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"So no one told you life was gonna be this way
Your job’s a joke, you’re broke, your love life’s D.O.A.
It’s like you’re always stuck in second gear
When it hasn’t been your day, your week, your month, or even your year
But I’ll be there for you”
The Friends: The Reunion special was recently released. When the six leading actors sat together on the coffee shop couch for the first time since the end of "Friends" in 2004, when the familiar title song sounded again, I believe that "Friends" audiences around the world could not hide their excitement. On Weibo, the #Friends Six reunion topic has been read by 210 million people and discussed by 54,000. A fan from Beijing said in an interview with the South China Morning Post, "I was shocked when I saw the trailer where they were all sitting in the living room. I felt that as long as the six of them sat together, whatever they said or did, I would watch it. ”
From 1994 to 2004, for a full decade, this sitcom established its status as a "national American drama". Chang Jiang, an associate professor at Tsinghua University's School of Journalism and Communication, pointed out that to become a national drama, it must meet at least the following three criteria: first, it has a good rating during the broadcast period; second, it has won the Emmy Award for "Best Comedy" series or "Best Drama" series, the highest award in the American television industry; third, it exerts cultural influence in the public life of the whole society. Combined with these three performances, no TV series can surpass "Friends". For Chinese audiences, "Friends" used to be both a textbook for learning American English and a window into the American way of life.
Most importantly, "Friends" has led the imagination of young people around the world to urban single life. This kind of TV series set in the metropolis and telling the friendship, love and personal growth of young people in a group portrait way was rare before "Friends", which both opened the way for a new form of American drama and reflected an important social change - in the 20s, young people are far away from home, working alone in the big city, their parents are far away, friends are family.
<h3>01 When Single Becomes zeitgeist: The Cosmopolitan Utopian Imagination of Friends</h3>
"Friends" co-creators, executive producers and screenwriters Marta Kauffman and David Crane recall their original intentions for creating this sitcom in the reunion special. At that time, they were young people in their 20s who were working hard in New York, surrounded by a group of deeply affectionate friends, working hard and looking for true love. So they thought of creating a real group drama, "either a protagonist and his friends, it's about that group of friends." ”
The book Still Friends: 25 Years of the TV Show That Defined an Era reveals more details. Kaufman and Klein's friends who had left New York had moved to Los Angeles, where they once drove past a café filled with incongruous furniture and battered couches that had been softened, but where young people gathered in droves to chat. This triggered the creative inspiration of Kaufman and Crane. In 1993, When Kaufman and Crane proposed to NBC the sitcom Friends, Klein summed up the show in one sentence: "It's a show about friendship, because when you're single and living in a big city, your friends are your family." ”
At the beginning of the whole play, Rachel, wearing a wedding dress and successfully escaping from marriage, rushes into the "Central Park" café, which is now a sacred place in the hearts of fans, leading the audience into a new world surrounded by friends and living independently. Rachel was supposed to be 24 years old and would have been arranged to marry someone she didn't love and live her life in a decent way, but she wanted to go to the big city to live a different life. In the second half of the first episode, she sits at the kitchen table of her high school friend Monica, and others encourage her to deactivate the credit card her father gave her—a symbolic scene in which Rachel cuts off her connection with her family and begins a new life in the big city with Monica, Phoebe, Chandler, Joey, and Rose, and marks the official beginning of the story of "Sixsome". As Monica told Rachel, "Welcome to the real world, it sucks, but you'll love it." ”
Previously, audiences rarely saw films and television works that told such stories. Most of the American sitcoms of the early 1990s were about family and married life, such as Roseanne, Full House, The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air, and Mad About You. In 1989, "Seinfeld" became a hit as soon as it aired; in the summer of 1993, Fox television aired "Living Single," about a group of black friends living together in Brooklyn. These two series foreshadow the fact that the American film and television industry is turning its eyes to a gradually emerging reality of young people's lives: for young people who work alone in big cities, they spend far more time with friends than with their families.
