Friends was a sit-com. If you expected that it was going to offer some life-changing, life-affirming insight into your reality, you really do not have a reality. You flipped it on for 30 minutes, once a week to get a few laughs. That’s what sit-coms we’re supposed to do. Every TV show, every movie, and I mean every one, you can pick apart as not being real, whether it’s the apartment is too big, or everyone is extraordinarily attractive, or every joke is so good it must have been written by a professional joke writer. Nothing is real that’s put on TV or even in the movies. How often do you see a character take a dump or a woman changing her tampon? Almost never (Nomadland). Are these characters not real human beings without bodily functions? They are real, but the producers only have 22 minutes of airtime per show, so they are not going to spend it on anything that is not completely relevant to the storyline. And if they made it too real to life, no one would watch it because we watch TV shows and movies to take a break from real life. And I’ll take the 90’s over the 2020’s any day. Everyone is completely disconnected today. Everything even our relationships are filtered through screens and algorithms. Talk about lack of reality, we are living through it right now. Everything is fake. Everything. Social media is a cesspool of phoniness and frauds. Everything is image and profile. This is the most pretentious, self-righteous, judgmental, hypocritical, disingenuous, mean-spirited time in my lifetime. The TV shows and the movies these days are garbage, and maybe that’s why Friends is still so popular.
Daniel Björkman
2 years ago
I think the 2020s is the perfect time for gloomy introverts. In the 90s (and to a lesser extent in the 2000s, and to an even lesser extend in the 2010s), I felt like everyone was having a great time but me. Now, everyone claims to be alienated and miserable. For the first time in my life, I fit right in!
If you were young in the mid 80s, being a miserablist was pretty much de-rigueur. I guess it’s all come full-circle, just with without the good pop music. Maybe now we’re in for another decade of hedonism like the 90s. Shame I’m too old to enjoy it. Still, table service and a few pints of fyne ale or good bottle of wine seems to do the business these days.
Which is why I find the ‘social life being opt-in’ aspect strange. Maybe the costs of being a loner in the past were higher, but there were plenty of people who were reculses for one reason or another. Just look at all the recluses in Dickens’ novels.
Thank you but I can’t really claim credit, it’s very simple: if you drop a link into the message box which directly references a picture (as in, the last the bit of the url is somethingsomething.jpg or ~.png) then the picture shows up in the box.
I say, Mr Kotak, you’ve received doubtless fully justified praise for the technical acumen you displayed by introducing an image into an UnHerd comment. Any chance you could add a textual “alt” description so that a visually impaired person with no useful sight such as my self might better participate in the conversations? (TIA, if it’s technically possible / you decide to do it, though I appreciate the graphic might be truly describable only by a professional essayist/TV pundit/the original artist, and then perhaps only with multi-thousand words!)
I’ll take a look – UnHerd comments seem to allow a limited amount of HTML so it may be possible to embed a text alt tag alongside with an image.
Alex Lekas
2 years ago
Sometimes a tv show is just a tv, a few minutes of relatively mindless entertainment about make believe people in a make believe world. Yes, much of the show had a very limited connection to reality, but one could say the same of the Cosby show that ruled the 80s. Yet people watched both.
Their network, NBC, used the tagline “must see tv” to gin up interest. And, this was when cable was a nascent enterprise, streaming services were not even a concept, and ‘on demand’ had yet to develop. Friends ran out of gas because eventually, people grow up. Even popular shows grow stale and something else comes along to take their place. Of late, it is often preachy melodramas seeking to enforce the dogma of the day which may be many things, but entertaining is not one of them.
It didn’t really run out of gas, it ended when it needed to. “Found families” fall apart and real families begin. It was the finale that got 50m.
ralph bell
2 years ago
Nice querky article and its so true about odd ball personalities/shows not existing today (Alan Partridge) with today’s woke intolerance and digging for dirt when not fitting their prescribed culture.
This is what depresses me. I love good movies and TV shows but I think the current obsession with wokeness will turn most new productions into mini soapboxes for delivering an ideological message. Gritty, edgy shows won’t be allowed.
Simon Baseley
2 years ago
Friends is almost exclusively responsible for introducing first into British speech the corrosive use of the word “like”. Theories as to why this idiom has become so popular are many and varied although all seem to agree that it provides a cue to friendly informality, perhaps explaining why it is so popular with the young. I am, like, sooo sick of it.
Might be a stretch to say that Friends is ‘exclusively’ responsible for this phenomenon. But I’m sure it had a role, as part of that long running, never ending geyser of mass media imports gushing up from America.
I never watched it , yet I did as I saw Jennifer Aniston’s hair commercials. Her life ( will she ever get back with Brad?) and rest cast seem to have become an extention of the show. Prefered Red Dwalf-good wholesome family drama.
