The other day, following the Internets wherever they would lead me, I came across this link offered as an elaboration on some joke or other. It appeared to be a very clever parody of a script of an episode of Friends. A brief excerpt (the entire first scene):
CENTRAL PERK (ALL PRESENT EXCEPT JOEY)
MONICA: Alright. Phoebe?
PHOEBE: Okay, okay. If I were omnipotent for a day, I would want, um, world peace, no more hunger, good things for the rain-forest… And bigger boobs!
ROSS: Yeah, see.. you took mine. Chandler, what about you?
CHANDLER: Uh, if I were omnipotent for a day, I’d.. make myself omnipotent forever.
RACHEL: See, there’s always one guy. (MOCKING) “If I had a wish, I’d wish for three more wishes.”
(ENTER JOEY)
ALL: Hey Joey. Hi. Hey, buddy.
MONICA: Hey, Joey, what would you do if you were omnipotent?
JOEY: Probably kill myself!
MONICA: ..Excuse me?
JOEY: Hey, if Little Joey’s dead, then I got no reason to live!
ROSS: Joey, uh- OMnipotent.
JOEY: You are? Ross, I’m sorry..
Brilliant, right? All the Friends chatting at Central Perk, the dialogue sounding just like exaggerated versions of the already grotesquely caricatured characters, their chatter even more inane, the jokes even more mild and unfunny than in the actual show.
Except, of course, that as I read further — it only dawned on me about halfway through the script — I realized that this was a transcription of a real Friends episode. I later confirmed with a couple of devotees of the show that there had in fact been an episode that included the Friends girls getting George Stephanopoulos’ pizza delivery by mistake (mushroom, green pepper, and onion).
I considered whether this episode seemed parodic because it happened to be particularly representative of the series, an ur-Friends. But thinking back on other episodes I realized that probably nearly every episode was just as representative, just as perfect an embodiment of that particular Friends vapidity.
I was never a Friends fan. I started watching it in the late ’90s, in reruns only, because it was on between The Simpsons and Seinfeld, right around the time I was sitting down in front of the TV with dinner. By this time it seemed that everyone in the country but me knew all the details about Rachel and Ross, how Phoebe came to be carrying her brother’s babies, and the backstories of each character that were laughably irrelevant to the character’s actions and manner.
(For example: Never in a million years, without viewing the handful of episodes in which this is mentioned, would I have thought that Ross was a paleontologist, of all things. Nothing about him suggests intellectual curiosity, intelligence, or the kind of dedication it takes to get through grad school. Except when his job provides color for some plot incident or joke, he seems as devoid of an actual career and educational history as any of the rest of the Friends — with the exception of Joey, who is convincingly integrated with his vocation as a bad, semi-employed actor. We can assume that Matt LeBlanc and the show’s writers drew deeply on their own experiences to attain such realism.)
As I unraveled the show’s bland and comforting mythology, I gradually began to seen how important a program it was, why it was so incredibly popular — a true “television event.” Friends was nothing less than a set of instructions for people my age about how to traverse their 20s. It’s a show about major Life Transitions: getting a job, starting and ending relationships, getting divorced, getting married, having children. The mild irony that is applied to everything else in the show is held in abeyance when the characters are in the midst of a Life Transition: Rachel gets a job other than waitressing, Ross gets engaged to the English girl and then flubs the wedding, Monica and Chandler fall in love, have a perfect wedding, and have a baby.
At the top of the hierarchy of Life Transitions are those connected with forming a heterosexual nuclear family. Finding the One is essential; Getting Married, in a lavishly expensive ceremony, must follow; having Offspring is then the payoff, the final transition away from the paradise represented by the oversized apartments and the endless hours of banter at Central Perk. Anything in the show can be mocked (Friends was contemporary with Seinfeld), but Monica’s need to have a perfect wedding cannot be mocked — it is in fact bedrock.
In a television show from my childhood, The Greatest American Hero, the protagonist, schoolteacher Ralph Hinkley (William Katt) finds a superhero suit of extraterrestrial origin. But it’s not self-evident how to use the suit’s powers. It came with an instruction manual of sorts, but the main comedy of the show is due to the protagonist’s having misplaced the manual for the suit and having to figure out how to use it on his own.
It turns out there was an audio-visual instruction manual for my generation, beginning with Fast Times at Ridgmont High and continuing through the John Hughes movies. I didn’t see most of these movies as a teenager, and when I discovered them in my early 20s I immediately recognized them as the missing manual for my adolescence. If only I’d seen The Breakfast Club, I would have known how to behave in high school. Friends was the next volume, showing kids my age how to quit their adolescent hijinks and get on with the complicated process of establishing an adult life as a worker, a lover, a consumer.
So does that make Thirtysomething my new guide? Unfortunately I never watched it, though I guess it’s probably out on dvd. I have felt kind of uncharted these past few years.
Lisa Parrish and I were talking about Thirtysomething last wkend. I was trying to figure out what it meant that I *loved* that show when I was a teenager. I wonder how I’d take it now.
