Generation Friends

by Saul Austerlitz

  Aniston was studied by a sexist press and found deficient, her failings somehow letting the rest of us off the hook for our own. If this beautiful, successful, charming woman could not find her way to having a family, then our colorless lives were redeemed. “The makers of The Break-Up want to prevent the rest of the world from seeing what Brad Pitt and Vince Vaughn have already passed on: Jennifer Aniston’s boobs,” read one remarkably catty “Page Six” lede from 2007.

  And reports of Aniston’s purported pregnancies were heavy on the ground. According to a Star magazine report from 2012, Aniston was having a girl with then-fiancé Justin Theroux and had cried “tears of joy” upon learning she was pregnant. Moreover, she had insisted on keeping the news secret out of fear of “jinxing” the pregnancy through the public fuss over her impending baby.

  None of this was true. Celebrity publications were perfectly content to publish fan fiction about Jennifer Aniston and pass it off as reportage. Us Weekly reported functionally the same story in 2013, with a bombshell splashed across the cover: “Jen’s big secret: PREGNANT! After years of trying, she’s finally going to be a mom at 44. How she’s prepping for baby—and a wedding!”

  The moral and journalistic failings of celebrity publications were well known, but the repeated interest in reporting a certain subset of stories about Jennifer Aniston, regardless of their lack of truth, was a compelling study in misogyny intermingled with the unconscious public hunger for a carefully circumscribed happy ending.

  This hunger, once it was studied carefully, revealed itself as a direct, if entirely accidental, product of the work of David Crane and Marta Kauffman. Much of America had met Jennifer Aniston as she burst through the door of Central Perk in a wedding dress, fleeing a bad marriage and in search of a different kind of companionship. We had gotten to know Aniston as Rachel Green and had never been able to fully separate the two. Jennifer was Rachel, and Rachel was Jennifer. An audience hungering for happy endings was not satisfied by the one provided by Friends; it wanted a similar happy ending in real life, with Brad Pitt or Justin Theroux or Vince Vaughn substituting for Ross Geller. Jennifer Aniston was treated as if she were the real-world extension of a fictional character created by Kauffman and Crane.

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  In the years after Friends concluded, a good deal of gossip coverage was directed toward the question of whether there would ever be a Friends reunion. In 2006, there were reports that NBC was closing in on a deal for four one-hour specials, with the stars to be paid $5 million each, but this project never came to fruition. Soon, attention turned to a Friends movie, which was said to be in the works.

  The breathless reporting mostly ignored the fairly obvious questions overhanging such an effort: Who was hungering for a Friends reunion on the big screen, only a few short years after the series’ conclusion? Where would the story go after the long-withheld happy endings it delivered? And how could a three-camera sitcom transform itself into a feature film without abandoning some of the core aesthetic and comedic principles on which it had modeled itself?

  Given any sustained thought, it soon became clear that a Friends film would be logically and artistically incoherent and practically impossible to execute. The rumors lingered, with one or another star singled out as the roadblock preventing the project from moving forward. Lisa Kudrow sought to scotch the rumors with deliberately misplaced enthusiasm, telling the press she thought the best possible Friends film would be a spoof along the lines of the successful Brady Bunch movies, and that she was curious who would be cast to play her role—in ten or twenty years.

  What had once been a fairly ludicrous idea grew substantially more plausible after Sex and the City successfully made the transition to the big screen. Kim Cattrall had been targeted by the press for her hesitance to commit to an SATC film, and Jennifer Aniston was now being pegged as the Cattrall figure keeping the public from getting the thing they purportedly wanted. “The movie star reportedly does not want to be typecast as Rachel Green,” “Page Six” reported in 2008. “Is Jennifer Aniston the next Kim Cattrall? Courteney [Cox] needs to schedule a meeting with SJP [Sex and the City star Sarah Jessica Parker] and get this diva straightened out.” It was a gratuitously nasty swipe.

  In the end, the only reunions would take place on television, where they belonged, as when David Schwimmer showed up opposite Matt LeBlanc on Episodes, or when late-night host Jimmy Kimmel, playing Ross in his own Friends fanfic script, cast Aniston as Rachel once more to pay homage to his erotic prowess, and Courteney Cox and Lisa Kudrow dropped in to echo his claims.

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  A few years ago, costume designer Debra McGuire received a phone call from a young man. His wife’s birthday was coming up soon, and he was looking to buy her the yellow dress. McGuire knew what he was referring to without requiring any further explanation. Of all her designs, this one was what people were most curious about. It was a strapless yellow dress with a slit up to mid-thigh that Jennifer Aniston had worn in the season-five episode “The One with All the Kissing.”

  People still called and emailed asking where they could buy this dress, and McGuire hated to be the one to tell them it was from a British label called IDOL that had gone out of business years prior. The thing to do, she told the man, was to take a screenshot and bring it in to a local seamstress. McGuire would tell him what fabric had been used, and a new version of Rachel’s dress could be made.

  It was astounding to still be fielding questions like these, almost two decades after viewers had first caught a glimpse of the IDOL dress. It spoke to the devoted attachment some Friends viewers had to their favorite show that they clamored to re-create it in their own lives. Rachel Green was no longer, but fans still wanted to insert themselves into Rachel Green’s life.

