Just Good Friends?
Reflections on a television phenomenon.
Dave Crofts, 18th July 2004
Where were you at 9:57 p.m. on the 28th of May 2004, the time etched in the minds of millions as the end of a televisual era? As the closing credits of the final episode of US sitcom Friends rolled on Channel 4, the UK said farewell - or at least au revoir - to a global entertainment phenomenon. When, some three weeks earlier, the last instalment was broadcast in the USA, Matthew Perry, who plays Chandler in the series, had this to say:
"I hope the entire country is moved by it emotionally - to see these relationships wrap up is too much to take."
Such a national outpouring of grief is obviously a grossly disproportionate reaction to an event as trivial as the close of a television comedy, but Friends is no ordinary sitcom. The very fact that US advertisers were prepared to pay $2m for a slot in one of the final show's commercial breaks bears testament to that. The program has had an unprecedented effect on our fashions, our retail habits, our coffee habits, our vocabulary and even our hairstyles. It has transcended television to become a multi-million dollar franchise that can afford to pay each of its six main stars $1m per episode. Not bad for a show about the trivial triumphs and traumas of the lives of a bunch of regular twenty-something New Yorkers.
What, then, made the show so successful that in one episode the writers could get away with one of the major plot lines being the group's attempts to keep throwing a ball between one another without dropping it? Other sitcoms have been funnier, cleverer, even cooler - but few can claim to have been anything like as influential. The key - as suggested from the title - has been basing Friends not around a series of events but around a group of characters, and the relationships they enjoy with one another - relationships that, crucially, the audience has been able to buy into. As Darren Waters, writing for BBC News Online, observed:
"Like actual friends, Friends was as much about familiarity as it was about being entertained."
Darren Waters, "Parting company with Friends", http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/pr/fr/-/1/hi/entertainment/tv_and_radio/3662453.stm
Friends Like These...
Ross, Rachel, Chandler, Monica, Joey and Phoebe really are the best of friends. There for each other "when the rain starts to pour" (to quote the theme tune), they are near-constant companions whose social lives revolve almost exclusively around one another. Indeed, external characters introduced by the scriptwriters have been either awkward bolt-ons who were written out within a few episodes, one-dimensional comic vehicles, or excuses for celebrity cameos - and often a combination of the above. The core group of six was quickly cemented in the minds of viewers and woe betide anyone who tried to break into it.
The friends are loyal, dependable and - most of the time - have each other's best interests at heart. They help each other out financially, they offer relationship advice, they hug their way through good times and bad. Who of us wouldn?t want a friendship group like that? Girls have the relationships between Monica, Rachel and Phoebe to look up to, where catfights last barely an episode and forgiveness is always the end point. Blokes, meanwhile, need look no further than Chandler and Joey for a paradigm of the twenty-first century "New Laddism", sharing flats and food, and competing over females and, well, foosball, but never, ultimately, at the expense of their friendship.
This kind of camaraderie is great to watch, and even better to be involved in. Close enough to reality to be familiar, and yet idealised and therefore slightly unreal, Friends portrays a lifestyle that many of its viewers would love to have, but for most is tantalisingly out of reach. Whilst frequently showing the harder side of life (broken relationships, unemployment etc.), the show is at heart a comedy, and those things are necessarily sidelined for the sake of laughs. Perhaps that is part of the appeal: deep down we would all like to be able to forget the messiness of life and just get back to bantering with the people we've known and loved for years.
Sons and Lovers (but not necessarily in that order...)
It is no perhaps surprise that a group as intimate as this has had its fair share of internal affairs. However, the Friends characters have, over the course of 10 seasons, been alarmingly incestuous. With the obvious exception of brother-sister pairing Ross and Monica, just about every male-female permutation has either happened or nearly happened. And this is perhaps illustrative of the fairly casual approach to sex often demonstrated on the show.
Singleness is seen as an opportunity for promiscuity - particularly for Joey, who, other than a brief genuine love for Rachel in Season 9, works his way (often with comic results) through woman after woman after woman. Indeed, by the final episode he is the only one yet to have settled down into long-term monogamy (and, not coincidentally, the only one with a spin-off show in the pipeline). But he is a strong friend to Chandler, so it doesn't seem to matter that he treats his one-night stands so badly. The rule would appear to be that as long as you treat your friends well, it's not all that important how you treat others - which boils down to moral relativism.
