In terms of the Great Sitcom Debate™, I have always considered myself a Seinfeld over Friends person. The causticness that Seinfeld embraces is a reaction to the world I consistently find relatable. Nonetheless, growing up in the aughts meant understanding Friends as the benchmark for what people wanted out of a sitcom. Over ten seasons and ubiquitous syndication, Monica, Rachel, Phoebe, Chandler, Joey, and yes, even Ross, calcified as America's favourite friend group.
Nearly two decades after its finale, Friends remains a key title in the streaming wars, just ask WarnerMedia. I can see the appeal: Friends is a comfort show for many, a place to turn with characters you know and love no matter what might go on in ‘real life' around you. Even so, I cannot help but avoid the fact that right now, in this chaotic world, Friends and shows like it only make me sad.
Even for my self-admitted Seinfeld bias, I was far from immune to Friends' charms. Growing up in small-town Maine has a way of making a tight-knit friend group in New York City seem like peak adulthood. I was nine when the original run came to a close, but all through middle and high school sick days and sleepovers, Friends ran through on TBS and Adult Swim.
The bug really took off for me when I discovered How I Met Your Mother, a show explicitly modeled to run on the Friends coattails when it premiered in 2005. Another multi-camera, NYC-set, friend-group-focused sitcom that played its cards to a nine-season run. Ted, Barney, Robin, Lily, and Marshall bled into the Friends crew. One amalgamation of antics, beautiful apartments, and an (relatively) easygoing chance for romance. It emerged as the aspiration for generations of young viewers.
Jump to 2022 and I am 26, the same age that Chandler was supposed to be in the first season of Friends. Only a year younger than Ted, Marshall, and Lily were listed as in the first season of How I Met Your Mother. The vision presented by those shows has gone from far-off fantasy to theoretical reality. For someone who writes about film and television, I imagine it's the equivalent of being a sports fan and realizing those athletes you idolize are in fact your age. If not, in fact, younger.
That crashing together of daydream and lived experience is a jarring shared aspect of anyone growing up. A part of progressing from dewy-eyed adolescent to, at least in this writer's case, far more cynical twenty-something. What fascinates me about the sitcom comp though is how the gap from Friends to now reflects so much of American culture.
Friends, How I Met Your Mother, and the visions of relative young adulthood they percolate represent a time when network television was the powerhouse. For NBC and CBS, the shows' respective homes, these sitcom hits were only especially floral additions to thriving schedules. HBO made waves with The Sopranos and The Wire, but that approach to television was still viewed as an outlier.
In short, a small group of broadcasters managed television norms based on what they saw as imminently profitable and appealing to the largest swathe of American viewers possible. Those norms have roots in the foundational years of television sitcoms. The I Love Lucy, The Andy Griffith Show, and All in the Family's of the world. This is not to diminish those towering shows, but only to point to the fact that the general functions of key network properties remained generally consistent.
The further we look past 9/11, the more American viewing habits turn away from that model. It's hard to nail down an exact timeline of when ‘Prestige TV' took over, but the progression from Breaking Bad to Game of Thrones and House of Cards provides a rather solid trio of shows that launched us out of a time when shows like Friends and How I Met Your Mother dominated the game.
Each of these shows started as a sort of underbelly. They tipped us towards darker, violent, and sexually explicit programs running on cable and streaming. Yes, network sitcoms like The Big Bang Theory and New Girl maintained their genre's popularity, but regarding the television landscape now, the dominance of a friend-group sitcom is staunchly rooted in a bygone era of American television. Meth, dragons, and zombies rule the day.
It is that transition that reflects a larger shift in American culture. Steps taken away from clear escapism to a reckoning with deeper flashpoints and discomforts. Therefore, for me, returning to Friends or How I Met Your Mother becomes a melancholy remembrance of the relative innocence that I had when I watched them. It is also a sharp divergence from the experiences I have now as a 26-year-old. I see their apartments and think “Jesus, you must have had a trust fund because no way you afford that in New York with student loans.” Or, “Wow, it would be so nice to go to a bar and sit around without wondering if I'll catch COVID.” More than anything, I'm sad, missing my friends and wishing it was all as easy as it looks.
Yes, this is a gnawing and personal reaction to media. Nonetheless, it is one friends, colleagues, and random people on the internet increasingly repeat. We are living through some of the most isolated times in modern history. Necessary public health lockdowns. Working from home. A probable culture-wide uptick in agoraphobic tendencies. It all means we simply do not have the same chance for access to our loved ones. To the adventures we aspired to when we watched them on television.
Layer on that a worldwide lean towards fascism, climate dread, and any other of the compounding crises, and it's hard for me not to experience Friends and its peers as less a comfort than a naive pipe dream. Maybe, just maybe the melancholy will lift if we collectively find a way through some of these crises. But, for now, I'll accept that, for all of these reasons, Courteney Cox with a turkey on her head may just make me cry.
