Friends forever A new generation watching exploits of Monica, Rachel, Phoebe, Joey, Chandler and Ross By: Jen Zoratti Posted: 7:00 PM CDT Friday, Sep. 20, 2019

Opinion

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 20/09/2019 (2183 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Last year, I overheard a group of teenage girls at The Grove arguing passionately over pizza about whether or not Ross and Rachel were on a break.

It’s easy to imagine an identical scene playing out 20 years earlier, when The Grove was Tubby’s Pizza, and when Friends was still on TV.

The show that introduced us to Rachel (Jennifer Aniston), Monica (Courteney Cox), Phoebe (Lisa Kudrow), Joey (Matt LeBlanc), Chandler (Matthew Perry), and Ross (David Schwimmer) debuted 25 years ago on Sept. 22. Friends was a bonafide cultural phenomenon, almost instantly launching a haircut (The Rachel) and a catchphrase (”How YOU doin’?”). By the end of its run in 2004, its six leads were clearing $1 million per episode.

And now, thanks to streaming, Friends is there for a whole new generation. In 2018, Netflix paid a reported $100 million to keep streaming the show through 2019 so it can continue to be binge watched by kids who were born after the series ended.

Friends’ run dovetailed with my formative years; it was on TV from the time I was nine until I was 19. It was among my favourite shows. Later, when I was a 20-something living in my own apartment, many a late-night cereal dinner was eaten by the glow of a Friends rerun. If you watched it when it was on, the show has a nostalgic, baby blanket familiarity about it. It takes you back to a time when we didn’t just see our friends on the internet, and it was actually possible to “unplug.”

In the winter of 2016, I rewatched the series on Netflix. And, as many people have pointed out, it hasn’t aged particularly well — which is probably true of most sitcoms considered “edgy” in the 1990s. I was taken aback by the laziness and casual cruelty of some of the jokes; it could be an incredibly homophobic and fatphobic show, with Fat Monica “jokes” that mainly consisted of putting an astonishingly thin woman in a fat suit.

And when you binge something, its worst qualities tend to be amplified. I found myself thinking, Man, was Ross always the absolute worst?

But when it was firing on all cylinders, Friends was, through its writing and cast, a masterclass in comedic timing. It could also be surprisingly incisive show, particularly when it delved into the thornier politics of friendship (romantic relationships, childhood baggage, income disparity).

The show was also made for binge watching; youth today just don’t know the pain of having to wait an entire summer to see what happens after Ross says the wrong name at the altar.

For my age group and older, I get the rewatch appeal. It’s a kind of escapism that doesn’t require the mental energy of starting something new, but what is it, specifically, about a sitcom about six friends living in New York City in the 1990s that appeals to Gen Z?

The internet is well populated by think pieces speculating on why kids are flocking to this show. I decided to actually ask some.

Frances Sigurdson, 12, is on her second watch through the whole series. She discovered it via Instagram.

“I saw this little clip of the show and I thought it looked kinda funny, so I searched for it on Netflix and started watching it, and I really enjoyed it,” she says. “It was really funny, but the episodes have a lot of meaning and messages in them. All the characters are different; it’s like I’m kind of looking at my own personalities but in different characters.”

Her favourite character is Phoebe.

“She’s pretty goofy on the outside and seems a little dumb, but she’s really wise and she’s really creative.”

Anna Deal, 13, was also drawn in by the characters. “They all seem like people you might meet in real life,” she says. “They all have distinct personalities, but they’re all really well written.”

Anna was introduced to the series by her best friend, who parachuted her in midway through Season 5.

“I watched (the whole series) in the span of two months,” she says with a laugh. “I was looking for a more long-term show, and there’s a lot of seasons.”

She notes that some things don’t hold up.

“I noticed there were some sexist and homophobic jokes, so it was outdated in that sense. There were also jokes I didn’t understand because they were centred around something I haven’t known, like technology and stuff,” she says.

Frances, too, was occasionally tripped up by the lack of tech.

“Sometimes I’d forget, and I’d think, ‘Why don’t you just text them?” I’m like, ‘Oh wait, they don’t have a phone.’ It gives you a sense of what it was really like to not have a phone. In the older times, if you wanted to find your friends, you had to bike around the city and call them on a little phone that has a little string thing. Now, it’s so much easier,” she says.

Noah Nause, 11, was born in 2007 three years after the series ended.

“My mom told me about it when it was getting back on Netflix and told me to watch it. I liked how funny it was,” he says.

He’s since watched it over and over again. Noah’s favourite character is Chandler.

“Just because he’s super awkward and he uses comedy as a defence mechanism and it’s pretty funny,” he says. “My favourite episode is probably the one where none of them are ready for Ross’s big paleontology thing.”

I ask him if he thinks it’s a realistic portrayal of adulthood. He has an instant answer for that one.

“No, not at all,” he says with a laugh.

Anna has a few theories about why people her age like Friends.

“Recently, a lot of comedy shows are coming back into the spotlight — Brooklyn 99 and The Office — I guess because the world is so sad now,” she says with a laugh. “I don’t know why so many people are drawn to Friends, per se, but if you walk down the hall at school, you’ll see seven different people wearing Friends merch. I just think it’s another thing about Netflix: sometimes people try out a bunch of different things, and Friends is pretty likeable from the start. You don’t have to be like, ‘the first two episodes are boring but you’ll get into it eventually.’”

Later in our conversation, Anna makes an observation that hits on what makes Friends feel like a comforting escape in our anxious times.

“It’s not a kid’s show, but there’s an innocence about it,” she says thoughtfully. “You feel like nothing really bad ever happens in their world.”

jen.zoratti@freepress.mb.ca

Twitter: @JenZoratti

Jen Zoratti
Columnist

Jen Zoratti is a columnist and feature writer working in the Arts & Life department, as well as the author of the weekly newsletter NEXT. A National Newspaper Award finalist for arts and entertainment writing, Jen is a graduate of the Creative Communications program at RRC Polytech and was a music writer before joining the Free Press in 2013. Read more about Jen.

Every piece of reporting Jen produces is reviewed by an editing team before it is posted online or published in print – part of the Free Press‘s tradition, since 1872, of producing reliable independent journalism. Read more about Free Press’s history and mandate, and learn how our newsroom operates.