Aug 28 2008
I Like The Friends
Last week, feeling sort of blue, I mixed a martini, climbed into my sleeping bag and settled on the couch to wait it out. This being the tail end of the summer, there was very little for me zone out to on TV and even MTV, which I can normally trust for some mindless show about some fat and socially inept kid being “made” into a break dancer, was showing a marathon of The Hills, pretty much the only reality TV show I refuse to watch. Anyway, I found myself stuck with TBS, whose new motto seems to be “very funny” (I guess got TNT got the drama, so funny was all that was left).
“Very Funny” apparently means lots of episodes of Friends, an association I did not necessarily agree with right off the bat (actually I still don’t agree with it). The thing is, I haven’t watched Friends since college, when I had the world’s worst roommate (if anyone wants I will write about it, but the story is short on the humor and heavy on the seriously annoying). The World’s Worst roommate had a rainman-like obsession with Friends and in addition to owning all of the seasons on VHS (or was it DVD at that point… how old am I?) talked about them almost constantly like they were real people. “Monica is SOOOO into cleaning,” she would tell me, looking up as I walked in, interrupting her eating cheese doodle and watching Friends time (which was all the time as far as I could tell). “Oh, okay.” I would respond. Her complete love of Friends, combined with her pure horribleness ruined the entire show for me and automatically made me suspicious from there on out of anyone that said they liked it (which at the time was about 99% of America). Anyway, I haven’t watched it since, and last week, when I heard the familiar Friends theme song, I suffered a small but significant shudder like former water torture victims gets when someone turns on the sink. But before I could change the channel I was sucked into watching. And then, something happened. The Friends won me back over.
In my defense, Friends is very colorful. I mean seriously, they all wear bright colors and adorable outfits. Also, like every single set piece is some shade of late 90s vibrant pastel, the kind of colors that call out “Hey, you on the couch, don’t be so sad! Look at these oversized colorful mugs Monica has, and Rachel’s mesmerizing hair, and Chandler’s sweater vest. Everything is going to be okay!” In addition, there is something spellbinding about the laugh track to that show and how dependable the “ohhhs and ahhs” and canned laughter are. The characters are dependable too. Pretty much they can all be summed up in a few words. Monica: likes to cook and is anal. Joey: dumb, likes food. Chandler: funny. And so on. Since the characters are so easy to grasp and it doesn’t take years of watching and analyzing to understand all their subtleties and nuances, you can just sort of flip it on and go with it. For instance, the episode I watched happened to be about Thanksgiving. In it all of these elements worked perfectly. Joey really likes to eat, so he was excited about the turkey. Monica was cooking the turkey and being anal. Chandler made a bunch of funny comments. No wonder people in other countries like to watch the Friends. Even if my understanding of the English language was very low, as long as I got the basic elements of show and characters, the bright colors and laugh track could carry the rest.
So when you are lying on the couch drinking alone and being incredibly depressed in a sleeping bag, Friends is an ideal show to watch. The colors are distracting, everyone behaves predictably (for instance, when Joey walks into a room there’s a 95% chance he’ll say “how you doing” ). The most stressful things that seem to happen to any of them is that they have silly long term crushes on each other that they keep secret for one reason or another. I owe Jennifer Aniston and the rest of the crew a sincere apology for the years I spent making statements like “that show is tailor-made for idiots.” I still think the show is for idiots, but I guess sometimes that’s not such a bad thing.