Christiane Dauphinais
2 years ago
In the old days, it was customary – as a matter of courtesy to the reader – to define an acronym the first time one used it. In the “new post-literate world” Mary Harrington talks about, the custom has been lost. Having to consult Wikipedia to find out what acronyms (eg. IRL) mean makes reading tedious.
You’re supposed to be using them all the time now like they are words. Soon IRL everything will B OMG and LOL. I guess it all started with ASAP, RSVP and BYOB.
To take a cue from Alan Girling, would you also require an explanation for RSVP and ASAP??????
IRL has been part of internet talk for ages. You did what we all do when are missing out on a fact. We look for it. You found it, that should have been end of story.
Jon Redman
2 years ago
Recently I tried to rewatch both The Matrix and an episode of Friends. I didn’t get a third of the way through either before becoming intensely, irritably bored.
I think the reason is the same reason I hate Star Wars, a deeply, deeply stupid film that amounted to a merchandise commercial you had to pay to watch. All of these screwed up so much that came after them. Everything had to look and sound like Star Wars, or The Matrix, or Friends.
Better than the depraved Netflix stuff – all sadism, horror, violence, unhealthy sex, cruelty, and always satanism with undead, being the favorite character.
It may have been dull and insipid, but it was not evil, like what is classed as entertainment is today.
Quite so, and then people wonder that the violence in the world is getting worse. You cannot desensitise people to such stuff and wonder where the sociability has all gone. And it is not just films and TV. Games are ever more graphic. Gone are the days of ‘Lego’ block graphics, that if you squinted you could make out the character. It is all augmented, photo-realistic bloody gore.
I read the back of a DVD the other day – ‘Strong bloody violence, sexual violence, sex, nudity, very strong language’.
Amazing what you can get at Tesco’s today – every little helps. Not.
The best part of Star Wars was the Empire Strikes Back and the post original trilogy novels, comics and games where many authors and artists built the lore of the Expanded Universe. Timothy Zahn, KOTOR, Tie Fighter, Dark Horse Comic, this was the value of the Star Wars franchise and like a couple of drunken fools the Disney braintrust took this legacy and flushed it down the toilet for so called girl power and so called diversity.
Very much a story of our time.
Exactly! Well I kinda liked the first Matrix, just because of the novelty factor, but by the third one, it was truly awful. Also disliked the Star Wars, even the first one. I was raised on Battlestar Galactica, Space:1999 and Logan’s Run, which were much more interesting.
Jeff Mason
2 years ago
It was just a TV show. Why do people insist on searching for deeper meaning and when they don’t find it, invent it. Friends wasn’t ‘selling’ anything but ad space. It wasn’t trying to make a huge social statement like other shows. When M*A*S*H ran out of funny things to say, it became a preachy modern show telling us what is wrong with 1970’s America and became incredibly less funny. I did watch the last episode if only to put a stake through the vampire’s heart. There is a very good reason that Friends reruns are still popular and M*A*S*H reruns are not. Good humor is timeless. Preachiness get stale – fast.
Margaret Donaldson
2 years ago
Another profound effect of Friends was the way it changed how young people spoke in the UK. Now they are passing it on to their children. The worst kind of twee American. It is not helping the preservation of regional accents in the UK and it embodys the shallow and unreal nature of Friends itself.
On a similar theme, supposedly Neighbours and Home & Away were responsible for Aussifying speech patterns throughout the UK.
You know, like when the end of every sentence is inflected, like, upwards? Like every sentence is spoken, like, a question?
As an Australian, I’ll happily take responsibility for the upward inflection at the end of a sentence, but like is something we adopted from the US. If I’m correct, I think it was a Californian habit. I remember first hearing it spoken in Sydney in the early 2000s(?) by young American tourists. It horrified me then and I was equally horrified when my own children picked it up.
I think people over estimate the effect of US television on accents, except in some cases. How many people in the U.K. actually say “I was, like…” anyway? British accents have remained in many cases impenetrable to me as a English speaking foreigner. It’s not like the Liverpool or Glasgow accent have disappeared.
Alison Wren
2 years ago
Gosh, and I never knew it was rude to phone people up!!!
I always talk to the person sitting next to me on the Tube and that is the ultimate faux-pas, but can be done if you lack any social reservations as I do –
I’m more of a Seinfeld guy. Friends were okay in small doses, but never good. It’s orders of magnitude better than “how I met your mother”, that one inspired murderous thoughts in me.
I didn’t watch Seinfeld systematically, Seinfeld himself was way too annoying to me, as were the other two. I did like Kramer, he was the only redeeming character of the show, and he was one of the first of the “cancelled” people generation, the beginning of the end.
Brian Dorsley
2 years ago
I loved the nineties, but then again I was a single young guy working in bars in Amsterdam. Once I got married that all ended.
You might have served me! I was a young(ish), single guy working in ad agencies (well, mostly watching/playing football, drinking old Bordeaux and going to bars) in Amsterdam in the 1990s.
