Notes Partway through a Friends Rewatch — Touched with Fire Media

In baseball people talk a lot about “adjusting for era”. Baseball has been played professionally for so long, and in so many different places and styles, that there’s a solid argument to be made that, though the rules remained unchanged, the game itself is several different games played under the same name. Segregation, equipment, training techniques, drug use, evolving tactics, the advent of the personal computer, artifical turf, the influx of Latino and Asian players, mallparks — the list of ways in which the game has changed goes on and on. Though the myth of baseball is that it’s immutable and eternal, in truth it’s a game in constant flux.

Part of adjusting for era is “timelining” — for a variety of reasons, it’s fairly safe to say that the average ballplayer of 2015 is better than the average ballplayer of 1915. It’s a difficult, and therefore controversial, task. A lot of it boils down to questions like: “Just how good would Ty Cobb be if you dropped him in centerfield today?” Some people are really allergic to the notion that a player of Cobb’s caliber might not really be that good by today’s standards, though it seems patently obvious to me. I’m not going to get into a lot of debates about why — this post isn’t really about baseball — but suffice it to say that I keep coming down on the same side. Baseball players, like television shows, are much better than they used to be.

See, what I really want to write about is not baseball, but television. For reasons that I’m kind of at a loss to enumerate, I’ve been watching Friends in a lot of my idle time over the last week or two, to the point that I’m almost halfway done with a show that lasted way longer than I remembered (ten seasons, per Wikipedia). And I’m tempted to try to timeline the show in the way one might a player like Ty Cobb. Friends was one of the truly titanic hits of the 1990s, the last period before cable channels and low-risk micronetworks like the WB started putting together quality shows that ultimately raised the bar for TV everywhere. The Sopranos began airing in 1999, during Friends’ fifth season. A lot of people see that show as the watershed moment when everything changed, and the path was paved for everything from Breaking Bad to Game of Boobs and all else in between. Friends is a resolutely pre-watershed show, a multi-camera laughtrack sitcom on which serialization is spotty at best, very little changes episode-to-episode, and there are never any gestures toward realism or real stakes for a group of beautiful, wacky twentysomethings. I’ve read some of the early reviews, which now seem strange, as though they’re about a show that was more interesting or daring than Friends was, but I guess that’s because I live in the future. Hindsight and foresight, etc.

And so I’m tempted to forgive the show’s many foibles, the same way I would look at Ty Cobb and say, “Hey, maybe half of ballplayers these days are faster than him, but he had blazing speed for his time.” A lot of the things that feel artificial and bad about Friends are simply conventions of the sitcom that have largely been exploded in the 20 years since it went on the air: so what if everything’s airbrushed; so what if there’s an audience that laughs when you’re supposed to laugh and goes woooooo when characters they like kiss or gives a big hand when the star of another sitcom wanders onstage;* so what if nothing ever really changes and it takes years for anybody to learn lessons most of us learn in a couple of weeks. That’s just TV, or it was in the 1990s, and had been for decades before. Right?

*This was a common gambit for Friends. In its first season it has Helen Hunt playing her character from Mad About You (I had to think long and hard as to why she was eliciting the canned applause), and features a long run from Tom Selleck, still sporting his Magnum moustache. As the show became a titanic success (it never ranked outside the top 5 in the Neilsens from its 2nd through its 10th seasons), this came almost to be self-parody, as the celebrity guest stars included peripheral members of Britain’s royal family, Aniston’s real-life beau Brad Pitt, Julia Roberts, Jean-Claude van Damme, George Clooney as a doctor in a parody of his role on ER, Robin Williams, Billy Crystal, Bruce Willis, Charlton Heston as Himself, Sean Penn, Susan Sarandon, Jeff Goldblum, Danny DeVito, and a laundry list of others.

Well, yeah, I guess. But the fact of the matter is that a lot of shows were both bound by these conventions, and vastly better than Friends was. I guess because comedy has always been kind of sneered at by the entertainment industry, it found a home on TV long before there were very good dramas there. Nearly all the shows that anybody still watches from before about 1980 are comedies: Dick van Dyke, Mary Tyler Moore, I Love Lucy, Barney Miller. These shows were attracting the top available talent in the world of comedy, both in the writers’ rooms and onscreen. And though drama began to catch up in the 80s and has since gone rocketing on past, that remained true for a long time. Still does, really. A huge number of sitcoms, even ones that aren’t very good, are going to be overstocked with performers (especially performers) who are hugely talented and hilarious.

