If you are unlucky enough to be asked by a friend to help them with a move, at some point someone may not be able to resist shouting “turn it! turn it! turn it!”, in the style of Ross Geller acting as couch step foreman. It is one of the everyday moments that he redefined Friends (available in full on HBO Max). The list is long: leather pants, taking a break, artificially white teeth, The Lion Sleeps Tonight —although don’t sing it to a Hollywood superstar monkey— or self-tanning. And Monica, Chandler, and Joey are probably the first ones you think of after getting stung by a jellyfish. A few days ago I referred to so little life by Hanya Yanagihara as “a book to keep in the freezer.” I don’t know if Harold Bloom would have accepted the concept as valid, but my interlocutor was overwhelmed thinking of Cujo and Little Women. She knew what I meant.
Some of those moments were remembered on social networks after the death of Matthew Perry. During a sort of spontaneous vigil, thousands of followers of the series revealed the gags with which Perry’s character had made them laugh. It seemed obligatory to thank both Chandler and the series for the good moments, so many that they wouldn’t fit in a laminated list. There was accumulated desire. Unlike fans of current series, we were never able to do trending topics #medialangosta, #unagi or #copageller. Friends It remained on screen for a decade, but it stayed with us for life.
In the early ’90s, NBC was looking for a product that would rejuvenate its target and two young screenwriters, Marta Kauffman and David Crane, came along with an idea about six twenty-somethings. They were endorsed by the hilarious Keep dreaming, one of the first HBO comedies, a love song to television that, unfortunately, is not on any platform. That project ended up being called Friends and it premiered on September 22, 1994—it arrived in Spain through Canal+ and encoded in November 1997—. The reviews were good, but the reception was not enthusiastic. In the second season it was already a phenomenon. More than 53 million viewers watched the episode The one from the Superbowl. Its success was slowly brewed in the heat of the relationship between Rachel and Ross, the respite that perhaps was not, the girl with the photocopier and the 18-page letter (on both sides!). The couple became an obsession: Kauffman was aware of what they had accomplished the day his rabbi asked him when they were going to return. Experienced director James Burrows always knew this. After reading the first script, he invited the actors to Las Vegas and gave them money to bet, assuring them that it would be the last time they would be anonymous.
Those who acted as mourners on social media after Perry’s death were not an army of nostalgic fifty-somethings. On the contrary, those in their thirties and even those in their twenties prevailed. Something that surprises even its creators. “It amazes me that not only do people continue to watch it, but that they continue to connect with it,” Marta Kauffman confessed in 2016. “I have a 17-year-old daughter, and recently someone at her school asked her: ‘Have you seen this new series called Friends?”
That’s what happens when characters are well written. That is why we can identify with the experiences of four retirees from Miami or a group of New York publicists from the 1950s. Despite the tendency of some executives to artificially truffle fictions with characters of all ages and conditions, universality exists. The problems of the protagonists of Friends They are timeless: they fall in love, fall out of love, have bad jobs, receive promotions, and sometimes dress up as armadillos. That in 2018 Netflix paid Warner 100 million to broadcast it for a year is proof of the durability of the series’ charm.
There is no single secret behind its success, although the most obvious is the chemistry between its protagonists, a group of brilliant actors who enhanced the diverse personalities that Kauffman and Crane designed. Their various combinations worked as well as the mix of physical comedy—the moving scene could have featured in any slapstick by Harold Lloyd—and the agility of the dialogues. He also knew how to take advantage of another of his virtues, the obvious physical attractiveness of his protagonists, and incorporated the unresolved sexual tension that had brought us so much joy in Moonlight either Remington Steele. Their episodes were self-contained, but we couldn’t lose track because, like Kauffman’s rabbi, we needed to know what was going to happen to Ross and Rachel.
It is inevitable that there will be dark clouds flying over it. They always lurk when you look at any cultural product of the past with the eyes of the present. Relentless revisionism has accused her of being homophobic and racist. The creators picked up the gauntlet at the long-awaited reunion in 2021 where, excusetio non petita, a group of young people that embraced all diversities redeemed the series of absurd accusations. It is not true that all the gangs of the nineties, not even those of today, brim with that racial and sexual diversity whose absence makes them ugly. Friends. More unreal than the fact that the six protagonists of Friends be heterosexual is that Matt Melrose Place, an attractive homosexual from Los Angeles, was the most chaste character in his gang. Aaron Spelling’s is the great science fiction series of the nineties and not X-Files. In the mid-nineties, the wedding between Susan and Carol was an unprecedented event in a fiction outside of the much freer cable television. And no, it wasn’t too obvious to serve chicken breasts.
On American television there were other groups of friends with whom they were compared. There was the dysfunctional gang of Seinfeld, much more cynical and harsh, or the parishioners of cheersthe place where everyone knew your name. Friends It combined conversations about nothing for some and the home away from home for others, replacing a poorly lit basement with one of those cozy cafes that Starbucks, another of the nineties phenomena, had replicated all over the world with its furniture from the times. of yesteryear and its colored cups.
Friends is as comfortable as the orange armchair at Central Perk and as comforting as its permanently steaming coffees, it is the epitome of what is known as comfort TV. A concept that no one has defined better than another television hero, Bojack Horseman: “For many people, life is just a long, hard kick in the urethra and sometimes, when you come home after a long day in which you’ve been kicked in the urethra, you just want to watch a series about good, nice people. that they love each other, in which no matter what happens, after thirty minutes, everything will be fine.” That is Friends.
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