Having said that, promiscuity is not a lifestyle Friends advocates long-term. Indeed, the goal would seem to be marriage - or at the least lasting, committed monogamy, both for the girls and, perhaps more surprisingly, for the guys. Chandler finds true happiness when he overcomes his fear of commitment to marry Monica, and even Ross' three failed marriages are not indicative of the failure of marriage per se, just that he hasn't yet found the right person at the right time. And by the end, it seems that in Rachel he may have at last found both. Even Phoebe, who has spent 200 episodes flying in the face of every convention in the book, is happily married by the time the final curtain falls.
And it's a short step, of course, from marriage to family - which means children. Again, having a family seems to be the characters' aim, despite the dysfunctional backgrounds they unanimously boast. Ross is perhaps already halfway there, with a rarely glimpsed son by his first wife, but it is not until he and Rachel finally get together to parent their baby Emma that he achieves this goal. Monica and Chandler adopt twins in the final episode. And Phoebe, in a surreal twist on the maternal objective, plays surrogate to bear her brother's triplets.
Friends has essentially documented the time between families for these six characters, the years of independence between leaving your parents and starting a family of your own. It is no surprise that Friends found its biggest audience in people in that very situation - obtaining or at least envisaging independence from their families. And for the intervening period, your friends essentially are your family - ever-present to offer unconditional support - but with the added bonus of placing fewer restrictions on your freedom. The advent of family units at the end of Friends signaled a change of phase, and therefore the end of the situation around which the comedy had been based.
The Best of Both Worlds?
In many ways, Friends presents a sort of "best of both worlds" scenario. The characters are able to combine independence with interdependence, lucrative careers with lives of leisure - the sort of combinations most of us struggle to ever achieve. In a world where we are, frankly, too often too busy to squeeze everything in, Friends offers a picture of how it can all be blended into a carefree utopia. Almost a "lifestyle guru" in sitcom form, Friends answers - or at least appears to answer - the modern conundrum of there simply not being enough hours in the day. But of course, it's just a comedy, so the answer is never going to be a realistic or workable one. Friends, and shows like it, aren't there to teach us. They're there to make us laugh - which is perhaps the next best thing.
So how should the Christian viewer react to all this? There are two extremes we should avoid: dismissing the whole affair as frivolous escapism, or taking it far too seriously and standing on the moral high ground to condemn it. But what we can do is identify and respond to the way in which Friends pinpoints some of the trends, wants and needs of modern society.
Amidst the dog-eat-dog world of Western individualism, Friends provides the haven of a steady, dependable community of loyalty, honesty and forgiveness - with excellent banter tacked on for good measure. Things may from time to time go wrong, but there is always something - or rather someone - to fall back on. Cheers captured the same spirit in the 80s - at the end of a long hard day when life has got you down, you just want to go where everybody knows your name.
This theme of community is an important one in the Bible. At the heart of the early church we read about in the opening chapters of Acts is a sense of a new community where individuals are valued and cared for both materially and spiritually. Throughout the Bible, God's people are encouraged to help one another out and demonstrate God's character of love and compassion to the world. God didn't create us for isolation, but for community - a plan that finds its fulfilment in the church, where people of every race, class, language, gender and salary are "all one in Christ Jesus" (Galatians 3:28). And interestingly, the sentiments of Friends' famous theme tune pretty closely echo the Bible's definition of a friend:
A friend loves at all times, and a brother is born for adversity.
Proverbs 17:17
We can't expect to necessarily compete in terms of wit or, for the most part, looks, but when the world looks at the church it should see a community that is characterised by bonds of love, care, loyalty, honesty and respect that Friends can only dream of portraying. After all, we are led by a Lord who claimed that "Greater love has no one than this, that someone lays down his life for his friends" (John 15:13) and then went and did just that.
Conclusions
So then, Friends has come to an end and there will, despite Channel 4's unwavering persistence in screening repeats, come a day when you can look at the Radio Times and not find a single episode in the schedules. We've laughed and we may even have cried, but all good things must end sometime. Just like life, we share paths with people for a time and then go our separate ways. It is therefore all the more striking that the friendship with God and the community of his people provided by the Christian message will never come to an end.