Friends Like Us — Cultural Digest #6
The warm, familiar comfort of nostalgia.
Up until the Summer of last year I had only ever watched Friends as it aired in real time, during the ‘90s and early ‘00s. I, like everyone else I knew, loved it. As a teen I was champing at the bit for the freedoms afforded those in their 20s but particularly for the hilarious happenings and infatuations going down at Central Perk.
My own gang at the time made up of a group of boys and girls who marginally outnumbered the six Friends, would gather every day at lunch on the playground benches to debate ‘Life’ as if bunched up on our own peachy pink plush sofa, playing at being adults. Looking back, there’s no doubt that we were trying to emulate what was happening on screen. It was both exhilarating and embarrassingly self-important and pretentious. But then, as Monica, Rachel, Phoebe, Joey, Ross and Chandler, edged towards their early to mid 30s, the show began to focus more on marriage and children than dating and sex, so rather than us growing out of them, they sort of outgrew us and we gradually stopped watching it.
Occasionally I’d see there was an episode playing, a rerun, but I wouldn’t get sucked in like I might do if Clueless or some other ‘90s nostalgic delight came on the TV just before midnight. I’d replaced Friends with cringe comedies like The Office, and then later, darker more fashionable dramadies and more recent sitcoms too — I am a self-proclaimed mega fan of Parks and Recreation. Friends no longer seemed relevant to me. My memory of it paled into insignificance. I even briefly met Jennifer Aniston at the SAG Awards in 2020 but didn’t let it overwhelm me. Then when I found myself in LA last Summer, suddenly with every available streaming network at my fingertips, which included HBO Max that Friends resides on in the US along with Friends: The Reunion, something peaked my curiosity.
The reunion was inevitably overflowing with nostalgia as well as unbelievable behind the scenes gossip. Of course when the show was first airing there was no internet to be tracking anything and everything bts related. Jennifer Aniston and David Schwimmer’s first season crush was a total gasp-worthy revelation, there was a catwalk of their most memorable costumes which focussed more on the funny than the fashionable — where was Rachel’s Season 3 green dress I ask you?? The cast revisited the set, examining every last detail of it in a way we’d all wanted to do ourselves, revealing secrets behind doors and underneath worktops. They reenacted some of their most iconic scenes, eyes pricked with fond memories and sharing some of the more challenging ones too. But even with the darker undertones of Matthew Perry’s historic and now widely known struggle with addiction droning faintly underneath it all, it was glorious. Especially given my layers of understanding as someone now inside the industry myself, who was literally filming a new US sitcom on an equivalent sound stage a stone’s throw from where they filmed Friends. Immediately I found myself sucked back in to the fabricated New York lives of these six mid 20s ridiculously good looking humans so I decided to take myself back there proper, to the very beginning.
I quickly realised I’d never seen any of Season 1 at all and when I eventually got to them, none of the last three seasons either — I watched it the entire way through pretty much all in one fell swoop. Inevitably perhaps, some of it hadn’t aged brilliantly but otherwise, I was completely blown away. It was relentlessly funny in a way that I couldn’t appreciate at the time and in a way that I don’t know that any other show has ever achieved. Its character development is flawless, the storylines don’t miss a beat and what’s more, it sustains it for 10 seasons. Without catching a breath I rolled straight back around and started it all over again. Since then I have watched it all the way through twice more and I’m about to complete round three.
I do this a lot by the way. I repeat watch. I repeat read. I repeat listen. Last year my Spotify Wrapped classified me under possibly the most boring of all their categories — the Replayer:
“You’re a comfort listener. You stick with the songs you like, by the artists you like, from whenever and wherever. Why rock the boat?”
This isn’t a new trend either. The films from my childhood I have watched in excess of 50 times each, easily. Maybe even 100s. I would consistently put on A Bug’s Life or Finding Nemo or Chicken Run when I would get home from school or at the weekends. Even earlier than that it would be Willy Wonka or The Snowman or Mary Poppins that we’d recorded off the TV with all its big hair 80s adverts and glitchy grainy VHS charm built in. At Christmas the same but different: Home Alone or The Grinch would be churned out repeatedly, Elf too. I will not get through a December without consuming all of these and much more besides. More recently I have added other, more (beloved) highbrow titles to the mix: Carol and Little Women.
During Christmas 2020 I remember noticing how scarce most channels were for content because I must have found myself watching the two Paddingtons at least three times in the space of a little over a week, not that I minded one bit. And to be honest, Christmas movies I don’t just reserve for the end of the year. Apropos of not very much, probably just hearing it mentioned on Brett Goldstein’s film podcast quite a lot, I watched The Muppet Christmas Carol for the first time in May 2021 and have watched it repeatedly since then, at all times of the year. As a general rule I also watch Disney films constantly.