Elayne Rapping, a professor of American studies at the University of Buffalo who has long studied popular culture, believes that "Friends" is a rare film and television work that has promoted cultural change in the United States, which marks that we are living in a "young and dominant" culture, making Americans realize that the 20s are the age of life. According to Rapping' observations, "Friends" and "Beverly Hills" (90210) were among the first television series to depict young people becoming self-reliant and living with little parental interference.
"Friends" not only makes it clear from the beginning of the series that the story will revolve around six friends, but also hints in some details that the original family is unreliable and friends can be relied upon. In the second episode of the first season, Phoebe talks about her mother's suicide, and Rachel discovers that her parents are in the process of agreeing to divorce. Monica and Rose's parents come to visit them in New York, and they are always dissatisfied with Rose on the one hand, and they are constantly belittling Monica on the other hand. As the plot progresses, Joey discovers that his father is having an affair behind his mother's back, while Chandler reveals to friends that his parents announced their divorce at Thanksgiving dinner when he was 9 years old. On the first Thanksgiving day in the play, the six protagonists cancel their original holiday plans for various unexpected reasons, and everyone gathers in Monica's apartment to eat grilled cheese. While Joey says "it's not anyone's first choice," the group of six has always spent Thanksgiving together ever since. It's this kind of genuine camaraderie between friends that gives "Friends" an irreplaceable charm, as one viewer who appeared in the reunion special put it — the six of them felt like my own friends.
"The characters in Friends and Leap Over Beverly are essentially autonomous in making their own life decisions and receiving moral guidance from each other," Rapping notes, "and they build their own families with each other, which became a central theme in many of the sitcoms that followed and reflected a mainstream trend in our society." "Since the hit of "Friends", the American film and television industry has paid more and more attention to single people in their 20s and 30s who do not need a family and are happy, and audiences familiar with American dramas can list the dramas effortlessly: "Sex and the City", "Will and Grace", "Girls", "The Big Bang Theory"... Elyakim Kislev, a ph.D. in sociology at Columbia University, believes that these films and television works are so popular that their influence extends beyond the Western world, allowing global audiences to see a different way of life and challenging people's attitudes towards traditional family and marriage.
For the most part, "Friends" comes at an opportune time in an era when "singleness becomes the zeitgeist." In The Single Society, Chislev analyzes the various social factors that contribute to the diminishing importance of marriage in young people's lives: the rise of consumerism has made society more respectful of individuals who buy and sell in the free market, who regard personal careers (or wealth accumulation) as a matter of the first priority, and who consider the pros and cons more rigorously in the face of marriage— which is especially important for women who pursue independence and self-actualization. To some extent, the market is more welcoming to singles, because single people consume more materially than individuals in the family unit, resulting in the market constantly adjusting to meet their needs. The improvement of education level is also a major factor for young people to remain single. Studies have found that the higher their level of education, the easier it is to abandon relationships and pursue personal and career goals, and they are generally more likely to have independent and individualistic values and higher incomes, and thus less pressure to start a family.
Another factor that cannot be ignored is urbanization. Around the world, urban development is driving an increase in the proportion of singles – data show that singles in South Asia, East Asia, South America and elsewhere are converging in cities, and even in conservative Islamic countries such as Iran, where urbanization is positively correlated with family liberalization. There are mainly the following reasons: first, as people gather in the city, the price of urban real estate increases, and families usually need larger space, so the urban environment becomes unfavorable to family life, and people living alone in small apartments have become the norm of urban life; second, the urban environment has bred a highly inclusive multiculturalism that encourages people to abandon traditional family values; third, economic development promotes large-scale population mobility. Outsiders who flock to cities in search of personal development opportunities are unfamiliar with the interpersonal circles of the place of emigration and are at the same time far removed from the marital obligations imposed by the family, so they are more likely to live alone and immerse themselves in the rich social and recreational options of the metropolis.