Just to take one show that has been kinda on my mind lately, The Drew Carey Show. Drew Carey was a middling show that had a fair amount of success — it ran 9 seasons, but never cracked the top 10, peaking at #13 for a couple of years in the middle of its run. On this show, this show that I remember almost nothing about other than that its main character was annoying, there were four people who you could probably style as some kind of genius: Ryan Stiles, Dietrich Bader, Christa Miller, and Craig Ferguson. That’s four hilarious performers, probably all powerful enough as presences to anchor their own show, just floating around the edges of Drew Carey’s semihit sitcom. You can perform this kind of trick with almost any sitcom, from a huge hit (all four of Frasier’s main cast members would probably be the funniest person you’ve ever met), to a cult classic (Get a Life starred Chris Elliott and Brian Doyle-Murray, and boasted Bob Odenkirk and Charlie Kaufmann in the writers’ room), to some notable bombs (Buddies starred Dave Chappelle; Cavemen featured Nick Kroll). You know all those people who have Comedy Central shows and hit podcasts and write books and stuff now? For years, they toiled as a sort of comedia dellarte for Hollywood sitcoms.

Friends just doesn’t have any of that. Other than Lisa Kudrow, who plays the dingbat hippie chick Phoebe, and maybe — maybe — Matthew Perry, who plays the sarcastic wimpy homophobe Chandler, none of the stars of the show are particularly notable for their comic chops. Mostly they’re notable for being cute, white, and stylishly dressed.** Some of them — especially the schlubby Eeyore, David Schwimmer, who plays Ross, on whom more anon — are downright bad. There’s a reason that the show is often at its best when it opens up its world to incorporate the friends’ bosses and families: because then you can rope in some real dynamos, even if the show did remain beholden to stunt casting. (I mean, I know Terri Garr and Elliot Gould are funny, but was it really necessary to go spelunking through the caves of 70s movie stars to find Phoebe’s mom and Monica’s dad?)

** What was accounted “stylish” in the 90s was considerably less offensive than 10 years previously, but still, there are a lot of pleated pants and big ties and floppy haircuts.

I’m often left with the feeling that Kudrow is battling bad scripts and a lame supporting cast to a sort of pyrrhic victory, landing a few funny punches before being swamped by a wave of mugging, whining, and shouting. It seems weird to me now that the breakout star of the show’s early going was Jennifer Aniston, whose Rachel is so generic that there are still guessing games going on about the character’s ethnic background, when the answer is clearly telegraphed in the dialogue, if not the performance. (Yes, Rachel is Jewish. And yes, she comes from Long Island money. Not that you’d be able to tell from Aniston’s blandly middle-American performance.) Cox is marginally more competent, but the boys — oh, the boys of Friends. Where to begin?

Really, the huge, ugly, terrible problem with Friends’ early seasons is Ross, and his odious crush on / relationship with Rachel. Ross is a mopey, whiny “nice guy” of the sort who these days seem to spend most of their time threatening to cut women’s heads off on Twitter; maybe this is just a context thing, but his constant mooning and attempts at manipulation seem gross and insincere at the remove of 20 years — maybe, in 1995, nerds were still so downtrodden and pathetic-seeming that we were meant to feel sorry for him; in 2015, he’s the guy with the coolest job (paleontologist sounds awesome), the most steady income, and by far the weirdest relationship to women. Joey (Matt LeBlanc), the promiscuous hunk next door, is often depicted as the pig — but it’s Ross who’s always lying and hiding things in order to get women to like him. Joey just likes sex. And I get it, Ross has a bit of a tough go of it. As the show starts, it’s explained that he married a closeted lesbian straight out of college and has now been rocked deeply by her affair with a woman he thought was merely her friend. He’s 26 (? I think), he doesn’t have a lot of experience, and a girl he had a hopeless crush on in high school suddenly plops right back into his social circle. I think that would throw anybody for a loop. But Jesus, does he have to mope and moan so much about it? Does he have to be secretive about it for so long? Gawd. I found myself muting his scenes.

And then, of course, the preposterous notion that this approach would actually win over a beautiful and relatively confident young woman like Rachel, who appears to have a lot of money, a lot of time on her hands, and the sexual smorgasbord of New York City at her feet. The instant the show’s writers decided to dump all their eggs in this basket, they made a huge blunder. (I was going to say a costly blunder, but I can’t imagine a scenario in which the show made more money, so maybe it wasn’t costly.) It forced them to write scenes for two characters with no chemistry, and to try to get us to believe that, once all is said and done, Rachel has strong, lingering feelings for the jealous loser who ruined a whole year of her life. It prevented them from sending Ross somewhere far away — Kazakhstan, maybe, or the moon — from whence it would be difficult to return, so that we wouldn’t have to deal with his moping and whining. And after the characters broke up it injected a tone of hostility into the show that really made it hard to watch for quite a while.

Which is where we get into the stuff where I start wondering about timelining. A lot of the features of the show I find most annoying also seem like maybe they were more common before the advent of the cable prestige show or the online binge watch:

(1) Is Chandler in a relationship with Janice or not? (Sub-question: does the fact that the show was created and staffed largely by Jews change how we feel about the fact that Janice reads like a broad, anti-Semitic stereotype?) Throughout the show’s third and fourth seasons, sometimes she’s there with him, sometimes she’s not, and it’s hard to tell when or why that's going to happen. They’ll break up in one episode and then be companionably sharing a couch at Central Perk the next, with no comment. It’s baffling.

