In defense of Friends
(This is Bringing the Heat, an as-often-as-I-feel-like-it feature where I say something that will probably get me yelled at on Twitter.)
When the kids are asleep, my wife and I watch TV. I was also going to say “when the kids are quiet,” but since that has never actually happened, that part would be strictly theoretical. So when they go to bed, we watch TV.
Usually, that means a newer episode of some show we like — she is a huge fan of Masked Singer, we both watch the daily Highly Questionable episodes, when our daughter is around we watch baking shows on Food Network, and RIP The Good Place. When we catch up on the most recent things (this is exceedingly rare), we try to circle back to something we’re way behind on. For example, we watched the first season and a half of This Is Us, Laurie loves it, I like it well enough. But babies make consistent TV show commitments difficult, so while we’re about 30 episodes into the show, it’s at 69 and in the middle of its fourth season, and we’re way behind. So (again, this is largely theoretical) when we catch up on everything else, we backtrack and watch shows like that that we’re way behind on.
But sometimes we don’t want to pay attention to something, we watch a lot of Friends.
Because there are a billion and seven different channels and a generation that subsists on nostalgia more than on food (and I’m not remotely pretending I’m above this), Friends is on in syndication on thirty-eleven different channels, which means you can almost always find it somewhere, and since we haven’t cut the cord yet, it’s easy to toss on.
Friends has gotten a bad reputation in recent years — not entirely undeserved! — but as mindless entertainment to have on when you just want some form of entertainment that you can jump into and out of without needing to pay attention (especially in a sportsless world), there’s not much better. So I want to address some of the Friends and Friends-adjacent comments I see in the world:
Seinfeld was better: This is abjectly untrue. It had some quotable moments and memorable scenes, but overall, Seinfeld was a bad show, or at the very least it was a fine show that has aged horribly. Either way, Seinfeld is unwatchable in 2020. Sorry, it’s true.
Friends is very problematic: True! If for no reason other than homophobia, Friends has not aged well socially. But then, that’s true of almost every show more than 10 years old. How I Met Your Mother is 10 years newer than Friends, and it struggled in this regard sometimes. If you want to completely close out problematic television (not a bad goal at all!), you basically need to cut out any shows made before about 2013. And that is a totally fair thing to do, but this certainly isn’t something exclusive to Friends.
(One note here: I’ve seen online criticisms of the very-criticizable Ross that he was very dismissive of Carol and Susan’s relationship, and I just want to say here that it was categorically untrue. He never once expressed any issue with his ex-wife being a lesbian — the closest he came was when he didn’t want Ben to play with a Barbie — with most of his issues being the fact that Susan was often pretty cruel to him. But eventually he even got past that. Ross had a lot of awful traits — read below! — but homophobia toward his ex-wife was not one of them.)
Phoebe was the best one: This is horrific! The Good Place indicated that Phoebe was the only one of the friends in the Good Place, and I’ve seen people say this lots of places. Phoebe was the worst member of the group, and it wasn’t close. They should have Kipped her early on. Two out of every three Phoebe plots consisted of “Friend does thing. Phoebe criticizes Friend for doing thing because it goes against Phoebe’s beliefs. Phoebe then does thing.” That happened a hundred damn times. Phoebe was an asshole. Don’t like Phoebe.
Ross was the worst one: True, non-Phoebe division! Ross was a possessive jerk, particularly in his Rachel relationship, but really the jealousy was an issue in all of his relationships (remember him playing rugby to compete with Emily’s ex? Horning in on Elizabeth’s Spring Break?) that was pretty damning, even if the show tried to retcon a fix by saying Carol’s betrayal broke him and made him a jealous person? Does that absolve him? Nah. Does it explain it? A bit. On the other hand, David Schwimmer, while a ham in a lot of ways, was easily the show’s best physical actor. He could do slapstick better than any two other friends combined. That’s just one thing, but it helps.
Continuity? What continuity? If Friends had come about in a internettier era, the show would have had to focus more on continuity than the “none at all” it did. The worst offense? Okay, so in the pilot, Ross had bid his wife goodbye as she left him for Susan. In Episode 2, he finds out she’s pregnant. Fine! That works out! Then in Season 3, we get the flashback episode to exactly a year before the pilot. The flashback includes Ross finding out Carol was a lesbian. So we have to assume Ross spent the better part of a year living with his wife and pretending to still be a committed heterosexual couple, up to and including her letting him have, what, sympathy sex? And all of this while carrying on a relationship with Susan, who was apparently okay with the situation? It’s all gibberish, and that’s even before the knowledge that that had to be in 1993 but then in another episode Ross says he and Joey went to see Dances with Wolves (released in 1990) together. I know this is just internet-era nitpicking, but the continuity is so, so bad.
(Also, I would have loved an explanation as to why Rachel and Monica went from absolute best-in-the-world high school friends to “Monica’s not even invited to a $40,000 wedding” people in about five years’ time, but I think the explanation there was “just go with it, okay?”)
Was Friends a perfect show, even at its peak? Absolutely not. But the people who denigrate it now do so from what I can only assume is an elitist view. Friends was a perfectly fine show when it was new, and it’s a perfectly fine “have it on as background noise” show now. If you want more than that? Well, you can find it. But there has always been and still is a place for mindless entertainment, and Friends fills that role.