From the premiere of "Friends" to the present, the generation of Chinese young people who have grown up watching this drama coincides with the historical period of the rise of consumerism, the rapid improvement of education level, and the rapid development of urbanization, and the lives of people in the play are gradually no longer out of reach, on the contrary, their life forms are gradually illuminated into reality, providing us with a kind of "metropolitan utopian imagination". Chang Jiang believes that this most well-known American drama has shaped the worldview of an entire generation of Young Chinese people, "presenting us with a template for controlling our own lives, while also implanting the concept of metropolitanism in our heads." ”
In the United States, Rapping believes that "Friends" also alludes to a special situation in local society, that is, for the first time in American history, young people no longer take it for granted that "one generation is stronger than the next.". "So we'll see sitcoms like Friends and Seinfeld, where the protagonists live in apartments rather than detached villas, they don't achieve class mobility, they always stay with the same friends, fantasizing about never having to grow up."
<h3>02 Radical or conservative? Revisit the values of Friends</h3>
9/11 marked a turning point in The Friends' decade-long history. Before "9/11", the "Friends" creative team considered ending the show in the next season, the ratings were slowly declining, the audience's interest was shifting, and it seemed that it was time to say goodbye to the show. But after 9/11, ratings soared 17 percent — perhaps because "Friends" was a New York-based tv series that gave viewers a sense of solace that the city has always had and hasn't changed.
The American writer Kelsey Miller devotes an entire chapter to I'll Be There For You: The One about Friends about the impact of 9/11 on Friends. This shocking tragic event, which continues to this day, is like a bomb thrown into the American psyche, forcing people to adjust themselves in a world that is completely strange in an instant. "Friends" has also been adjusted accordingly: the T-shirt and the American flag paying tribute to the New York Fire Department quietly appear in the series, and although "Friends" does not directly put the "9/11" incident into the plot, it uses this obscure way to highlight the pride of New York and the deep meaning of paying tribute to the hero.
The more profound impact of 9/11 on "Friends" is that it pushed the hit series closer to traditional family values. In the second half of the series, love and marriage completely transcend friendship and become the ultimate solution to real-life dilemmas, with four members of the group of six transforming from friends to couples/lovers – in the finale, Rachel sacrifices her career to return to Rose to raise her daughter together, Monica and Chandler move to the suburbs for two lovely children – the maverick and shiny Phoebe in previous seasons is marginalized by the main plot, and even she married in the finale.
Chang Jiang believes that the "9/11" incident caused great trauma to American society, and the return to the family has become an inevitable trend, and this trend has inevitably affected the narrative strategy of popular American dramas. "This strategy laid a solid foundation for 'Friends' to reach the peak of influence in season eight, but it also led to the final two seasons of this excellent work, which inevitably fell into cultural mediocrity."
Looking back at this American drama broadcast at the turn of the century, it is not difficult to find that the values it presents are actually both radical and conservative. The idea of "friends is family" is not the only way Friends challenges traditional family values, and in the ten seasons, Friends also deals with same-sex marriage, infertility, adoption, surrogacy, and single parents, but by today's standards, its presentation of these controversial topics is not entirely "correct."
In recent years, "Friends" has encountered some criticism in terms of diversity, such as the six main actors are all white, and the vast majority of the characters in the play are also white, which is not in line with the racial proportion of the real New York population. But on the other hand, Friends realistically describes several interracial romantic relationships.
On the issue of sexual minorities, "Friends" also shows a certain left-right vacillation attitude. The wedding of Rose's ex-wife Carol and girlfriend Susan was one of the first same-sex weddings in American sitcoms, but in retrospect, its presentation was very conservative: they failed to kiss in front of the camera, and the entire wedding scene lasted only 60 seconds. In addition, there are many homophobic and transphobic jokes in the play. Chandler's father, Charles Bing, was set up as a sexual minority who would perform on a cross-dress show under the pseudonym "Helena Handbury," which was supposed to be a rare opportunity to show the sexual minority to a television audience, but the role wasn't played by a true transgender actress, and when she appeared in the series, some transgender jokes were thrown out. Kaufman herself admits that if she goes back in time, the transphobic jokes and interpretations of Helena's character in Friends would be the parts she hopes to improve.