Prescient. I wish I had developed my love of claret in the 90s when I was young and carefree. I’d now have bottles reaching their peak, giving me a middle-aged ‘blue pill’ fuzz against the horrors of the modern age. When I think of some of the ghastly potions we gleefully swilled down at parties and nightclubs in that decade. *Shudder*
I loved the 80s, by the time the 90s came around, the road back to women as Stepford Wives and men in suits was already returning. The 80s were the end of good times.
Andre Lower
2 years ago
Never watched “Friends”. Cannot bear the US sitcom artificiality. As for the comments on “where do we go from here” in terms of human contact/connection, I have a guess: People will eventually realize that being 100% passive is not cutting, and some will actually seek real life interaction. Many will fail abysmally (because they cannot generate any interesting “content” by themselves), but a few will succeed and finally provide the sorely needed good examples of how to actually enjoy being alive. No rocket science really. Little children do something equivalent all the time.
Last edited 2 years ago by Andre Lower
William Gladstone
2 years ago
I guess “they” (probably WEF types) always try and package an ideal future/norm for young adults. I would say now its the woke, non hetero normative, Gender fluid-ey, rainbow-ey, unicorn-ey one.
I always found friends quite funny and it was a nice idea and infinitely cheerier than This life which was our miserable unpleasant version. I never actually thought it was going to happen and I suppose coming from a slightly older generation I thought it would be more like the young ones but uni wasn’t like that really either.
Its all pre-packaged nonsense perhaps we need a gone with the wind style warning to that effect at the start but we will probably have to wait another 40 years for that.
About that norm they push for young adults:
I am profoundly worried about the “p*ssed off and powerful”glower and folded arm trope they are pushing to represent young females and people of color. As if, if you aren’t projecting how alienated and ready to blow you are—aren’t projecting that you are a threat—then how else will you get to the top in prison? Er, correction, in society?
Last edited 2 years ago by Alex Delszsen
k8dsnkcgyq
2 years ago
It didn’t really sell this dream of cafe lifestyle with zero responsibility. They all had jobs. It just wasn’t about their careers (although at times it was.) Probably why they called it Friends and not R.E.S.P.O.N.S.I.B.I.L.I.T.I.E.S
Alex Delszsen
2 years ago
We find a thread of continuity with the huge apartments and endless coffee shop time in the 90s in the Instagram-ready selfie accompanying the story, where the camera isheld so as to strategically block out the unattractive person who won’t promote the naaaarative.
Kremlington Swan
2 years ago
I wonder if we should just unharness electricity. No more anything we take for granted, of course, but genuinely new.
Were they any worse off in the 1700s? Everyone who lived then, died then, and everyone who lives now will die soon.
The world is inter-connected, and smaller, and more instant, but nothing is better than a skylark or a cowslip. Nothing we have invented has actually improved our lives at more than the most superficial level. Nothing we have invented is really any more significant than a fridge-freezer.
Maybe the man who sang about going to lie down in a field had it about right.
Most people ask why are you going to lie down in a field, but the real question is: why isn’t everybody going to lie down in a field?
Andrew Thompson
2 years ago
Disgraceful; not even one trans or non binary cast member. I’m being sarcastic.
That’s what made the sitcom fun to watch. Six good looking, straight, young white people living in a major city. The show created the pleasant illusion that this was somehow reality for generation X.
I don’t think you are talking for all of generation X, Trishia.
Nicolas Jouan
2 years ago
I’m a millennial fan that devoured the show in the 2000s. I still love it. Yet, I see the immense contradiction behind the world of Friends cleverly formulated in the article:
In a nutshell, Friends world was a soft-focus picture of the adult life the baby boomers hoped they’d created for their offspring: maximally connected, but also maximally free.
Friends, like many subsequent sitcoms, tends to glorify both personality quirks and ultra-openness, suggesting that it will result in a delicious cocktail of attractive ingenuity and wholesomeness. The slight detail is that we were not ready for an unscripted world around us. It appears that, when you are a childish womanizer or a control freak, people actually tend to dislike you.
Steve Garrett
2 years ago
Sometimes a pipe is just a pipe.
G A
2 years ago
When did ‘cringeworthy’ turn into ‘cringe’?
jvcowan
2 years ago
This is an incredible article. Quite incredible writing.
Andrew Thompson
2 years ago
I can proudly hold my head up and admit that I have never even watched as much as two consecutive seconds of this American tripe.
Mike Boosh
2 years ago
I loved the 90s, but I always hated Friends.
Brendan O'Leary
2 years ago
a mean-spirited media-world in-joke about how embarrassed everyone would be if one of those people who’d never stand a chance in the industry actually became a TV presenter
Actually, that’s what Alan Partridge always was. You’ve just grown up since.
