always been purple?"
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