But some commentators argue that it is precisely because Friends insists on a moderate and non-adventurous route that it can achieve the greatest common denominator between radicalism and conservatism, placing controversial political issues in the spotlight of mainstream society. Neil Ewen, a senior lecturer at the University of Winchester's School of Media and Film, points out that Friends has never been radical, and if it had been, it would most likely not have become one of the most popular tv series in the history of American television, "What's interesting about Friends is that it discusses all aspects of these cultural issues, but is carried out under the packaging of a mild comedy." It empowers these issues and pushes them to a wider audience. In the view of Saul Austerlitz, author of Still, "It puts these offensive 'ordinary things' into the storyline, which allows it to expand the 'normal' spectrum until it can accommodate a lesbian wedding." ”
There is no doubt that today's audience will re-examine the values of "Friends" and be keenly aware of its conservative tendencies, which is due to changes in the social environment. After decades of efforts, progressivism has made equality a mainstream social value in the Western world. Steven Pinker, a psychology professor at Harvard University, is even more optimistic that racial and ethnic biases around the world are on the decline, and that improvements in women's and gay rights are global. While global trends of racism, sexism and homophobia persist, Pinker cites data from the World Values Survey, arguing that liberal values are subtly pushing people around the world to become more self-reliant and the freedom of others, and it is worth noting that in the process of social liberalization, young people affected by liberal and enlightened ideas do not change back to conservative appearance as they age.
In 2020, when "Friends" encountered value criticism, Phoebe's actor Lisa Cudjo said, "If 'Friends' had been completely different today, it would certainly not have been an all-white cast. I'm not sure what other people think, but for me it should be seen as a time capsule and we can't just stare at where they're doing it wrong. "Of course, we must admit that the value review of past film and television works is at best a position statement, and more importantly, whether future film and television works can perform better in terms of diversity and inclusiveness, but we also need to face up to the fact that these film and television works with global influence do have a "negative legacy" in the value output to non-Western audiences. Due to differences in social and cultural environments, the idea of equal rights that has become a consensus in mainstream Western society may be more difficult to spontaneously form reflection in non-Western societies. On Douban's Friends reunion page, a high-praise comment was uncomfortable with the film's people of color and LGBT groups taking big and as if this group had become the mainstream of society (obviously not).
The story of "Friends" is over, the American film and television industry is launching a batch of new works that highlight the current value orientation, and in the foreseeable future, they may still be competitive and influential cultural products in the global market; and will the aesthetics and values we have been shaped by the classics of the past be shaken and changed in this process, as in the past?
Resources:
Ilyakin Chislev. "Single Society". CITIC Publishing Group.2021.
[Beauty] Steven Pinker. The Enlightenment of The Present: A Defense of Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress. Zhejiang People's Publishing House.2019.
"Reunion: It's a Fairy Tale Forever", look at the ideal
https://mp.weixin.qq.com/s?__biz=MzA3MDM3NjE5NQ==&mid=2650887387&idx=1&sn=60eb9e343ca708a7a34d9af3b143c656&chksm=84c83ab7b3bfb3a1362ba09e48c7bf550c8dc72297c16226c797b285ca37c28f93d776b47f0c#rd
Takedown: Is It Necessary for Us to Review The Values of Past Works? interface culture
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https://www.bbc.com/culture/article/20190920-friends-the-show-that-changed-our-idea-of-family
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http://www.buffalo.edu/news/releases/2004/04/6680.html
“‘The Rachel’ and other cultural impacts,” Analyzing Television, March 25, 2016.
https://analyzingtv.wordpress.com/2016/03/25/the-rachel-and-other-cultural-impacts/
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https://www.goodmorningamerica.com/culture/story/ways-knew-show-friends-influenced-tv-world-58898455