Andrew Baldwin
2 years ago
I think I have fonder memories of the 1990s than Mary, maybe because I am older. I never watched ‘Friends’ much, but the 1990s was a great decade for American movies, especially ‘Fight Club’ and ‘Fearless’: “At the end of its long journey, the soul finds itself, naked and alone, drawing nearer to the divine.”
Andrew Russell
2 years ago
Nice article. I enjoyed Friends but I never went out of my way to watch it. It was well-written and could be pretty funny. My main memory is of an episode where Joey (I think) finished a brief phone call and was asked who it was. “That was K.C.” came the reply. “What did he want?” “I don’t know – do a little dance, make a little love, get down tonight?”
This is a joke that would now need to be explained, but people watching it at the time would get.
The Friends reboot (groan) is about as necessary as a new Die Hard movie.
Annette Kralendijk
2 years ago
Sometimes light entertainment is just that, light entertainment. We really don’t need to analyze every single show on television for hidden messages. Can we no longer just enjoy a television show for the momentary escape and entertainment it offers? I used to watch Lassie and Flipper when I was a kid but I never heard anyone try to imbue them with hidden messages. This sort of navel gazing should be discouraged. Friends is not real life anymore than Flipper was.
I grew up in the same neighborhood as Jerry Seinfeld, Ray Romano and Fran Drescher. All of whom made highly entertaining shows. None of them were real life.
Last edited 2 years ago by Annette Kralendijk
Mangle Tangle
2 years ago
Mary, why did you loathe the 90s?
J. Hale
2 years ago
In hindsight the ’90s was pretty good. That decade between the fall of the Berlin Wall and the fall of the twin towers saw relative peace, and growing prosperity and freedom around the world. It really did look like a capitalist economy regulated by a democratic government was the solution to mankind’s problems. Thirty years later, we’ve got global warming, endless wars, rampant inequality, etc.
Just a few horrible times of the 90s that come to mind
Don Gaughan
2 years ago
When in a depressed state, as reportedy so many and young are experiencing these days , my view of the world and life was darkened by the pessimism and mind solely seeing the bad.
As I got oldervand saw that neither good times or bad times last forever, and the depression started to fade , I saw my views then were overly dark and blinded me to the good , hopeful and uplifting around me..including a more capable proactive self awareness.
I was not a big Freinds fan myself, and felt it was made for another, different audience demographic, but did watch to see how THEY behaved and interacted.
Despite whst ever circumstances we are in, the pandemic lockdown , the woke mob divisions, the paradoxical social effect of the internet , the lonliness epidemic , humans are social order beings and we need each other…and somehow that need and drive will manifest in all that we face.
Your article connected your thoughts and feelings with me, fellow carbon based life form.
Trishia A
2 years ago
The Phoebe character played a huge role in the backlash against feminism, playing up stupid blonds as “nice”, then followed third wave feminism, where so-called “feminists” cherish stupidity, weakness, and overall submissive behaviour.
I would place that character as the worst female character of 90s television. I despised it.
parkalot01
2 years ago
The reunion was a calculated risk. I don’t think it paid off. Several of the characters did not age well. It’s like watching people inside a picture change. Do you want the real world? Do you want the fat, the vacant stares, the fake smiles, the awkward pauses and all of that? Sure, it’s real life but what does it prove? People get old?
Robert Malcolm
2 years ago
I don’t think I ever managed to watch a whole episode of Friends: the endless studio laughter was a real switch off. I preferred the grittier realities of ‘Minder’ – though even that was pure sanitised East end mockney gangsta porn.
John Shea
2 years ago
So being American I watched this show for all of two seasons. It was all people talked about. Pre-Internet you would watch it. The reason I only watched it for two seasons was the characters were all stereotypes and lived predictable, boring lives. By the second season I knew what the characters would say before they even spoke it. Phoebe was the only interesting character, she had original takes and thoughts. You still cannot escape the series, the reruns seems to never end playing. How sad us Americans had to foist this series on the rest of the world.
Ferrusian Gambit
2 years ago
I’m not sure how many more articles about Mary Harrington’s life packaged as being about tangential cultural themes and her vaguely concealed self-obsession I can take.
Daniel, I don’t think Ferrusian and Mark were criticizing the author’s lack of humility or drive for self praise. The criticism was on her obsession to describe everything through the context of the effect it had on her personally, as opposed to the broader public.
That pattern is indeed very common in the female universe, and is bothersome if you are interested in what other people may have thought about the subject.
General tendencies : Men objective, Women subjective.
This is “bothersome” ?
What do you want ? Women to be more like men ?
That would be a pity.
How about recognising the difference between us and appreciating a different approach.
Variety in a magazine is good I think.
Really? I’ve read most of her stuff on here and other places, listened to her interviews. Would be curious to see if there is ( do recommend) someone writing better and with greater depth on the range of subjects she does.
Humble enough to share/personalise the fact that she wasn’t always one of the cool kids. She’s great.
