How Friends Illustrates the Depressing Insularity of Our Lives

Friends ended less than a decade ago, but it's already a relic of a bygone era--a critically respected network sitcom that enjoyed massive ratings. That's the central irony of the Must-See TV show's legacy: It was one of the last programs to enjoy a national audience before cable and the Internet fully segmented audiences, but the show itself prophesied that fragmentation through its 10-year-long portrait of increasing social segregation.

Friends started out as a somewhat realistic (for network TV) exploration of metropolitan young (white) people, in the same way that Roseanne sought to capture (white) working-class Midwestern life. In their original treatment, creators David Crane and Marta Kauffman described the show as a look at "a time in your life when everything's possible," when the future was "more of a question mark." It was a Girls before Girls--Monica and Rachel are 24 when the show begins, just like Lena Dunham's Hannah--but much more optimistic because the economy hadn't yet vomited all over itself after another binge-and-purge cycle. Thus, it's no coincidence that so many of the complaints lodged against Friends--unrealistically expensive lifestyles, pervasive whiteness, youthful frivolity, all that sex--now are being recycled by the anti-Dunham crowd.

Crane and Kauffman contrasted their show against traditional living-room and workplace sitcoms with a then-innovative, now-rote concept. "It's about friendship, because when you're single and in the city, your friends are your family," read the original pitch to NBC. (The Peacock's execs were apparently so uncomfortable with the idea of a show about 20-somethings that they suggested the creators add a middle-aged man to dole out fatherly advice. Perhaps that explains that NBC also-ran sitcom where Ernest Borgnine played Jonathan Silverman's BFF?) The great achievement of Friends' 10 seasons is that Crane, Kauffman and executive producer Kevin S. Bright convincingly carried the sexy sextet through several life stages: marriage, parenthood, divorce and the rocky, too-often humiliating road to a fulfilling career.

But as the seasons progressed and its mythology expanded, the show shriveled, folding into itself. At the same time, the storylines became increasingly outlandish--the nadir of the head-scratching plots being Joey and Rachel's doomed romance--yet still somehow more depressingly realistic. The source of these two phenomena lay in the show's illustration that, as doors shut in your face during your 20s, you're not just increasingly penned in professionally but also personally. The overarching narrative of Friends charts how its characters' lives got smaller and narrower until they could no longer comfortably accommodate their makeshift friend-families--just a spouse and a child or two.

Kauffman articulated the show's ethos of "maturity means friends or children" when she denied rumors of a follow-up to the show earlier this year. "Friends was about that time in your life when your friends are your family," she explained. "Once you have a family, there's no need anymore."

To be fair, most sitcoms function as narrative islands. But from the start, Friends had sociological aspirations, making its observations of life as a post-collegiate lost soul in the big city more significant and purposeful than its timeslot neighbors such as Seinfeld and Frasier. And during the early years, there were good reasons for the sextet to stick so closely together.

In the first two seasons, when the show hewed to its slice-of-life ambitions, money was a constant source of anxiety. Friends implied that the high cost of fun made a lot of activities off-limits; its New York was never the playground of luxury and fashion that is Sex and the City's Manhattan, not even for clotheshorse Rachel. Early in the second season, the show had its most explicit episode about income and friendships, where three of the have-not Friends--Phoebe, Rachel and Joey--balk at their better-earning counterparts' plan to buy Hootie and the Blowfish tickets (heh) for Ross' birthday. Say what you will about the sextet's caffeine addiction--Scientific American certainly did--but those venti mugs probably didn't exceed $5. Since both lattes and talk are cheap, Central Perk kept the Friends together by offering itself as an economic oasis.

The characters mostly take advantage of their urban environs by treating them as one long speed-dating assembly line. Friends relied heavily on the sitcom cliché of the Significant Other of the Week, a plot device that inevitably resulted in the SOW being dumped by the end of the episode, though some lasted a month or two. Especially in the earlier episodes, SOWs were routinely cast off because one of the other Friends disliked them. Over time, the repetition of the SOW storylines served to foster a loyal conformity among the Friends, as well as the creation and enforcement of a particular strand of promiscuous, gay-panicked, white-privileged, yuppie heterosexuality.

The decadelong accumulation of rejected romantic partners eventually turned Friends' New York from a marketplace of possibilities to a menagerie of freaks, thus providing further incentive to stick to the clique. It makes sense that Phoebe, who marries Paul Rudd's Mike in the last season, was the exception to the rule, since she has the most tenuous connection to the rest of the characters. (According to Splitsider, she is also the only character who doesn't share a previous sex partner with any of her Friends.)