We learned the wrong lesson from 'Friends'

Despite its name, 'Friends' actually demonstrates the power of family relationships

Thanks for checking out Nuclear Meltdown. If you like Friends or just friends, subscribe to this blog.

I’ve been in New York this week for work, and as I’m wont to do in New York I’ve been reflecting on all the NYC sitcoms I loved as a teenager. Like a lot of older millennials, I grew up with shows like Seinfeld and Friends — and I think these shows left a strong impression on me about adult life. Basically, I looked forward to an adulthood of endless hanging out in the big city.

Seinfeld is the better-crafted of these two 90s shows, but Friends perhaps captured the dream lifestyle better. And the name gets at the core idea: Life revolves around friends. The takeaway seemed to be that eventually you get to ditch your boring suburban life and spend all your time with your chosen social circle.

I was probably beguiled by this idea to a somewhat unique extent, but I don’t think I’m alone generally. Around the time my cohort started hitting the workforce, there was a glut of “back to the city” coverage and commentary. For example, theorist Richard Florida rose to prominence with his 2002 book The Rise of the Creative Class. The ideas seemed smart and jargon-y at the time, but Florida was also kind of just arguing that the Friends world — creative young people living it up in cities — will and should win out. Many news articles during this period similarly indicated millennials were returning to the city and effectively living the Friends lifestyle.

Obviously, there were a lot of factors driving this. But I do believe that pop culture of the 90s and early 2000s primed people my age to embrace this lifestyle. Where as previous sitcoms often portrayed families, the rise of the aspirational hang out comedy offered a new and alluring, vision for the good life. Subsequent youth culture shows — New Girl, Girls, etc. — further ran with this idea¹.

So my point is that I think for an entire generation, shows like Friends had a huge impact on what we thought waited for us in adulthood. I have no way to prove this is also connected to things like millennials delaying milestones such as marriage, or to falling birthrates. Nevertheless, I do think there is a connection.

But here’s the thing: We all missed the basic premise of Friends. Despite the name of the show, it’s actually about family.

Consider, there are six members of the core Friends group: Rachel, Monica, Phoebe, Ross, Chandler and Joey.

But if you will recall, Ross and Monica are actually siblings. They’re Gellers. In fact, it is this sibling relationship that forms the foundation of the entire friend group. Rachel, for example, is Monica’s high school friend. And Chandler is Ross’ college roommate. Chandler and Rachel, therefore, first know each other through the Geller family — and even end up a part of it after Monica marries Chandler and Rachel has a baby with Ross.

The Geller family shows up in other ways as well, for example, via recurring roles for the Geller parents (Elliot Gould memorably and hilariously played family patriarch Jack Geller). Or, there’s Tom Selleck’s recurring appearances as Monica’s love interest. But Selleck’s character was first a friend of the Geller family and is introduced during an event at the Geller home, not in the city. And of course Monica is subletting her spectacular apartment — an apartment that inspired a generation of future urbanites — from another family member.

In this light, it wouldn’t have been a stretch to call the show Family instead of Friends. Or, maybe it should’ve been called The Gellers. It is at least as much about family as a show like Family Matters in which the most famous character, Steve Urkel, was actually a neighbor kid and not a member of the titular family at all.

In fact, the primary difference between Friends and many bygone family sitcoms like Full House, Growing Pains, Family Ties and others is that Friends is about a grown up family. It’s about what happens to family when the kids reach adulthood but remain close. And for all its weakness — this is not a review, but again Seinfeld is the superior sitcom and Friends has a lot of weak writing — it’s actually a pretty idyllic representation of family. Two adult siblings are best friends, and knit together their own connections into one cohesive group. I’d be thrilled if my own kids have Friends-like relationships when they grow up (that would make me the Elliot Gould of the family, which I suppose is also a best-case scenario).

Many other shows also feature relationships that started in pre-narrative institutions. In Seinfeld, for example, Jerry and George are old high school buddies. Elaine joins the duo as Jerry’s ex-girlfriend, and Kramer joins as the neighbor, but it’s the George-Jerry relationship that holds everything together — something that’s further illustrated via the recurring roles of their parents, and those parents’ rivalries².

Something similar happens in New Girl, where Nick and Schmidt are college friends.

I haven’t seen every hang out comedy, but the point here is that all of these shows seem to be telling us the same thing: Adult relationships do not form out of nothing. When I first watch Friends as a teenager, I assumed I’d grow up and meet my own Friends friends.

But if I had been watching more closely I might have noticed that even TV writers know how hard it is to form deep relationships in adulthood. The lesson of Friends is not so much that you grow up, move to the city and leave your boring life behind. It’s that you should stay close enough to your existing social network that it can serve you through the rest of your life. The fact that the show took place in a cool setting is almost inconsequential.

This lesson was lost on me as a kid, who wanted to live in New York, specifically, despite growing up on the opposite side of the country. The best case scenario if I had done that would be becoming a Joey or a Kramer in someone else’s existing group — something that’s not easy to pull off.

There’s a lesson here that I think people like me have completely ignored. I know that TV shows are silly by design, and I don’t mean to suggest that Friends is the Bible. But again and again in the most popular fiction, writers seem to be telling us that it is not through random connections that most relationships are formed. The people hanging out the most, the people having the greatest amount of fun, are not the people who ditched their entire early-life social network. In fiction, as in real life, deep relationships take years to cultivate and often emerge via institutions such as family and school.

This seems like an important lesson right now as we grapple with growing levels of loneliness and isolation. I wouldn’t go so far as to blame the so-called loneliness epidemic on Friends. But I do think the worldview my generation took away from Gen X media a few decades ago did, at the very least, counterintuitively not help us ultimately maintain strong adult relationships. I know I grew up looking forward, into the future, assuming my best relationships still lay ahead. But it turns out that if I had been watching more closely, I might have looked to the past instead.

Thanks for checking out Nuclear Meltdown. If you enjoyed this post, consider sharing it with your friends.

1. There were obviously pre-Seinfeld hangout comedies, Cheers being a notable example. But Cheers gives off a hardscrabble and working class vibe. There’s a popular image on the internet, for example, showing the ages of the Cheers cast and how they were all quite young on the show — but how they also looked decades older than their actual ages. By contrast, later hangout shows were filled with people who were both hot and well-educated. They were more aspirational about, than descriptive of, city life. I’m sure people have written dissertations on this, but class dynamics are certainly a part of what’s going on. Post-Friends cities were depicted as places for the professional or ruling classes — the “creative class.” Another good example of this is New Girl, which is set in the long-ignored-but-now-cool downtown L.A.

2. It’s telling that when Jerry Seinfeld staged a Seinfeld revival on his show Comedians In Cars Getting Coffee, he only included the George character.