Friends From College

What on earth is this?  A spin-off show from Friends?  No, it just has the name of that programme in its title.  This isn’t about six young people making their way through adult life in 90s New York City.  This is about six older people making their way through adult life in today’s New York City.

I didn’t even plan to watch it.  It all came about during that classic moment when you’re travelling through Japan with a friend (we’ve all done it, right?) and you’ve booked into a traditional hotel where you have to take your shoes off and they roll a futon out for you on the floor.  You’re in a tiny mountain town where the only thing to do is visit the thermal baths for awkward communal nudity (once you’ve hobbled between each one in wooden flip flops).  After you’ve dined exquisitely and drunk all the sake, how on earth do you entertain yourself for the evening when everything has closed down?  With Netflix of course.  Friends From College got watched as it was the only show one of us was prepared to watch again.

This is important for two reasons.  The first is that it came to me highly recommended, and here I am passing on that recommendation.  The second is that this show is best watched when you find yourself in front of the Netflix menu with a friend and you can’t agree what to select.  Maybe it’s a netflixandchill evening and you won’t be getting very far with it anyway, or maybe you’re just hanging out, but you can’t bear the thought of explaining what’s going on in series three of Bojack Horseman or you don’t want to sit through a second viewing of Stranger Things.  This show will fill that gap.  And then you can finish it off on your own in no time at all.

So that’s how to watch it, but what are you actually watching?  At the show’s heart are a group of friends who went to Harvard together.  They are now in their forties, but have remained friends, taking with them through the decades all of the emotional baggage you would expect.  In fact, episode one kicks off by contriving for two of the friends, married couple, Ethan and Lisa, to move from Chicago (where they have been living away from the friend group) back to New York.  The gang is finally getting back together!  The problem is: Ethan (played by a heroic Keegan-Michael Key) has been having a long-distance affair with Sam.  Now they’re in the same city, how will they keep their college romance secret from her husband and his wife?  Cue hilarity.

I appreciate that sounds sardonic, but the show really is a barrel of laughs.  I went into it thinking it was a comedy-drama, which means there are a few chuckles in between people crying and shouting and being serious.  But given the farcical nature of the characters’ exploits, their combination of physical comedy and things spiralling out of control, I was surprised to find myself in sitcom territory.  There is an episode where the friend group attends a wedding and I totally lost count of my laughs out loud.  In a sense, while the show is cruel in its portrayal of the well-educated professionals that form its cast, the writing’s strongest vitriol seems saved for the institution of marriage itself.  Nobody respects their vows because nobody can be honest.  It’s only Marianne, played by the incredible Jae Suh Park, who fully rejects the concept, screaming at her friends when she realises they have encouraged her lover to propose.  She’s happier with her rabbit, Anastasia.

Along with Marianne, outside of the love triangle, Nick and Max form the rest of the six-person friend group.  And it’s these characters that are most interesting, yet about whom we find out the least.  Tune in for Marianne’s amateur dramatic productions, including a performance of A Streetcar Named Desire with role-reversed casting (her rape of Blanche demands a ten out of ten for effort and conviction), but stay for further episodes where Max’s boyfriend Felix voices what we’re all thinking: this friend group is a terrible bunch of people.  With each episode at 30 minutes, it’s a bit like Girls: you always want a bit more of everyone (even though everyone is terrible).

We’ve all got a friend group like this.  We might not be forty, live in New York, or have gone to Harvard, but we all know there are people that hold us back.  Yet, we can’t get enough of them.  The fact that the characters are supposed to be intelligent (having studied at boffin box, Harvard) makes their bad choices all the funnier; they deserve what they get because they have acted so selfishly and should know better.  Miraculously, they remain likeable.  Each time they whine something about the friend group being to blame, a little bit of you wants to be in the friend group.

Sorry for saying friend group so much, but this is the term the show uses and it’s made me aware how hard it is to find a good alternative.  Gang?  Crew?  Brethren?  The English language really has let us down, so the show knowingly adopts this lame term for the social construct the characters use to organise the dregs of their adult lives.

Let’s pause for breath and conclude there is a lot to love about Friends From College.  Series two will come to us like an old friend, hopefully bringing more depth to the peripheral characters, and spending a bit more money on any special effects (as the season one finale completely undoes itself when something precious ends up in the swimming pool with graphics that look like a watercolour illustration).  Will it replace Friends in our hearts?  It doesn’t need to, and it’s unlikely it will ever form 80% of Comedy Central’s programming schedule, but it’s certainly up there as The One Where We Realise That Even People With Harvard Educations Are No Better At Adult Life Than We Are.