Friends was a sit-com. If you expected that it was going to offer some life-changing, life-affirming insight into your reality, you really do not have a reality. You flipped it on for 30 minutes, once a week to get a few laughs. That’s what sit-coms we’re supposed to do. Every TV show, every movie, and I mean every one, you can pick apart as not being real, whether it’s the apartment is too big, or everyone is extraordinarily attractive, or every joke is so good it must have been written by a professional joke writer. Nothing is real that’s put on TV or even in the movies. How often do you see a character take a dump or a woman changing her tampon? Almost never (Nomadland). Are these characters not real human beings without bodily functions? They are real, but the producers only have 22 minutes of airtime per show, so they are not going to spend it on anything that is not completely relevant to the storyline. And if they made it too real to life, no one would watch it because we watch TV shows and movies to take a break from real life. And I’ll take the 90’s over the 2020’s any day. Everyone is completely disconnected today. Everything even our relationships are filtered through screens and algorithms. Talk about lack of reality, we are living through it right now. Everything is fake. Everything. Social media is a cesspool of phoniness and frauds. Everything is image and profile. This is the most pretentious, self-righteous, judgmental, hypocritical, disingenuous, mean-spirited time in my lifetime. The TV shows and the movies these days are garbage, and maybe that’s why Friends is still so popular.
I think the 2020s is the perfect time for gloomy introverts. In the 90s (and to a lesser extent in the 2000s, and to an even lesser extend in the 2010s), I felt like everyone was having a great time but me. Now, everyone claims to be alienated and miserable. For the first time in my life, I fit right in!
If you were young in the mid 80s, being a miserablist was pretty much de-rigueur. I guess it’s all come full-circle, just with without the good pop music. Maybe now we’re in for another decade of hedonism like the 90s. Shame I’m too old to enjoy it. Still, table service and a few pints of fyne ale or good bottle of wine seems to do the business these days.
Which is why I find the ‘social life being opt-in’ aspect strange. Maybe the costs of being a loner in the past were higher, but there were plenty of people who were reculses for one reason or another. Just look at all the recluses in Dickens’ novels.
The 80s were still Sex, Drugs, and Rock’n Roll, the 90s was the return of suits and stiff hair, the end of fun.
10 out of 10 for uploading the cartoon. Thou art a magician, sir! 🙂
Thank you but I can’t really claim credit, it’s very simple: if you drop a link into the message box which directly references a picture (as in, the last the bit of the url is somethingsomething.jpg or ~.png) then the picture shows up in the box.
I say, Mr Kotak, you’ve received doubtless fully justified praise for the technical acumen you displayed by introducing an image into an UnHerd comment. Any chance you could add a textual “alt” description so that a visually impaired person with no useful sight such as my self might better participate in the conversations? (TIA, if it’s technically possible / you decide to do it, though I appreciate the graphic might be truly describable only by a professional essayist/TV pundit/the original artist, and then perhaps only with multi-thousand words!)
I’ll take a look – UnHerd comments seem to allow a limited amount of HTML so it may be possible to embed a text alt tag alongside with an image.
Sometimes a tv show is just a tv, a few minutes of relatively mindless entertainment about make believe people in a make believe world. Yes, much of the show had a very limited connection to reality, but one could say the same of the Cosby show that ruled the 80s. Yet people watched both.
Their network, NBC, used the tagline “must see tv” to gin up interest. And, this was when cable was a nascent enterprise, streaming services were not even a concept, and ‘on demand’ had yet to develop. Friends ran out of gas because eventually, people grow up. Even popular shows grow stale and something else comes along to take their place. Of late, it is often preachy melodramas seeking to enforce the dogma of the day which may be many things, but entertaining is not one of them.
Mmust see TV’ must be one of the most egregious oxymorons ever constructed.
It didn’t really run out of gas, it ended when it needed to. “Found families” fall apart and real families begin. It was the finale that got 50m.
Nice querky article and its so true about odd ball personalities/shows not existing today (Alan Partridge) with today’s woke intolerance and digging for dirt when not fitting their prescribed culture.
This is what depresses me. I love good movies and TV shows but I think the current obsession with wokeness will turn most new productions into mini soapboxes for delivering an ideological message. Gritty, edgy shows won’t be allowed.
Friends is almost exclusively responsible for introducing first into British speech the corrosive use of the word “like”. Theories as to why this idiom has become so popular are many and varied although all seem to agree that it provides a cue to friendly informality, perhaps explaining why it is so popular with the young. I am, like, sooo sick of it.
Might be a stretch to say that Friends is ‘exclusively’ responsible for this phenomenon. But I’m sure it had a role, as part of that long running, never ending geyser of mass media imports gushing up from America.
I did say “almost” exclusively responsible but yes, Lewis, we are of like mind.
That is like the most irritating like tic people use, followed by you know all the time & sort of repeated a lot.
‘Trainspotting’, book, UK release 1993: ‘Likesay’.