I never really watched Thirtysomething. The baby-boomer self-absorption was unbearable. I’d say those of us now in our thirties need our own show. It was probably Six Feet Under, actually.
Though does it have the same manners handbook quality the others do?
Dave, I’m hopeful that this post won’t double back and clobber Friends. I absolutely adore that show and proudly own every season on DVD. Mockers be damned, it’s the quintessential series for our generation, a great pop culture touchstone, and perhaps the last “classic” sitcom.
To paraphrase Chandler, could it be any more fun and relevant?
uh-oh
Dave, I’m hopeful that this post won’t double back and clobber Friends.
G-Lock, I just said that every episode is self-parody. Could I be any more dismissive?
Bring it, Dave!
I know there’s no arguing with deeply ironic detachment, but can the fact that the show so favorably featured a lesbian couple raising a kid win it some favor?
P.S. I just adore dropping in here and being the token mainstream pop culture junkie who’s spoonfed vanilla corporate product and LOVING it! When I understand what the hell you crazy kids are all deconstructing and ranting about, that is.
ooh…can’t wait for part two. I am a Friends junkie– and spiral through crushes on the characters, playing the game of “who’s my favorite Friend?” regularly. Hands down winner: Chandler.
Funny that you mention Friends being an “instruction manual.” I’m inclined to agree. Working with high school kids these last years, I was able to talk about Friends with them (“Did you see last night’s episode, Miss?”). It seems like some of the more cynical and mocking behaviors we see in shows like Friends and The Simpsons were reflected in their interactions with each other. Kids are much more witty than I remember my friends ever being in high school (having been more influenced by never-ending reruns of Happy Days– or Molly Ringwald’s _Sixteen Candles_ eyeroll and “Shut. Up.” comebacks).
I loved Thirtysomething too. Because it was drama. Around the same time, was Moonlighting, remember?
Moonlighting: my introduction to Meta. Blew my mind.
I don’t think I’ve ever seen an entire episode of Friends but this post reminded me of a harrassment suit filed by someone who worked on the show. The writers apparently mocked the intelligence of/ said crude sexual things about some of the stars on the show. The judge threw out the suit claiming that comedy writing of this sort necessitated that the writers indulge in such formulations to construct the jokes. Not being a huge fan of the script excerpt, awful and yet dead-on in all of the ways that Dave mentions, this got me to thinking about the underlying cruelty of different kinds of comedy. Does writing such ruthlessly middlebrow entertainment somehow unleash a darker id than those writing edgier stuff where you really can touch upon some taboo busting humor?
Loved the post; always glad to talk about growing up, selling out, and how pop culture mediates such life transitions.
“being the token mainstream pop culture junkie who’s spoonfed vanilla corporate product and LOVING it! ”
Meet me at . . . BURGER KING!
(Oh wait, you were supposed to be the one with good taste.)
I loved 30something, even though I was 20something at the time. (The show’s rumoured DVD release continues to be delayed, presumably by the usual music rights issues that finance our lawfirm and my remodel).
Dave’s Friends fetish reminds me that my own actual demographic is practically invisible, awkwardly sandwiched between the baby boomers’ and the Gen Xer’s respective takes on self absorption. The TV show of my precise vintage is actually Freaks and Geeks, which was quickly cancelled….
One of my college roommates is a huge Friends fan so I’ve seen every episode more than once and recognized the one excerpted. We used to have discussions about which “friend” we each were. Everyone wants to be Chandler or Rachel. Of course, to my dismay, I got dubbed Phoebe. (I was the only one with a guitar?)
I had never thought about Friends as a life manual but I like your point. I’ve always preferred the early Friends because I feel like the characters in the later friends became caricatures of themselves, especially Ross and Phoebe. I still enjoy the later shows but cringe a little when Ross’ voice gets high pitched at the end of a so-called joke. (Ok, so really I was called Phoebe because I can be blunt. I hope David Schwimmer doesn’t read that though. On his behalf, he did a stellar job in the final episode when he professes his love for Rachel at the airport.)
Dave, I love Six Feet Under. I don’t think I’ve ever so full-heartedly loved tv characters before. I miss them sometimes.
I only ever watched a few Friends’ episodes, but that’s one of the first ones I saw. And one of the only ones I sat through—the humor on that sitcom tended to involve situations so unbearably embarrassing that I had to leave the room.
I remember that I found out Ross was a paleontologist in the episode where he and Rachel end up doing it in the cavemen diorama (or something), and waking up naked in front of an aghast public the next morning. My reaction: yeah, right. Not only did Ross not seem like he could have made it through grad school, but he didn’t seem like a person who could pull off being a real paleontologist, even just an academic one, for one day.
Thank god I have the Golden Girls to look forward to one day. I’ll just wander aimlessly from my forties to my sixties, maybe picking up a couple of life lessons from Law & Order on my way.
And yeah, Ross is a dumbshit most the time, though I think I did like him the first couple seasons. Then he just became pure annoyance.
Courteney Cox was robbed of an Emmy nomination all those years. Every one else got at least one. Even Matt LeBlanc!!