Unless the “Friends” end on some really surprising note, like moving together to Utah or throwing a big Moonie-style wedding in Yankee stadium, it appears that the nuclear family will out in the end. Whether Ross and Rachel get together once more for old times’ sake is immaterial at this point. For years, NBC tried to replicate the show’s success, only to produce steadily more disappointing results that ended, mortifyingly, in “Coupling.” Nobody blames the network for backing off for a while, but nobody blames the twentysomethings for ending up on “Paradise Hotel,” “The Bachelor” and “The Apprentice” and trying to get something out of the deal, either. The theory that doesn’t quite explain why, after all that effort, there aren’t any more twentysomething comedies on TVĪrguably, no show was cloned as often as “Friends.” Ultimately, the show that would launch a thousand failed sitcoms about urban tribes and cute single people prompted a backlash against its own kind. The one where everybody cannibalizes New York before New York is altogether dead Reader, they all started marrying each other. The one where they all eventually bow down and conform (Remember when everybody thought Phoebe and Joey were the next, inevitable item?) Of course, in real life, friends fall out, get married, move away and drift off, making the urge to pair-bond before it’s too late that much stronger. “Friends” presented the idea of a never-changing but ever-evolving core of friends as a set of recombinant genes. On “Friends,” especially during the early years of the swinging Clinton era, looking for love in all the wrong places was considered, if not a noble pursuit, then at least a fine way to kill time between congressional hearings. “Seinfeld” viewers, by contrast, were constantly reminded of why Jerry, George, Kramer and Elaine were single - they were bad and deserved to be punished. “Friends’ ” principal innovation, other than assembling a group of people who looked like they might hang out together and letting them do so unsupervised, seems to have been its willingness to let the characters be single and likable. But fans of Ross, Rachel, Monica, Chandler, Phoebe and Joey wanted to copy their hair, wear their clothes, live in their town and mail them their underwear. Other characters on other sitcoms had been popular, widely recognized, iconic, funny even. In no time, the sextet of buddies in their early 20s (remember way back when?) frolicking in a storybook Manhattan (remember way back never?) became pop idols in ways few sitcom stars before them had. Canadian forests were felled in service to the subject of Aniston’s hair. Entire magazines would spring fully formed from the head of Bonnie Fuller to track their various haircuts, drug addictions, weight fluctuations, romantic involvements and sweatpants preferences. Within a few short years of its debut, David Schwimmer, Jennifer Aniston, Courteney Cox Arquette, Matthew Perry, Lisa Kudrow and Matt LeBlanc would be canonized by Time Warner. As “Friends” - peerless sitcommernaut of the ‘90s and beyond - rolls out the last two installments in its 230-plus-episode, multibillion-dollar run, it’s funny to remember what a hesitant, conflicted latecomer to the Gen X-ploitstation genre it was, way back in 1994.īut the show not only defied its own life expectancy, it outlived its original premise and the mostly media-manufactured “trend” that inspired it.
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