(2) Secrecy is a theme. Ross’ crush on Rachel is a secret, which I guess kinda makes sense, though it goes on way too long. Chandler and Monica’s relationship is a secret from everybody, and then a secret from everybody but Joey, then a secret from everybody but Joey and Rachel, and finally only a secret from Ross, for reasons that are never adequately explained. People do insane things to keep these secrets, things with consequences far greater than simply owning up to the truth — as, for instance, when Monica pretends to have had a one-night-stand with Joey, followed by a long-term stalking kind of situation, all in an attempt to keep Ross and Rachel from figuring out that she’s in the midst of a simple, committed relationship with Chandler, a fairly nice, steadily-employed guy who Ross and Rachel already know and like. WHAT?

(3) “Don’t touch my butt. If you touch my butt, it means we’re gay.” A running theme in the friendship between Joey and Chandler is that various things that might occur between them push some kind of “no homo” button, and must be warded off as though they are spells that will in fact turn them gay. (The unstated thesis being that homosexuality is gross or unpleasant in some way.) It feels like there’s one of these in every episode — the one I remember best is from a football game, in which Chandler requests that Joey not stand directly behind him waiting for the snap of the ball, as that brings Joey’s hands perilously close to Chandler’s butt. This is one of those things where I’m a little lost as to how much we should be timelining this kind of thing. On the one hand, this kind of weird paranoia was a feature of many male friendships back in the 90s, especially for young, insecure men. But I don’t remember it featuring heavily in most shows of the time. Were there a lot of jokes about how Jerry and George were afraid of crossing the line into gayness on Seinfeld? Were Norm and Cliff worried about that stuff on Cheers? If they were, I don’t remember it. I’ve been trying to give this the most charitable reading I can imagine — for instance, that this is a self-conscious mocking of this kind of behavior, and that Joey and Chandler are the butts of these jokes. But it doesn’t feel that way, not to me, and it’s returned to so many times that it begins to feel like an obsession.

(4) Dating merry-go-round. I guess this is just what the show was about, but seriously, don’t these guys ever think about anything other than dating? Don’t they have thoughts about. . . anything else? I guess that Ross and Joey are notionally sports fans, and Monica is into food, but mostly even their tastes are defined by dating and sex: the boys’ favorite TV show is Baywatch, for instance; Rachel keeps a shitty job because she has a cute client who she might want to date; even Phoebe, who at least appears to have some interests and hobbies, picks and chooses restaurants and workplaces based on the cute guys who are there.

(5) Backstory, with the American History Guys. When some form of backstory is needed, it’s often simply fabricated, and inserted into the show suddenly, with a sort of, “You remember that guy, don’t you?” speech. Again, if I felt like this were being done knowingly, with a wink to the audience, this might work as a sort of meta-joke. But that’s 21st century TV thinking there. (Or at least, it isn’t Friends TV thinking. Friends resists the meta, the commentarial, the considered, the ironic, the self-aware, and the edgy at all costs.) This is just: we need Chandler to have had a friend who he dropped because he dated Monica and they broke up. Notwithstanding Monica’s “I’m so unlucky in love!” schtick (almost as tired and bad as Ross’ mopey niceguy routine), they just shove it right in there, make two jokes about it, and forget it forever.

The list goes on and on, obviously. Can you see how I’m thinking about timelining? A lot of this stuff was common practice in TV before the golden age you keep hearing about. TV was a safe world where nothing really mattered and certainly little ever changed, and Friends was not operating out of any desire whatsoever to change any of that. So is it Friends’ fault that it was making what I account “mistakes” but which at the time were just the way things were done? Probably not. Probably I just have unrealistic expectations for a show that only seems current because I’m watching it on Netflix and I’m old enough to remember when it was on the air.***

***I didn’t watch Friends when it was on, by the way, though I’ve been surprised by the amount of ambient Friends knowledge that has leaked into my brain. I came into the show basically knowing who all the characters are — even some of the peripheral ones, like Rachel’s creepy boss Gunther — and have not been particularly surprised by any development. Did I watch a bunch of this show and forget about it? Seems possible.

And it is, very occasionally, funny. I mean, there’s no moment that equals even a smidge of what Niles gets up to in the early seasons of Frasier, but now and again something happens — as when Joey locks Chandler in a box for Thanksgiving dinner, as a punishment for having kissed Joey’s girlfriend — that is wacky enough to get some laughs. And the show does get a little better in its middle seasons, not least because Cox and Aniston and Matt Leblanc, who plays Joey, become competent, if not brilliant, comedic actors. (Schwimmer, unfortunately, remains a dark cloud on the show’s horizon. Perry and Kudrow were fine from the start.) But it’s not that great.

So why do I keep watching it? I was gonna make some kind of similitude involving the show’s title, about how, despite its flaws, it offers companionship — I think I’ve read that a lot of people relate to TV characters in that way without even knowing it. But I don’t like these people. If they were my friends, I’d be trying to find new ones. So — I don’t know. I’m at a loss. I should probably quit.