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  In 2008, veteran director Roger Christiansen was on a panel at the Shanghai Television Festival with Carlton Cuse, the cocreator of Lost, and other prominent television creators who were also serving on the festival’s jury, and had been asked to take questions from the media. He was astounded when question after question was about Friends, which he had directed for two episodes.

  China was fascinated by all matters Friends. Christiansen later learned that for many of the country’s college students, Friends was a time-tested method of studying English. They could watch Chandler and Phoebe and learn colloquial English. (The New York Times would report, in similar fashion, about Major League Baseball players learning English by watching the show. Wilmer Flores of the New York Mets would watch Friends episodes until he arrived at the stadium for a game, and then pick up where he had left off after the game. Flores’s walk-up song when he batted? “I’ll Be There for You.”)

  A passionate fan named Du Xin, who would ask visitors to refer to him as “Gunther,” built a scale version of Central Perk in a sixth-floor Beijing apartment. Guests were invited to sample treats that had been mentioned on the show, and the space featured the familiar Central Perk logo painted on the window and an orange couch practically identical to the one on television. (The television, needless to say, was showing Friends reruns.) Xin had also commandeered the next-door apartment and transformed it into a version of Joey and Chandler’s apartment, complete with a poorly measured entertainment unit.

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  For a time, Jessica Hecht felt like the work she was doing on Friends, playing Ross’s ex-wife Carol’s new partner, Susan, was unsophisticated. She knew the show was good, knew there were talented comedic performers like David Schwimmer featured on it, but she didn’t think much of what she herself was contributing to the grand patchwork of American culture. One day, she was talking to her brother-in-law, who was then chief emergency-room physician at a large urban hospital. Wasn’t it silly, she told him, to spend her time on such a trifle?

  Her brother-in-law turned to face her and st
ared at her for a long beat. “Do you know how many people are lying in an emergency room, terrified, and watch Friends to relax?” he asked her. At that moment, something clicked for Hecht. Friends was many things, and among them was this: It was something that provided people, whether lying in hospital beds or on their couches, exhausted at the end of a long day or mourning the loss of a close friend, a momentary respite from their own lives. This was, in the end, no small thing, and Hecht was grateful to have played a role, however small, in creating something that offered that gift to those who needed it.

  CHAPTER 25

  TASTING THE TRIFLE

  Friends Discovers a New Audience

  When Kaily Smith started dating her future husband, Adam, in 2010, they would unwind in the evenings by watching Friends. Adam had never been into Friends before meeting Kaily, but in short order, he was the one who would ask as bedtime approached: “Aren’t we watching Friends tonight?” Smith, highly organized and efficient, thought of herself as a Monica, and Adam was a Chandler type, the yang to her yin.

  After Adam proposed and Smith accepted, the question arose of how to share the good news with their family and friends. They talked about taking engagement photos, potentially for a save-the-date card, and Adam suggested a fountain, like the one in Friends’ credits. Smith, an aspiring actress and producer, creatively misheard his suggestion as shooting at the Friends fountain. It turned out that the iconic fountain was on an auxiliary Warner Bros. lot and was available for rent.

  Kaily and Adam brought in lighting and a few familiar props—a couch and a lamp. The engaged couple played the parts of their favorite sitcom stars, cavorting in the fountain and twirling umbrellas. Adam spit out water à la Chandler, and Smith’s mother and some other friends filled out the ranks of the friends, covering their faces with their umbrellas so as not to distract from the happy couple. Smith’s manager called in a favor and asked Courteney Cox to record a video greeting Kaily and Adam before their shoot: “I hear you guys are the real-life Monica and Chandler.”

  To be a Friends fan was to do more than watch; it was to insert yourself into a narrative and find your place in it. It was to declare yourself a Monica, or a Phoebe, or a Ross. (Well, probably not a Ross.) Not everyone could afford to rent out the Warner Bros. lot to shoot their engagement photos after the fashion of Friends, but what did it say about the dedication of the show’s fans that someone did?

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  Writer Wil Calhoun’s daughter Bren grew up and went off to college at Louisiana State University. Returning to Los Angeles on winter break, she asked her father to watch Friends with her. “You want to watch Friends?” Calhoun asked her, surprised.

  Calhoun had never known his daughter to be a fan, but he happily agreed and turned on an episode of the show on Netflix. He was stunned when she began to quote lines back to the screen. Calhoun turned to his daughter and asked, “You know the lines to this TV show?” “Dad,” she replied, “everybody does this.” At her sorority, they hosted a weekly Friends night, and by this point, practically everyone knew the Friends dialogue backward and forward.

  What was true of the LSU sorority system was true of America at large. Most shows, no matter how successful, disappeared after their initial run into a nostalgic mist. Appreciative fans might tune in for a late-night rerun of M*A*S*H or Cheers, but outside of a small band of budding comedy aesthetes, few younger fans would take pains to discover a show that predated their own era of television. Friends was the exception to all this. A younger generation of fans has embraced Friends as their own. They binged the show on Netflix, obsessed over Ross and Rachel, memorized favorite lines, and created memes inspired by the show. (There was a particularly good 30 Rock joke, as well, with Alec Baldwin’s Jack Donaghy preparing for a television appearance by bingeing the first season of Friends and obsessing over Ross and Rachel’s chemistry.)