‘Friends’, TV, UK release 1995.
Edit – the US ‘like’; I concur (hated Friends? +1).
I never watched it , yet I did as I saw Jennifer Aniston’s hair commercials. Her life ( will she ever get back with Brad?) and rest cast seem to have become an extention of the show. Prefered Red Dwalf-good wholesome family drama.
In the old days, it was customary – as a matter of courtesy to the reader – to define an acronym the first time one used it. In the “new post-literate world” Mary Harrington talks about, the custom has been lost. Having to consult Wikipedia to find out what acronyms (eg. IRL) mean makes reading tedious.
You’re supposed to be using them all the time now like they are words. Soon IRL everything will B OMG and LOL. I guess it all started with ASAP, RSVP and BYOB.
To take a cue from Alan Girling, would you also require an explanation for RSVP and ASAP??????
IRL has been part of internet talk for ages. You did what we all do when are missing out on a fact. We look for it. You found it, that should have been end of story.
Recently I tried to rewatch both The Matrix and an episode of Friends. I didn’t get a third of the way through either before becoming intensely, irritably bored.
I think the reason is the same reason I hate Star Wars, a deeply, deeply stupid film that amounted to a merchandise commercial you had to pay to watch. All of these screwed up so much that came after them. Everything had to look and sound like Star Wars, or The Matrix, or Friends.
Better than the depraved Netflix stuff – all sadism, horror, violence, unhealthy sex, cruelty, and always satanism with undead, being the favorite character.
It may have been dull and insipid, but it was not evil, like what is classed as entertainment is today.
Quite so, and then people wonder that the violence in the world is getting worse. You cannot desensitise people to such stuff and wonder where the sociability has all gone. And it is not just films and TV. Games are ever more graphic. Gone are the days of ‘Lego’ block graphics, that if you squinted you could make out the character. It is all augmented, photo-realistic bloody gore.
I read the back of a DVD the other day – ‘Strong bloody violence, sexual violence, sex, nudity, very strong language’.
Amazing what you can get at Tesco’s today – every little helps. Not.
Groundhog Day Now there’s a movie!
The best part of Star Wars was the Empire Strikes Back and the post original trilogy novels, comics and games where many authors and artists built the lore of the Expanded Universe. Timothy Zahn, KOTOR, Tie Fighter, Dark Horse Comic, this was the value of the Star Wars franchise and like a couple of drunken fools the Disney braintrust took this legacy and flushed it down the toilet for so called girl power and so called diversity.
Very much a story of our time.
Exactly! Well I kinda liked the first Matrix, just because of the novelty factor, but by the third one, it was truly awful. Also disliked the Star Wars, even the first one. I was raised on Battlestar Galactica, Space:1999 and Logan’s Run, which were much more interesting.
It was just a TV show. Why do people insist on searching for deeper meaning and when they don’t find it, invent it. Friends wasn’t ‘selling’ anything but ad space. It wasn’t trying to make a huge social statement like other shows. When M*A*S*H ran out of funny things to say, it became a preachy modern show telling us what is wrong with 1970’s America and became incredibly less funny. I did watch the last episode if only to put a stake through the vampire’s heart. There is a very good reason that Friends reruns are still popular and M*A*S*H reruns are not. Good humor is timeless. Preachiness get stale – fast.
Another profound effect of Friends was the way it changed how young people spoke in the UK. Now they are passing it on to their children. The worst kind of twee American. It is not helping the preservation of regional accents in the UK and it embodys the shallow and unreal nature of Friends itself.
On a similar theme, supposedly Neighbours and Home & Away were responsible for Aussifying speech patterns throughout the UK.
You know, like when the end of every sentence is inflected, like, upwards? Like every sentence is spoken, like, a question?
As an Australian, I’ll happily take responsibility for the upward inflection at the end of a sentence, but like is something we adopted from the US. If I’m correct, I think it was a Californian habit. I remember first hearing it spoken in Sydney in the early 2000s(?) by young American tourists. It horrified me then and I was equally horrified when my own children picked it up.
It is not all bad. “No worries” is an Australian phrase that has moved to the English speaking world. It’s welcome.
Ok, is originally American. Apparently the English speaking world needed a catch all for yes, I can, definitely, sure etc.
I think people over estimate the effect of US television on accents, except in some cases. How many people in the U.K. actually say “I was, like…” anyway? British accents have remained in many cases impenetrable to me as a English speaking foreigner. It’s not like the Liverpool or Glasgow accent have disappeared.
Gosh, and I never knew it was rude to phone people up!!!
I always talk to the person sitting next to me on the Tube and that is the ultimate faux-pas, but can be done if you lack any social reservations as I do –
I do it on the bus but we’re not allowed to any more ….sigh….
Well, at least you know now.
I’m more of a Seinfeld guy. Friends were okay in small doses, but never good. It’s orders of magnitude better than “how I met your mother”, that one inspired murderous thoughts in me.
