The "Friends" Finale
by Joshua Adams
Always go down with the ship. This is the lesson imparted by the finale of "Friends," which, after 10 years, finally dried up its well of naughty PG-13 jokes and statistically possible romantic pairings among its six characters. Grinding to a halt last Thursday night, the show looked over its shoulder, recapitulating the question that engrossed viewers in 1994 and snared them season after season. Would David Schwimmer’s fieldwork-free paleontologist Ross, and Jennifer Aniston’s "Yes, I do wear mini-skirts on overnight transoceanic flights" Rachel, finally be together? Could the answer be any plainer?
For a moment there, it wasn’t. If the "Friends" writers wanted to show the world that they hadn’t lost their balls — even if they may get strung up by them in court — they nearly succeeded in gloriously conventional fashion: The crucial Ross/Rachel rendezvous initially landed our suitor at the wrong airport. Never mind the fact that "Friends" shortens the distance between Kennedy and Newark airports to 20 minutes — just figuring out how to use the damn monorail at Newark takes an hour. But the show always made the greater Tri-State area into a projection of the yuppie pleasure principle. Insane apartments conveniently rent-controlled, readily available street parking in the Village and, of course, Central Perk, the only coffee shop in New York where you could always find a seat on the sofa.
The show’s zany early years built impressively on its characters' ambiguous relationships and collective sexual frustration. As the laughs became fewer and the tears more frequent, loyal fans defended the show by claiming that its characters were growing up. But this isn’t "Full House." Maturity is an inconvenient subject for a sitcom, even an hour-long finale, and the promise of catharsis faded away, much like Matthew Perry’s sense of humor, once so sharp, now so desperate. Comparing childbirth to getting kicked in the nuts is about one-twentieth as funny as announcing, impromptu, that the fifth dentist has now caved and recommends Trident. After 10 years, the ensemble cast still jelled, but into a mold the audience has come to expect. Even Phoebe, in the capable hands of Lisa Kudrow, tended toward a frustrating predictability.
"Friends" enjoyed a particular asset among contemporary sitcoms in that comic emphasis fell equally on all six characters. The show’s writers generated a panoply of story lines that would have sunk a less capable group orbiting a celebrated star. But ensembles cut the other way, too — they can’t single out individuals for special attention. The Ross/Rachel dynamic propelled the show because it drew each cast member into a mess that wasn’t properly resolved (and still isn’t). The unexpected pairing of Monica and Chandler enjoyed the same cachet until their relationship inevitably morphed into respectability, marriage and finally, raising adopted children. Cultural Studies departments will eventually spawn theses about when "Friends" stopped being "Friends" and turned into an extended episode of "Mad About You" featuring Matt LeBlanc.
Whose spin-off, "Joey," it must be said, could actually work. Things turned horribly wrong in the land of the always-available haute couture Paris-based fashion job when LeBlanc’s pea-brained beefcake had to register complex emotions along the lines of, "Rachel, I’m in love with you." By moving our aspiring actor to the unapologetic surfaces of Los Angeles, "Joey" might actually make Joey funny again. Of all the characters on the show, LeBlanc was always the closest play to stereotype, and, therefore, the easiest indulgence. We all imagined ourselves, or pretended we didn’t, as Ross or Rachel or Chandler or Monica. Phoebe was way out there. But Joey, well, we all know someone like him. Whether or not we’ll be reintroduced to the man who asked how "If homo sapiens are homo sapiens, how come they’re not extinct?" will determine if NBC has another "Frasier" or a reimagining of "The Michael Richards Show on its hands."
The death of "Friends" has been mourned — by some — as a signal of the sitcom's demise in the face of reality TV. And while it's easy to indict the show for not making its audience think particularly hard over the course of its 10-year-long run, it should be praised as a cultural phenomenon. Unlike "Seinfeld," whose characters mixed hilarious narcissism with a liberal dose of schadenfreude, "Friends" was, and remained, altogether more innocent. It proved that good-natured humor and plausible relationships could be produced in the crass, lowest-common-denominator jungles of network TV. That’s not, as they say, a "moo point."
E-mail Joshua Adams at joshua at uchicago dot edu.