  A substantial swath of the twenty-first-century Internet is devoted to all matters Friends, which would be down a significant chunk of its content without the ability to create Friends listicles. More than that, there is an expectation of mass Friends literacy. BuzzFeed could publish a story in which the author had decided to prepare Rachel’s trifle from the episode “The One Where Ross Got High,” assuming that enough readers would be not only familiar with the reference but curious about just how a trifle composed of equal parts jam, custard, beef, and peas might taste.

  Friends had premiered when the Internet was still a novelty, a toy Chandler could play with to meet women on his shiny new laptop. By the time the show went off the air, the Internet had become a place to chew over Friends, to identify with it, to mock it, to question its choices, to undermine its assumptions, to celebrate its reign and to pontificate.

  In the summer of 2017, a corner of the Internet was seized by a tweetstorm by Claire Willett obsessing over one particular Friends plotline: the brief, abortive romance between Rachel and Joey. In Willett’s argument, Rachel and Joey were far better suited for each other than Rachel and Ross ever had been. Over the course of one hundred densely detailed tweets, Willett laid out a case for Rachel and Joey, arguing that Joey was more respectful of Rachel’s needs and desires than Ross, and that their relationship had naturally blossomed in a manner that Rachel and Ross’s never had. Ross, in her estimation, continually comes up short: “49/Joey knows what it feels like to be grasping for your big break. But name ONE THING Ross ever did to unselfishly help Rachel’s career.” Joey, by contrast, is more devoted to the actual, flesh-and-blood Rachel: “84/Joey: respecting Rachel’s feelings. Ross: needing to win every fucking time.” Willett concluded by suggesting that Friends had erred in not ultimately bringing Rachel and Joey together, instead of Rachel and Ross: “99/But a S10 surprise twist where Rachel and Joey end up realizing THEY were each other’s lobster all along WOULD HAVE CHANGED SITCOM TV.”

  Willett’s argument is compelling, and remarkable in the depth of its fervor (one hundred tweets!), but it is also worth noting the extent of Willett’s assumption of an audience knowledgeable enough to follow her argument about a two-decade-old series. Not only does Willett expect her readers to remember the details of Friends’ romantic plots, she also casually drops references that only readers deeply familiar with its jokes and worldview would grasp. After all, the idea of Ross and Rachel as each other’s “lobsters” had come up in a single episode that had premiered in the mid-1990s. It expressed a remarkable faith in the shared passion of a new, Twitter-fed audience and its devotion to the nuances of a show that premiered the same year as Models Inc., Chicago Hope, and Babylon 5.

  Other Internet sleuths sought to revisit little-remembered nooks and crannies of the show or “discover” new details about Friends. One well-circulated article took notice of the hidden reason the couch at Central Perk was always available: a small RESERVED sign nestled amid the cups and saucers on the coffee table. Another spotted a moment in which a stand-in could be glimpsed sitting in Courteney Cox’s place in a Central Perk scene. That these relatively inconsequential discoveries and slip-ups could prompt entire articles of their own demonstrated a latent hunger for new Friends material, even years after the final episode.

  One intrepid Bustle writer ranked all 703 of Rachel Green’s outfits worn over 10 seasons of the show. Season 2’s worst outfit involved a silver quilted jacket that she described as “The One Where Rachel Auditions for The Fast & the Furious”; season 4’s favorite was a slinky black dress with sheer sleeves. The amount of research required for this effort had to have been heroic, and it was unlikely that another show (other than perhaps Sex and the City) would have inspired so thorough a deep dive. It could safely be assumed that readers would not only be familiar with Friends but know its characters and the general outline of its plot. The Internet footprint of Friends began in the knowledge that everyone had already seen the show. This was not an introductory course; it was an advanced seminar.

  The Intern
et was a place to share the love. It was a place to buy a hoodie that read “WE WERE ON A BREAK!” or a mug inscribed “YOU’RE MY LOBSTER.” The tools of the contemporary Internet allowed collective desire to become imaginary wish fulfillment. There would never be a Friends movie, but there genuinely was a (fake) Friends movie trailer that made the rounds, with scenes from Episodes and other shows featuring Friends stars edited together into something resembling a heart-tugging new movie with the six familiar faces.

  The overall impulse of twenty-first-century Friends chat was twofold: laudatory and revisionist. It was understood that most of the milquetoast fans had fallen away and were unlikely to be interested in discussing a show they had moderately liked over a decade ago. It was only the superfans who were left, and unlike the fans of nearly every other show ever made, their ranks were growing.

  New audiences were discovering Friends long after its premiere, and their impressions were inevitably colored by the passage of time and by changing social mores. A notable subset of contemporary social media was devoted to revisiting Friends and questioning its underlying assumptions. Why were there so few minorities on the show? Why was the show so offensive about Chandler’s transgender father? And did Ross and Rachel even belong together?