Reconsidering Friends

By James Poniewozik

In the Friends episode "The One Where No One Proposes"--in which Rachel Green has had Ross Geller's baby after a one-night stand--Ross's father gazes at the tiny girl in the hospital. "My first grandchild," he purrs. "What about Ben?" asks Ross, referring to his son by his lesbian ex-wife, born in the first season. "Well, of course Ben," Mr. Geller covers up. "I meant my first granddaughter."

Is it farfetched that a man would forget his own grandson? Sure. But the gag works, because many of us also forgot Ben existed, even though he figured heavily in the sitcom's first two seasons. Jokes on Friends often involve characters' reminding us of basic details about their lives (say, that Monica and Ross are brother and sister) or forgetting details about one another (in Season 7, Chandler gets glasses, and everyone, including his fiance Monica, believes he has always had them). Friends is like that: content to be funny and forgettable. Even the episode titles--"The One Where ..."--suggest that even if the titles were more grandiose, you wouldn't remember them.

Friends underestimates itself. But that's understandable, because we underestimate it too. The highly popular show, which signs off after 10 seasons on May 6, has not inspired the kind of cultural hand wringing about its existential meaning that Seinfeld did--despite NBC's hubristically plugging Friends as the "best comedy ever"--and its proud-to-be-shallow attitude may be the reason. Beginning in the Norman Lear 1970s, we decided that great sitcoms must not be simply funny; they must also be important. That is, they must court controversy (All in the Family). They must document social progress (Mary Tyler Moore). They must have a sense of satire (M*A*S*H) or mission (The Cosby Show). They must be about something. Even Seinfeld, the "show about nothing," was about being the show about nothing; its nihilism was so well advertised as to beg cultural critics to read deep meaning into it.

Friends, on the other hand, is simply about being a pleasant sitcom. The bland, it-is-what-it-is title, the innocuous theme song I'll Be There for You--everything about it screams that it would rather be liked than respected. Its comments about the outside world are kept to the background. (Literally. After 9/11 rocked New York City, the Magna Doodle board on Joey's apartment door had the initials "FDNY" written on it.) What do people talk about when they talk about Friends? Jennifer Aniston's hair. Jennifer Aniston's husband. The Ugly Naked Guy across the street. The Smelly Cat song. "We were on a break!"

But perhaps we need to redefine "important TV." When Aniston, Courteney Cox (later Cox Arquette), Lisa Kudrow, Matt LeBlanc, Matthew Perry and David Schwimmer arrived en masse, controversy was still a mark of great sitcoms (Roseanne); however, it also allowed mediocre ones (Ellen, Murphy Brown) to act important. Friends went out of its way to be lightweight. But it may have done more to show how American values and definitions of family have changed--and to ratify those changes--than its peers, precisely because it was so innocuous.

Back in 1994--that Reality Bites, Kurt Cobain year--the show wanted to explain people in their 20s to themselves: the aimlessness, the cappuccino drinking, the feeling that you were, you know, "always stuck in second gear." It soon wisely toned down its voice-of-a-generation aspirations and became a comedy about pals and lovers who suffered comic misunderstandings and got pet monkeys.

But it stuck with one theme. Being part of Gen X may not mean you had a goatee or were in a grunge band; it did, however, mean there was a good chance that your family was screwed up and that you feared it had damaged you. Only Ross and Monica have a (relatively) happy set of parents. Phoebe's mom (not, we later learn, her biological mother) committed suicide, and her dad ran out. When Chandler was 9, his parents announced their divorce at Thanksgiving--Dad, it turned out, was a cross-dresser, played by Kathleen Turner. Joey discovered his father was having an affair. Rachel's mom left her dad, inspired by Rachel's jilting her fiance at the altar.

For 10 years, through all the musical-chairs dating and goofy college-flashback episodes, the characters have dealt with one problem: how to replace the kind of family in which they grew up with the one they believed they were supposed to have. One way was by making one another family. But they also found answers that should have, yet somehow didn't, set off conniptions in the people now exercised over gay marriage and Janet Jackson's nipple.

There was, of course, all the sleeping around, though that's not exactly rare on TV today. More unusual was Friends' fixation--consistent but never spotlighted in "very special episodes"--with alternative families. Like all romantic comedies, Friends tends to end its seasons with weddings or births. And yet none of the Friends has had a baby the "normal" way--in the Bushian sense--through procreative sex between a legally sanctioned husband and wife. Chandler and Monica adopt. Ross has kids by his lesbian ex-wife and his unwed ex-girlfriend. Phoebe carries her half brother and his wife's triplets (one of the funniest, sweetest and creepiest situations ever--"My sister's gonna have my baby!" he whoops). As paleontologist Ross might put it, Friends is, on a Darwinian level, about how the species adapts to propagate itself when the old nuclear-family methods don't work.

The message of Friends, in other words, is that there is no normal anymore and that Americans--at least the plurality needed to make a sitcom No. 1--accept that. (To the show's discredit, it used a cast almost entirely of white-bread heteros to guide us through all that otherness.) In January 1996, when Ross's ex-wife married her lesbian lover, the episode raised scant controversy, and most of that because Candace Gingrich--the lesbian sister of Newt, then Speaker of the House--presided over the ceremony. "This is just another zooey episode of the justifiably popular Friends," yawned USA Today. Sure, sitcoms like Roseanne had introduced gays earlier--but it's not as though that had rendered gay marriage uncontroversial, then or now. The bigger difference was in attitude, both the show's and the audience's.

What was radical about Friends was that it assumed these situations were not shocking but a fact of life. Maybe your dad wasn't a drag queen, Friends says, but maybe your parents split up, or maybe you had a confirmed-bachelor uncle whom the family, whatever its politics, had come to accept. If it was important for Murphy Brown to show that a single woman could have a baby in prime time--and spark a war with a Vice President--it was as important that Friends showed that a single woman could have a baby on TV's biggest sitcom, sparking nothing but "awwws."

In the end, the characters are approaching something like traditional happy endings: Phoebe married, Chandler and Monica becoming parents, Ross and Rachel headed for whatever closure the writers have devised, Joey going west for the Valhalla of spin-off-dom. Still, what a weird route they took. Friends may not have been as artistically great as NBC says, but it may have been more important than the show itself seemed to believe. If, as the headlines keep screaming, the culture war is not over, for half an hour a week over 10 years, we were able to forget it existed. What else are friends for?