2014 - A Friends Odyssey

On the twentieth anniversary of Friends, I decided to take some time off from trashing your favourite movies and patronisingly telling you to widen your horizons. Instead, I will finally let out my conflicting emotions about one of the most popular and influential sitcoms of all time.

To say that Friends has influenced an entire generation would only be a half-truth, since the show's influence extends far, far beyond those born in the 70s and the 80s. In fact, I would go so far as to say that it is in us, the children of the 90s, where the legacy of Friends is truly visible.

It was in the countless re-runs of the show in the mid-2000s that those of us born circa 1990 got the first taste of 'grown-up' humour. It is because we watched it in our formative years, the impressionable teens, that Friends shaped the way we talk, behave around people, and even think.

I don't think Uncle Sam has any idea how much it owes to Marta Kauffman and David Crane for Americanising the young anglophone Indian. I'm pretty sure that I have not met more than a handful of people from this demographic that have not seen Friends, and most of the people I know have seen the entire show more than a few times.

In high school, it was almost fashionable to start a conversation with "Do you remember that episode in which..." without actually specifying which show you're talking about. This would generally lead to a seemingly endless conversation until someone had the sense to say "Okay, this could go on for a while."

Whether it was Ross and Joey shinnying each other down the 'water-pipe' (which always annoyed me, because it was a fire escape) or Ross' "My sandwich!" meltdown, quoting and re-quoting one's favourite scenes was in vogue throughout high school, not just because it was the only adult sitcom we watched at that time, but because it gave us, young anglophone Indians, something to identify with, something to aspire to.

Indeed, living in a country where our demographic had been rendered politically and culturally irrelevant, aspiring to the sitcom lifestyle of these six fictional New Yorkers seemed natural enough. The way they spoke was the way we spoke, their sense of humour was the foundation of ours, we adopted their relationship jargon, because their ideas of adult relationships became canon for us.

The greatest contribution of Friends, as many have pointed out, was to make sarcasm a way of life. Everything we said was layered with it, and those who didn't get it or use it were almost an alien species. For the Chandlers of the world such as myself, this was a god-sent, for a world that does not accept sarcasm is one that we are fundamentally at odds with.

While the other characters are rarer in the real world, I'm sure many of us know milder versions of Ross, Joeys who we don't think of as Joeys (because in the real world, it's 'politically incorrect' to think of people as dumb), pseudo-Phoebes (idiots masquerading as kooks) and Rachel-Monica hybrids (quirky women who are high-maintenance but enjoy considerable popularity with the opposite sex and not their own).

Underneath this glossy veneer though, lies an ugly truth. While most characters in other sitcoms are meant to be seen as dysfunctional, in Friends, the dysfunctional nature of the characters is merely a token trait, for comedies cannot be made around 'normal' characters. That the Friends and their lives were meant to be aspirational may have been what made the show new and refreshing, but it is this very thing that is hard to digest, and sometimes, disturbing.

Ross and Chandler, in contrast to Joey, are men who "repel women all the time". Ross is the nerd who always comes up with fun facts that puts everyone to sleep, while Chandler has seemingly insurmountable problems with intimacy. However, a closer look reveals that it is only in contrast with Joey that their 'unattractiveness' comes to light, and that too if you're willing to see only what the writers want you to see.

In the ten seasons of the show, Ross has been in more serious relationships than any of the other characters, including the women. Carol, Julie, Rachel, Emily, Mona, Charlie and the many other attractive women that he has dated every now and then show that despite the "three divorces" spiel that we hear all the time, Ross is actually quite a catch!

Chandler, despite all his shortcomings, does not fare too badly on the relationship scorecard either. Barring Janice, the women he dates are quite attractive, and getting together with one of your best friends isn't too shabby for anyone, let alone the guy who's meant to be seen as someone who'll never find love. To top it all, he (along with Monica obviously), is the first of them to get married, something that goes into the win column in the show's universe.

Ross and Chandler's supposed unattractiveness is just a token trait, given to them to make them more relatable. An exercise in futility, because if they were truly unattractive, they would not be aspirational. It is truly laughable then, that when at the end of one episode, the question "who do you think would be the last of us to get married?" is asked, all eyes immediately go to Chandler.

Now let us look at Joey, who is supposed to be the only overtly attractive one of the three. A stupid, sex-obsessed pick-up artist who barely forms any deep or lasting relationships throughout the show, and the classical douchebag who sleeps with women and never calls them again. This is the guy we are meant to see as attractive, only because he is good looking, 'less weird' than the other two, and gets laid more, the implication being that quantity trumps quality.