I didn’t watch Seinfeld systematically, Seinfeld himself was way too annoying to me, as were the other two. I did like Kramer, he was the only redeeming character of the show, and he was one of the first of the “cancelled” people generation, the beginning of the end.
I loved the nineties, but then again I was a single young guy working in bars in Amsterdam. Once I got married that all ended.
You might have served me! I was a young(ish), single guy working in ad agencies (well, mostly watching/playing football, drinking old Bordeaux and going to bars) in Amsterdam in the 1990s.
Aha. That explains it!
” Drinking old Bordeaux ” while you were youngish – bizarre
Prescient. I wish I had developed my love of claret in the 90s when I was young and carefree. I’d now have bottles reaching their peak, giving me a middle-aged ‘blue pill’ fuzz against the horrors of the modern age. When I think of some of the ghastly potions we gleefully swilled down at parties and nightclubs in that decade. *Shudder*
I loved the 80s, by the time the 90s came around, the road back to women as Stepford Wives and men in suits was already returning. The 80s were the end of good times.
Never watched “Friends”. Cannot bear the US sitcom artificiality. As for the comments on “where do we go from here” in terms of human contact/connection, I have a guess: People will eventually realize that being 100% passive is not cutting, and some will actually seek real life interaction. Many will fail abysmally (because they cannot generate any interesting “content” by themselves), but a few will succeed and finally provide the sorely needed good examples of how to actually enjoy being alive. No rocket science really. Little children do something equivalent all the time.
I guess “they” (probably WEF types) always try and package an ideal future/norm for young adults. I would say now its the woke, non hetero normative, Gender fluid-ey, rainbow-ey, unicorn-ey one.
I always found friends quite funny and it was a nice idea and infinitely cheerier than This life which was our miserable unpleasant version. I never actually thought it was going to happen and I suppose coming from a slightly older generation I thought it would be more like the young ones but uni wasn’t like that really either.
Its all pre-packaged nonsense perhaps we need a gone with the wind style warning to that effect at the start but we will probably have to wait another 40 years for that.
About that norm they push for young adults:
I am profoundly worried about the “p*ssed off and powerful”glower and folded arm trope they are pushing to represent young females and people of color. As if, if you aren’t projecting how alienated and ready to blow you are—aren’t projecting that you are a threat—then how else will you get to the top in prison? Er, correction, in society?
It didn’t really sell this dream of cafe lifestyle with zero responsibility. They all had jobs. It just wasn’t about their careers (although at times it was.) Probably why they called it Friends and not R.E.S.P.O.N.S.I.B.I.L.I.T.I.E.S
We find a thread of continuity with the huge apartments and endless coffee shop time in the 90s in the Instagram-ready selfie accompanying the story, where the camera isheld so as to strategically block out the unattractive person who won’t promote the naaaarative.
I wonder if we should just unharness electricity. No more anything we take for granted, of course, but genuinely new.
Were they any worse off in the 1700s? Everyone who lived then, died then, and everyone who lives now will die soon.
The world is inter-connected, and smaller, and more instant, but nothing is better than a skylark or a cowslip. Nothing we have invented has actually improved our lives at more than the most superficial level. Nothing we have invented is really any more significant than a fridge-freezer.
Maybe the man who sang about going to lie down in a field had it about right.
Most people ask why are you going to lie down in a field, but the real question is: why isn’t everybody going to lie down in a field?
Disgraceful; not even one trans or non binary cast member. I’m being sarcastic.
That’s what made the sitcom fun to watch. Six good looking, straight, young white people living in a major city. The show created the pleasant illusion that this was somehow reality for generation X.
As a Gen-Xer, I can not disagree more! These people were vapid, conformist, and we wanted nothing to do with them.
I don’t think you are talking for all of generation X, Trishia.
I’m a millennial fan that devoured the show in the 2000s. I still love it. Yet, I see the immense contradiction behind the world of Friends cleverly formulated in the article:
Friends, like many subsequent sitcoms, tends to glorify both personality quirks and ultra-openness, suggesting that it will result in a delicious cocktail of attractive ingenuity and wholesomeness. The slight detail is that we were not ready for an unscripted world around us. It appears that, when you are a childish womanizer or a control freak, people actually tend to dislike you.
Sometimes a pipe is just a pipe.
When did ‘cringeworthy’ turn into ‘cringe’?
This is an incredible article. Quite incredible writing.
I can proudly hold my head up and admit that I have never even watched as much as two consecutive seconds of this American tripe.
I loved the 90s, but I always hated Friends.
Actually, that’s what Alan Partridge always was.
You’ve just grown up since.
I think I have fonder memories of the 1990s than Mary, maybe because I am older. I never watched ‘Friends’ much, but the 1990s was a great decade for American movies, especially ‘Fight Club’ and ‘Fearless’: “At the end of its long journey, the soul finds itself, naked and alone, drawing nearer to the divine.”