The reason I love to read, the reason I love to watch TV shows and movies, the reason I love to act, is to get lost in those worlds. I not only love watching Friends I want to be in it. Not as an actor, I want it to be real and to magically exist inside it forever. I’m only realising now that’s maybe why I had an out-of-body experience when Rob Lowe was stood in front of me whilst filming my new TV show Unstable, because I had watched him in Parks and Rec start to finish, front to back, side to side, cover to cover, Episode 1 all the way through to Episode 124, at least fifteen times. It makes you feel like you know someone when you don’t — maybe I didn’t freak out because I was on set with Rob Lowe, maybe I freaked out because I was on set with Chris Traeger. Schitt’s Creek is another show I do this with, perhaps because like Parks and Friends it has episodes just over 20 minutes each so they are very easy to snack on.
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I know consciously that what I am seeking is the safety and security of comfort. Of nostalgia. The familiar. The known. I watch new things too but if given the choice I will always opt for the habitual. I imagine this has something to do with needing to redress the balance within my life as an actor, a life of not knowing — job insecurity, financial insecurity, endless rejection alongside a healthy dollop of anxiety and neuroses. Delicious. It may also have something to do with the instability that we’re experiencing globally, politically, environmentally. I get overwhelmed by that stuff very easily. I get anxious just thinking about other actors being cast in Friends ffs — if it wasn’t for that exact combination of six people would it have been the phenomenon that it was? I’m not sure. I have heard some people say the same of Fleabag occasionally and have disputed it in the past but in the context of Friends I think I know what they mean.
During the broadcast reunion, Marta Kauffman, one of the creators of Friends, revealed that the other actor of the two at the final audition to play Joey, ended up playing his ‘twin’ in an episode where Joey is attempting to participate in a paid medical study for identical twins, and whilst that actor is wonderful, imagining him as Joey is so at odds with the group dynamic as we know it I find it genuinely unsettling that that could have ever been. It literally makes my brain feel like it’s being turned inside out.
Same with the working titles for Friends, which included: Insomnia Cafe, Six of One and Across The Hall. I’m not saying it’s rational but they make me physically baulk. Eventually Friends Like Us is where they’d landed by the time casting came around and obviously dropped the tail end of that before the show actually aired. Somehow anything other than Friends just doesn’t feel right. It might sound futile but these terrifying precipices are what the success of a show live and die by, all the magical (but enormously technical) elements that need to come together for something to transcend regular run-of-the-mill programming. It is never one thing, it is all of things working together in alchemical harmony. That’s why it’s so rare. That’s also why it scares me because perhaps it wasn’t destined, perhaps it just so happened that on that occasion it happened like that and thankfully, came together. Although I’m going to take reassurance from the episode where Phoebe goes on a date with a man she believes is Monica’s soulmate, but Monica and Chandler are already married. Phoebe brings ‘Don’ to the coffee house and sure enough, Monica and this guy immediately hit it off but then when Chandler freaks out, she reassures him:
Monica: I don’t believe in soulmates, either.
Chandler: You don’t?
Monica: No. I don’t think that you and I were destined to end up together. I think that we fell in love and we work hard at our relationship. Some days, we work really hard.
Chandler: So, you don’t want to live with Don in a cheese house?
Monica: No, I’ve had second thoughts about that. Do you realize how hard that would be to clean?
Friends, Season 8 Episode 16
Friends taught me the fundamentals of friendship and navigating romance - not necessarily successfully but nonetheless watching it back it is extraordinary to me how hugely formative the experience of watching Friends was on my life - not so paled into insignificance now! Watching it as an adult, repeatedly, I am also getting enormous satisfaction from what it’s teaching me about the person I’ve become and how it’s reminding me of where I started. Friends like us? Yes, please.
I remember not really relating to Phoebe as a teenager but now with pleasing irony it’s clear to me she’s the one I’m most like, with shades of Monica’s obsessive cleanliness and organisation too. There are actual outfits of both Monica and Rachel’s that Topshop must have done cheap knock offs of because I definitely owned them to try to be them, but ultimately I was trying to squeeze myself into a mould of cool that didn’t fit. I, like many people at the time also regrettably got ‘the Rachel’ - I was delighted to find an interview with Jennifer Aniston where she says that her hairdresser was experimenting when he did her hair like that and that he ultimately left her with a style that could only be worked by a professional — guys, IT WASN’T JUST US. Whilst down this same Youtube wormhole I also found this incredible Friends: The One That Goes Behind The Scenes special, quality isn’t great but it’s a fascinating insight into the making of the show for fans. It also covers so many of the different roles within the film and television industry and how things get made, I think it’s pretty interesting in and of itself particularly for anyone who’s thinking of joining the film industry.
Recently
wrote about how she manages to read so much, because of how many other things she doesn’t do — essentially because she prioritises reading. In the writing of this I realise I am exactly the same — a little with books but predominantly with my fervent consumption of movies and television. I will pluck time out of thin air to watch anything and everything but mostly lots of the same thing. Over and over and then begin again. I guess, where some people reach for the comfort of food, I will forever reach for stories and Friends.Anyone else a Friends obsessive that can’t handle the idea of an alternate reality cast? Do you reach for the comfort of the familiar in your viewing habits or do you thrive on watching something new? What’s something you really enjoyed watching recently? I’d love to hear from you!
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