Is a reunion episode for Friends really needed? I don’t think so. No matter how much we loved it two decades ago. But apparently, it is the most awaited episode in our pandemic-struck lives where we have collectively lowered the bar on entertainment.
Seventeen years after the last episode aired in May 2004, Friends is back for a reunion. All six original cast members — Courtney Cox, Lisa Kudrow, Matthew Perry, Matt LeBlanc, David Schwimmer, and Jennifer Aniston — will get together and reminisce about the wildly popular American sitcom that still has people agog over it. It is in Netflix India’s Top 10 almost every week.
In this era of short attention spans and even shorter television interests, this is quite a feat.
But a reunion for the sake of a reunion sounds like what boomers did when they discovered Facebook nearly 15 years ago — realising that they never really liked their school classmates and that there was a reason why they hadn’t kept in touch in the first place.
Now, before the diehard fans run after me with a bludgeon, let me just state at the outset that I don’t hate the show. Even though I have had to endure jokes, comments and ‘we were on a break’ barbs about Rachel Green, courtesy my name, all my life.
It is true that after a long tiring day when your brain does not wish to process any more information, most people do turn to Friends for a light, comedic watch. That’s a space that the show has carved out for itself even after all these years, and no other has truly replaced it — though The Office, How I Met Your Mother, and The Big Bang Theory did compete. It’s mindless, comfort food. It’s like scrolling through Instagram at night after spending a grating day on toxic Twitter.
However, the appeal of Friends is limited to that bit of nostalgic, comfort watch. A throwback to a time when Ross yelling “PIVOT”, Joey saying “how you doin” with the smirk, Rachel mistakenly putting beef in a Thanksgiving trifle and Phoebe’s awful rendition of “Smelly Cat” were hilarious.
Now it’s just dated, and frankly, has little to celebrate in terms of content.
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Some things just aren’t funny anymore
Comedy has come a long way from the time Friends first aired in 1994. Since then, we have had far better, diverse and smarter shows that also make us laugh. Compared to these ‘woke’ comedies, for lack of a better term, the comedy in Friends is, dare I say, quite boring.
Shows like Fleabag, The Good Place, Brooklyn 99, Ramy, Black-ish among others, prove that there is a way to be funny and incisive yet not be offensive at the same time.
And this is primarily the axis that the comedy on Friends revolved around. The show is steeped in fatphobia, homophobia, and sexism besides being offensively White. The fat jokes directed at Monica’s character are no longer funny, nor is the overt sexualisation of Ross’s first wife because she was a lesbian. Joey’s antics towards women were perhaps funny at one point but now they are frankly cringey, so is the constant fun poked at Chandler by suggesting that he was gay. People have been cancelled for far less in the past few years and for good reason.
One of the best callouts of the race erasure in Friends is rapper Jay-Z’s music video for the 2017 song ‘Moonlight’. He parodied the hit sitcom by recasting all the characters with prominent Black comedians, which was a pointed attack on the representation of Blacks in American media. It was also perhaps a meta attack on the fact that Friends has long been viewed as the ‘White version’ of another sitcom ‘Living Single’ that was about six Black friends and aired a year earlier but never got the same push that the former did.
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Reunion hurts the show
Looking at the sappy and snazzy trailer released for the reunion, it is all about nostalgic reminiscing of the great times the cast had shooting it with ‘I’ll Be There For You’ by The Rembrandts playing in the background.
And as far as I can guess, there is going to be no reckoning with the problematic elements of the show. Even if there is, it is bound to be superficial, like all these throwbacks ultimately are. After all, Friends basically invented ‘feel good’ television that doesn’t agitate your brain cells into thinking too much.
But really, what’s the point of this reunion if you don’t view it from a contemporary lens and know that there will be intense criticism waiting for you on the other side if you don’t.
Above all, it is fairly obvious to everyone that the reunion will not be able to hold a candle to the original. So why mess that comfortable Friends corner up?
At the end of the first episode of the show, Monica “welcomes” Rachel to the “real world” and says, “It sucks. You’re gonna love it”. But in the real world of 2021, it’s better to leave Friends in that 1990s corner.
Views are personal.