Nice article. I enjoyed Friends but I never went out of my way to watch it. It was well-written and could be pretty funny. My main memory is of an episode where Joey (I think) finished a brief phone call and was asked who it was. “That was K.C.” came the reply. “What did he want?” “I don’t know – do a little dance, make a little love, get down tonight?”
This is a joke that would now need to be explained, but people watching it at the time would get.
The Friends reboot (groan) is about as necessary as a new Die Hard movie.
Sometimes light entertainment is just that, light entertainment. We really don’t need to analyze every single show on television for hidden messages. Can we no longer just enjoy a television show for the momentary escape and entertainment it offers? I used to watch Lassie and Flipper when I was a kid but I never heard anyone try to imbue them with hidden messages. This sort of navel gazing should be discouraged. Friends is not real life anymore than Flipper was.
I grew up in the same neighborhood as Jerry Seinfeld, Ray Romano and Fran Drescher. All of whom made highly entertaining shows. None of them were real life.
Mary, why did you loathe the 90s?
In hindsight the ’90s was pretty good. That decade between the fall of the Berlin Wall and the fall of the twin towers saw relative peace, and growing prosperity and freedom around the world. It really did look like a capitalist economy regulated by a democratic government was the solution to mankind’s problems. Thirty years later, we’ve got global warming, endless wars, rampant inequality, etc.
Just a few horrible times of the 90s that come to mind
When in a depressed state, as reportedy so many and young are experiencing these days , my view of the world and life was darkened by the pessimism and mind solely seeing the bad.
As I got oldervand saw that neither good times or bad times last forever, and the depression started to fade , I saw my views then were overly dark and blinded me to the good , hopeful and uplifting around me..including a more capable proactive self awareness.
I was not a big Freinds fan myself, and felt it was made for another, different audience demographic, but did watch to see how THEY behaved and interacted.
Despite whst ever circumstances we are in, the pandemic lockdown , the woke mob divisions, the paradoxical social effect of the internet , the lonliness epidemic , humans are social order beings and we need each other…and somehow that need and drive will manifest in all that we face.
Your article connected your thoughts and feelings with me, fellow carbon based life form.
The Phoebe character played a huge role in the backlash against feminism, playing up stupid blonds as “nice”, then followed third wave feminism, where so-called “feminists” cherish stupidity, weakness, and overall submissive behaviour.
I would place that character as the worst female character of 90s television. I despised it.
The reunion was a calculated risk. I don’t think it paid off. Several of the characters did not age well. It’s like watching people inside a picture change. Do you want the real world? Do you want the fat, the vacant stares, the fake smiles, the awkward pauses and all of that? Sure, it’s real life but what does it prove? People get old?
I don’t think I ever managed to watch a whole episode of Friends: the endless studio laughter was a real switch off. I preferred the grittier realities of ‘Minder’ – though even that was pure sanitised East end mockney gangsta porn.
So being American I watched this show for all of two seasons. It was all people talked about. Pre-Internet you would watch it. The reason I only watched it for two seasons was the characters were all stereotypes and lived predictable, boring lives. By the second season I knew what the characters would say before they even spoke it. Phoebe was the only interesting character, she had original takes and thoughts. You still cannot escape the series, the reruns seems to never end playing. How sad us Americans had to foist this series on the rest of the world.
I’m not sure how many more articles about Mary Harrington’s life packaged as being about tangential cultural themes and her vaguely concealed self-obsession I can take.
Like most female comedians, some female journalists just can’t resist making everything about them them them.
As opposed to men, who are famously selfless and humble.
(yes, I’m being sarcastic. And it’s so sad that I feel the need to point that out)
Daniel, I don’t think Ferrusian and Mark were criticizing the author’s lack of humility or drive for self praise. The criticism was on her obsession to describe everything through the context of the effect it had on her personally, as opposed to the broader public.
That pattern is indeed very common in the female universe, and is bothersome if you are interested in what other people may have thought about the subject.
General tendencies : Men objective, Women subjective.
This is “bothersome” ?
What do you want ? Women to be more like men ?
That would be a pity.
How about recognising the difference between us and appreciating a different approach.
Variety in a magazine is good I think.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Doz5w2W-jAY
98.327
I don’t mind Mary using her life story to make a point. That point seems to be that folks really do get more conservative as they get older.
I like her adding in her life.
I am a memoir junkie myself, and I love essays which nod to the personal… but there is something about her self-confessions that doesn’t feel natural.
Really? I’ve read most of her stuff on here and other places, listened to her interviews. Would be curious to see if there is ( do recommend) someone writing better and with greater depth on the range of subjects she does.
Humble enough to share/personalise the fact that she wasn’t always one of the cool kids. She’s great.
Better not to comment sometimes, FG.
I think you may be on to something!