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.

Friends

Growing up, I used to think everyone had a breakfast room in their house.  We did.  This doesn’t mean it was a massive mansion.  It was your standard four bedroom detached house in Surrey.  There was a dining room, but this was for best.  We sat in there on Christmas and select special occasions.  The breakfast room was a smaller affair right next to the kitchen, with a table and chairs for the four of us.  This is where we ate not only breakfast, but also lunch, dinner and any other snacks in between (so I can only apologise for the misleading name).  How does this relate to Friends?  Well, it’s where I first came across this programme in 1995.

You might have guessed I come from TV-viewing stock.  My dad can watch TV for hours.  At one point there was a TV in the garage so he didn’t miss old films while working on the car.  Because he couldn’t get through a meal without telly, we of course had a small set affixed to the wall in the hallowed breakfast room.  I don’t think I ever had tea without Neighbours AND Home & Away as an accompaniment.  I’m not sure why this meal lasted an hour.  As I came on for ten years old, I started to want to watch my own shows, and this meant leaving the comfy sofas of the lounge where my parents watched things that mums and dads like to watch.  And so, perched on one of the uncomfortable wooden chairs in the breakfast room, I came across my first episode of Friends one Friday evening while being daring and watching Channel 4.

Series 2, episode 1 opens with Phoebe recapping the latest in the star-crossed saga of Ross and Rachel: Ross has returned from China with Julie (Julie!) just as Rachel has realised he loves her.  I was hooked.  I had never heard people speak like this before.  They said cool things like “Hey” rather than “Hello” and peppered their sentences with “Like” which was brand new at the time and hadn’t yet ruined the ability to articulate of a generation of British school kids.  They were young, but they didn’t need grown-ups.  There was a sofa in their coffeehouse and, curiously, nobody else ever sat in it but them.

I have since seen all 236 episodes several times.  I think everyone has.  Twenty-two years after first meeting the Friends, I still end up watching around one and a half episodes a day.  It’s not on purpose, but it’s also something I allow to happen.  And this is a show whose last episode aired thirteen years ago.  For a while, I couldn’t bring myself to sit through any of the constant repeats on e4, so I would watch anything but Friends.  It was too soon.  If it came on by accident, I had to get the channel switched over before the claps at the beginning of the opening credits.  But now, Comedy Central is our default channel when the telly boots up and episode upon episode of Friends is lined up to catch young professionals getting in from work who want to be reminded of when they were a bit younger and less professional.  Of course, as a channel, its new home comes with an onslaught of promotional trailers for The Middle and Impractical Jokers (stop trying to make Impractical Jokers happen), but that can be forgiven, as it’s these old episodes that are so comforting after a day in the office.

Some jokes have dated.  Some storylines are from a distant age before mobile phones and the internet.  Some hairstyles and wardrobe choices seem unfathomable in 2017.  But I still laugh.  The better I know a scene and the more I know what’s coming next, the more I laugh.  I forgive punchlines I would never tolerate from a new show made in this day and age.  But this is because Friends practically defines the modern sitcom.  Ross even had a pet monkey in earlier series.  Could anything be any more sitcom?

So here we are, on an eternal cycle through all ten seasons.  Each time we go back to series one, the charm starts all over again.  I’m even now measuring my life in rotations of the entire Friends canon.  And by life, I mean crushing adult disappointment at how much time I spend watching TV.  My fear is that this behaviour will never end.  I will become my parents, who spent my childhood indulging themselves with repeats of Dad’s Army, Only Fools And Horses, Open All Hours and Are You Being Served?  Over time, their comments went from “Oh, what was he in last?” to “Oh, course, he’s dead now” – do I want to go through the same thing with the cast of Friends?

Just as I know where I was for the first episode I ever saw, I also know exactly where I was when the final episode of series 10 aired in the UK.  It was summer 2004 and I was in the first year of university.  I needed to find someone with a TV in their room, as did the rest of the freshers.  We piled in to a tiny dorm, pressed our faces to one of the tiny television sets we used to watch in those days and prepared ourselves for the end.  The girls cried.  The boys pretended they didn’t want to cry.  Life as the Friends knew it was changing, and so was a part of our lives.  We said goodbye to a show that had accompanied us for the best part of ten years.  With so many new shows available to us, the fact that I have welcomed Friends back is testament to the quality of not only its comedy, but its relatability.  That breakfast room might be in a house that belongs to a different family now, but Friends will always be my friends.