Monica, Rachel, and Phoebe. The quirky, the likeable, and the kooky. Seems like the perfect trinity, doesn't it? A deeper look would reveal that it is far from it. It would also reveal that the latent sexism of the show is actually quite blatant, for throughout the show's run, the primary, all consuming force that drives each of these three women is the utterly desperate need to - wait for it - get married.

 

Monica's high-maintenance nature may explain why she may be unattractive to some men, but it still does not explain why that bothers her so much, because she makes no effort to change that and is actually proud of the way she is. Her yelling "my day is finally here!" the moment she wakes up on her wedding day reflects a mentality primitive enough to be an issue dealt with in Mad Men.

While Monica's obsession with finding a man who 'puts up' with her quirks can be explained, the same cannot be said about the other two. Rachel, clearly the most likeable and easy-going of the three, and very popular among men, is also the most desperate. Just a single viewing of the episode in which she goes to preposterous lengths to woo Joshua, her recently divorced customer, by putting on a show in her cheer-leading costume, and actually kissing his leg is ample proof of her desperation.

And then we have Phoebe the kookfest. Phoebe, who does not believe in evolution or gravity. Phoebe, who believes in past lives. Phoebe, who in one episode, believes that she's being possessed by a dead woman, and in another, that her mother's spirit is in a cat. And yet we have the same Phoebe ultimately deciding that the institution of marriage is so important to her that the love of her life not wanting to get married becomes a deal breaker, even though he wants to live with her in an arrangement that is virtually indistinguishable from marriage.

The extremely dated, ridiculous notions of love and marriage do not stop with the women. Ross (obviously) deserves a special mention in this context. I'm sure everyone remembers the episode in which his second wife, Emily, tells him that he needs to fulfill certain conditions if they are to have a chance of being together, one of them being that he can never see Rachel again.

Tough decision? Not really. On one hand, there is his sister, his best friends, an entire life that he has built for himself, while on the other, there is a woman he has known for four weeks. However, when the rest of them finally tell him what they really feel about what he has to do, his outburst about how "life is all about making compromises" actually shuts them up because not one of them has the sense to point out that what he's saying is a pile of horseshit, that life is certainly not about sacrificing your de facto family for a woman you married on a whim, and that if it wasn't for the stigma of another divorce, this would be a no-brainer.

Sex and relationship politics in the 21st century is something we have to thank Friends for. A ridiculous and unnecessary amount of thought and effort going into 'getting laid' is what Friends gave us, all the while reminding us that there is still such a thing as 'too much effort' which will make you seem creepy and weird. It spawned the pseudo-liberal wankers, who say "sex is not a big deal" in contrast to the traditional, conservative viewpoint on the subject, but don't have the brains to apply the same thought to themselves and ask that if sex is really not that big a deal, then why should it be on one's mind all the time?

Friends established sex as the primary goal of life for any modern day 'liberal', but it also said, hey, there's no need to be too liberal now, and antiquated views on marriage, handed down through centuries of brainwashing by a patriarchal society, are still cool. True, we did have Ross and Rachel having and raising a baby not only out of wedlock, but also when they were not romantically involved in any way, but this was nothing more than an attempt on the part of the writers to have Friends maintain it's 'soapcom' status and keep the story moving.

While almost all its viewers have been deeply affected by the impact of these archaic views being perpetuated by Friends, our generation specifically suffered more by being exposed to the culture of snobbery, judgement, and ostracisation glorified by the show. 

While using sarcasm and Friends jargon was pretty harmless, the flip-side was that endlessly mocking one's personality traits that deviated from the norm became a way of life. Nobody could freely be themselves, or be anything other than silently tense while in a group, because the smallest of slip-ups would mean a lifetime of ridicule.

Friends relentlessly told us that it is not okay to be different. Being weird is not cool, and you will be judged and mocked for it your entire life, even by those who claim to be your family. The group's endless Chandler bashing was not in good humour, especially since a lot of it was behind his back. When Monica says "I'm just going to label it 'what were you thinking?'" about one of Rachel's boxes, the latter's horrifyingly vicious response is "I was just going to walk across the hall and write that on Chandler," because that's what true Friends think about each other, don't they?

Friends has a legacy like no other show before or after it. Its concept became the prototype for many highly acclaimed and popular sitcoms of the 21st century, and it met its one true successor in How I Met Your Mother. It made us and our lives funnier, and therefore better. It gave us an escape when it hadn't been our week, month, or year.

However, there's no denying that there is a dark side to this legacy, which is entirely due to the fact that it was a show that was meant to make you aspire to its lifestyle. Our desire to be like the characters made us not only embrace, but enforce conformity. It said that in love, politics is not only inescapable, but desirable, and technicalities matter as much, if not more than emotions. It made us believe that in life, while it is okay to bend the smaller rules dictated by society, we should not dare to question the cardinal ones. It told us that the ultimate goal of life is to get married.