ENTERTAINMENT
Photo:
The cast of NBC's "Friends" Jennifer Aniston as
Rachel Green, Matt Le Blanc as Joey, David Schwimmer as Ross Geller, Lisa
Kudrow as Pheobe, Matthew Perry as Chandler Bing, and Courteney Cox Arquette
as Monica Geller Bing. (AP /Warner Bros.)
NEW YORK (AP) -- Among all the coverage of the Friends finale, call this article The One That Explains What Makes Friends Unique. Many things set it apart from other hugely successful sitcoms like Cheers, Seinfeld and The Cosby Show. Or from MASH, All in the Family and Mary Tyler Moore. But Friends is unique, and the reason can be boiled down to a pair of words: Six and Equal. As a final display of this splendid alchemy, the series' hour-long conclusion airs Thursday on NBC at 9 p.m. EDT (preceded by an hour-long retrospective). With that, a fine-tuned, never-fail comedy machine will be dismantled for its principals to go their separate ways. Joey (Matt LeBlanc) will be heading to L.A., to pursue his acting career next season as the title character of an NBC Friends spinoff. Monica and Chandler (Courteney Cox Arquette and Matthew Perry) are likely to flee for the suburbs with their adopted babe in arms (the mother was going into labour at the end of last week's episode). The real nail-biter: Will Rachel (Jennifer Aniston) really take the glamorous fashion job and move to Paris with the child she had with Ross (David Schwimmer)? Will Ross, in love with her since high school, be left heartbroken in Manhattan? As for Phoebe (Lisa Kudrow), already rewarded with her happy ending when she was married -- outside the Friends flock -- to Mike, could there be a last-minute twist? Say, for instance: We discover to our shock that she's actually an equities broker in Seattle who once went out with Frasier Crane! The past Friends decade has all been Phoebe's dream!
When Friends premiered on Sept. 22, 1994, its break-from-the-pack success was the stuff dreams are made of. Its first week it ranked a robust 15th place, it was tied for eighth place for the 1994-95 season, and has been a top 10 show ever since, claiming the top spot for the 2001-02 season. A show about six people! A breath of fresh air, Friends had arrived during a rash of sitcoms that showcased, however tortuously, established standup comics. Consider the top five hits of the 1993-94 season: After first-place newsmagazine 60 Minutes, they were the Tim Allen sitcom Home Improvement, Seinfeld, Roseanne and Brett Butler's Grace Under Fire. And only six months earlier, Ellen DeGeneres, yet another standup, had arrived with her signature sitcom. Before Friends, there had never been a sitcom that showcased an ensemble of co-equals both in billing and by narrative design, and maintained that equilibrium throughout the show's run. Friends did it for 10 hit seasons. Also worth noting: Despite TV's time-honoured habit of ripping off hit formulas, no Friends clone has ever caught on. It's hard to even think of any flopped attempts (maybe the closest approximation: It's Like, You Know, which had a brief run on ABC in 1999). "A show with six people given equal weight, all equally involved in story lines -- that was a key part of the show's conception," says David Crane, who created Friends with fellow executive producer Marta Kauffman. "I don't think we thought of it as radical," he says of that balancing act. "It was only when we got into it, we realized: There really is no lead! No one character whose point of view you were supposed to be following, no single character you're supposed to be going through this journey with." The advantage: "If the characters are interesting enough, you can go on six different journeys." But there was also a downside. Writing the scripts, says Crane, entailed "a lot of mechanics. Every week we're telling three stories, and at least one of them has to have an emotional component." One example, The One With the Birth Mother: Chandler and Monica meet with the expectant mother whose child they hope to adopt, but she almost backs out. Chandler makes a moving speech and saves the day. Meanwhile, Rachel and Phoebe help Ross dress for a date, but he looks nerdier than ever. And Phoebe sends Joey on a blind date, who at dinner proves perfect in all ways except -- for Joey, a cardinal sin -- she eats off his plate. "There's a lot of interweaving, a lot of juggling," says Crane. "One character is the go-to person in another character's story. Then, next time, you have to shift it around." Of course, the magic of Friends wasn't simply its sitcom sextet, but also the magic little world they shared, observes Syracuse University television scholar Robert Thompson. Most sitcoms rely on an authority figure: a parent, a boss, a domineering spouse or even a bossy pal. But Friends took place in a realm free of authority figures, says Thompson, likening it to The Brady Bunch, of all things, "if Mike and Carol had walked around the corner for a pack of smokes and never come back." "The theme song says 'Always stuck in second gear,' and they were: In their 20s, between adolescence and adulthood," he says. "And that, of course, is the dream of everyone: To maintain the ethos of life in a college dorm, beyond college." Another distinguishing factor of Friends: lack of conflict between the characters.
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