TMC
08-07-2017, 02:12 AM
http://www.avclub.com/article/very-special-friends-1997-debated-meaning-break-258896
At the start of 1997, the world had just gone through a year that included a bombing at the Atlanta Olympics, the arrest of Ted “The Unabomber” Kaczynski, a deadly terrorist attack on a U.S. military base in Saudi Arabia, and mass shootings at both an Australian tourist site and a Scottish primary school. Meanwhile, when the new year began, NBC’s hit sitcom Friends launched a new storyline, which had Rachel Green quitting her job as a coffeehouse waitress and landing a position in the fashion industry, ultimately straining her relationship with her boyfriend Ross Geller.
This was a widely watched, memorable arc for Friends—the kind that people who paid attention to TV back then still bring up when they talk about the pop culture of the ’90s. It’s true that anybody who watches those episodes now wouldn’t get much inkling from them about any violence or strife that was happening elsewhere in the world. But to be fair, most folks who watched Friends in its original run probably weren’t thinking about that either.
Or at least that’s how I remember it. I was 26 years old in the first half of ’97, and a newlywed living in northern Virginia. My wife and I had a daily subscription to The Washington Post, and spent most of our time in our apartment with the TV on and some kind of reading material close at hand. We felt well-informed, although compared to the age of Twitter, our access to breaking news was primitive. Perhaps as a result, unlike in 2017, we didn’t spend all day feeling constantly on-edge and mildly queasy… even if, in retrospect, perhaps we had reason to. That’s why watching Friends now—at least for those of us who remember the first time the episodes aired—isn’t just an exercise in pining for a prettified, fictionalized version of New York yuppies. It also provokes nostalgia for a seemingly more sedate, less persistently nerve-wracking way of life.
As silly as it seems to say now, what did make us anxious back then was television. In the waning years of the ’90s, before The Sopranos debuted on HBO and initiated the age of prestige, the major networks were in the middle of their own mini-Golden Age. In 1997, even viewers without cable subscriptions could watch The X-Files, The Practice, The Simpsons, King Of The Hill, Ally McBeal, Buffy The Vampire Slayer, NYPD Blue, Murder One, Everybody Loves Raymond, Mad About You, Roseanne, NewsRadio, Frasier, Dawson’s Creek, The Drew Carey Show, Seinfeld, Law & Order, Chicago Hope, ER, and Homicide: Life On The Street. We were a few years away from the intense, “can’t miss an episode of you’ll be lost” serialization becoming the norm for TV storytelling. But a remarkable number of the shows above did rely on subplots to keep fans hanging on—sometimes nervously—from week to week.
The enduring popularity of Friends is due in part to how comforting it is to drop into its universe, and to shut out anything happening outside the frame. But the reasons for that have a lot to do with how adroitly the writers combined serialization with episodic “one and done” plotting.
At the start of 1997, the world had just gone through a year that included a bombing at the Atlanta Olympics, the arrest of Ted “The Unabomber” Kaczynski, a deadly terrorist attack on a U.S. military base in Saudi Arabia, and mass shootings at both an Australian tourist site and a Scottish primary school. Meanwhile, when the new year began, NBC’s hit sitcom Friends launched a new storyline, which had Rachel Green quitting her job as a coffeehouse waitress and landing a position in the fashion industry, ultimately straining her relationship with her boyfriend Ross Geller.
This was a widely watched, memorable arc for Friends—the kind that people who paid attention to TV back then still bring up when they talk about the pop culture of the ’90s. It’s true that anybody who watches those episodes now wouldn’t get much inkling from them about any violence or strife that was happening elsewhere in the world. But to be fair, most folks who watched Friends in its original run probably weren’t thinking about that either.
Or at least that’s how I remember it. I was 26 years old in the first half of ’97, and a newlywed living in northern Virginia. My wife and I had a daily subscription to The Washington Post, and spent most of our time in our apartment with the TV on and some kind of reading material close at hand. We felt well-informed, although compared to the age of Twitter, our access to breaking news was primitive. Perhaps as a result, unlike in 2017, we didn’t spend all day feeling constantly on-edge and mildly queasy… even if, in retrospect, perhaps we had reason to. That’s why watching Friends now—at least for those of us who remember the first time the episodes aired—isn’t just an exercise in pining for a prettified, fictionalized version of New York yuppies. It also provokes nostalgia for a seemingly more sedate, less persistently nerve-wracking way of life.
As silly as it seems to say now, what did make us anxious back then was television. In the waning years of the ’90s, before The Sopranos debuted on HBO and initiated the age of prestige, the major networks were in the middle of their own mini-Golden Age. In 1997, even viewers without cable subscriptions could watch The X-Files, The Practice, The Simpsons, King Of The Hill, Ally McBeal, Buffy The Vampire Slayer, NYPD Blue, Murder One, Everybody Loves Raymond, Mad About You, Roseanne, NewsRadio, Frasier, Dawson’s Creek, The Drew Carey Show, Seinfeld, Law & Order, Chicago Hope, ER, and Homicide: Life On The Street. We were a few years away from the intense, “can’t miss an episode of you’ll be lost” serialization becoming the norm for TV storytelling. But a remarkable number of the shows above did rely on subplots to keep fans hanging on—sometimes nervously—from week to week.
The enduring popularity of Friends is due in part to how comforting it is to drop into its universe, and to shut out anything happening outside the frame. But the reasons for that have a lot to do with how adroitly the writers combined serialization with episodic “one and done” plotting.