We were on a break...

Picture: Warner Media

So much for the much-anticipated Friends reunion. It had been talked about for over a year, postponed because of The Thing that’s been screwing everything up, and finally went out yesterday, on Sky in the UK. Note the emphasis on “reunion”: this was certainly not a revival. In fact, at one hour and 40 minutes, I wasn’t entirely sure what the hell it was.

Certainly it was a bit of history - albeit confected history - since, as Jennifer Aniston remarked early on, it was only the second time since the show ended in 2004 that the magic sextet of, in no particular order, Aniston, Courtney Cox, Matthew Perry, Lisa Kudrow, David Schwimmer and Matt LeBlanc, had been together in the same room. Various combinations had met socially, but as the 100-minute special opened, with the cast members walking emotionally on to the original Warner Brothers set, it was clear that something unique was unfolding. Or, at least, should have been.

This was a celebration of an undoubted television phenomenon: a sitcom that ran for 236 episodes over 10 series; shown in 220 countries and dubbed into 18 languages; watched (apparently) more than 100 billion times across all platforms; the No.1 show for six straight seasons in the US, averaging 22 million viewers a week; and whose finale was watched by a US audience of 52 million (no stats for the rest of the world). And, of course, is still running, somewhere, in syndication. Television’s equivalent of Dark Side Of The Moon.

For those of us of a certain age, Friends was a show that, to a limited sense, reflected life in the 1990s and early 2000s. Not that we were all exclusively white New Yorkers with Cox’s cheekbones, Perry’s wit or the sexual prowess of LeBlanc’s character. But we bought into the Friends lifestyle: we descended upon cosy coffee shops like Central Perk and aspired to the SoHo apartment life. Pre-social media, we argued - in person - over who was our favourite Friend. We all had an opinion as to whether Phoebe was, actually, the star of the show, that Chandler and Joey should have had their own sitcom as TV’s greatest odd couple, that Monica was very annoying, that Ross was worse, and that Rachel was lovably ditzy, but Oh My God.

Now I think of it, there was much to celebrate about Friends, and this reunion should have done that. Instead we got a mish-mash. Bits jumped all over the place, themes were never fully fleshed out, and guest appearances either made no sense, or were squandered. From the Warners set reunion of just the six actors, we went to a bizarre outdoor interview set-up, in front of the famous title sequence fountain, in which the aggravating James Corden asked a couple of questions, before it moved on to the cast doing a read-through of a classic scene, or recorded interviews with creators David Crane and Marta Kauffman. Breathlessly we were then on to a meaningless segment in which Tom Selleck walked into the apartment set for all of a minute, or actor James Michael Tyler (Gunther) appeared via Zoom for a brief hello, or Maggie Wheeler (Janice) stopped by to do her nasal “Oh-my-God!” catchphrase.

It was all a bit of an unsatisfying mess, really. And, strangely, for such an anticipated event, we hardly got to hear from the principle cast members. Yes, the likeable Schwimmer told how he’d fancied Aniston for real during their first season (they chose to channel their unrequited interest into the on-off-on-off Ross/Rachel affair). Cox, as might have been expected, seeing as she was, in the very beginning, the only member of the gang to have a profile (courtesy of Bruce Springsteen’s slightly corny Dancing In The Dark video) came across more guarded. LeBlanc - so much better in real life than as a somewhat stiff Top Gear presenter (let’s forget the entirely forgettable Friends spinoff, Joey…) - came across as the Friend you’d actually want to befriend, and perhaps the least actorly of the group. He also reminds me now of an old schoolfriend (albeit somewhat…erm…‘well upholstered’), which might enhance his familiarity. Kudrow, too, as I’d suspected, seemed just nice and down to earth. 

Perhaps the biggest disappointment, the biggest challenge to expectation management, was Perry. As Chandler Bing he had the funniest lines and easily the finest comic timing, famously forcing entire scenes to be rewritten with his own, funnier contributions. Perry had the distinction of uttering the very final line in the finale, with Rachel suggesting to the group that they should get one last coffee, to which Chandler cracks “Sure. Where?”.  In the reunion Perry appeared emotionally stunted, not helped by having undergone dental surgery immediately before the recording, which rendered him with a grin that resembled Jack Nicholson’s Joker, prior to putting on the face paint. 

There were moments of the Chandler wit: in response to Kudrow pledging that they all stayed in touch (“Maybe not every day, but every time you text or call, someone will be there.”) to which Perry deadpans: “I don’t hear from anyone”. It’s easy to see him as the classic tragic clown, and he has been through the wars in real life (self-inflicted, it must be said), but for all his natural funnies, he also felt anxiety the most, gripped with fear at delivering those pin-sharp lines in front of a live studio audience. “To me, I felt like I was going to die if they didn't laugh,” he said. “It's not healthy, for sure, but I would sometimes say a line and they wouldn't laugh and I would sweat and just go into convulsions if I didn't get the laugh I was supposed to get. I would freak out.” Perry’s admission seemed to shock his castmates in what felt like the one true deviation from the slightly forced party atmosphere. 

There’s no doubt that Friends was the product of great writing and astute casting. “We saw a gazillion people,” Kauffman revealed. Bright said that David Schwimmer had even given up television and had returned to doing theatre in Chicago when they came calling. Cox was originally seen as Rachel, until she convinced the producers otherwise. Kudrow’s Phoebe arrived ready-baked, having played the character’s fictional twin sister Ursula first in Mad About You. LeBlanc had been jobbing as a minor teen heartthrob, but when he auditioned he had just $11 to his name. He spent his first pay packet on a hot dinner. He explained how his second audition was almost hampered by a drunken episode the night before, where he’d lamped himself on a friend’s toilet bowl, leaving him a gruesome bruise on his nose. The pratfall may have won him the role. Other characters weren’t so straightforward: once Aniston was identified as Rachel, the producers had the task of freeing her from a contract with another show, Muddling Through. She wanted Friends, but having been in “a graveyard of pilots”, she’d finally found a fixed job and had to plead to be released from it. “That show is not going to make you a star,” she reveals its producer telling her.

Of course, it did. Arguably Aniston became Friends’ biggest breakout star, a point the reunion deftly avoids, although in a compilation of guest stars, there’s an awkward flashback to Brad Pitt’s appearance (they were married for five years). As Kauffman recalls, the Friends actors’ fame was unprecedented, remembering once seeing them on the cover of every single magazine at an airport newsagent as she passed by. “No one was going through what we were going through, except for the other five,” Schwimmer says.

17 years after they went for that final coffee, it’s clear that there is a genuine bond between the six. But ultimately, you can’t help feeling the reunion was squandered. It’s hard to understand why it was entertained in this form to begin with. Yes, some of the clips and anecdotes were fun, but when you’ve probably seen all 236 episodes, multiple times probably, given the amount of global syndication since Friends ended, there was nothing new to say. Ultimately, this was an exercise in HBO Max - the US network - leveraging some of the $425 million it paid to secure exclusive rights to the show. The cast’s appearance fees for the reunion were said to be somewhere between $2.5 and $3 million each. I suppose good for them. Nice work if you can get it.

If there’s one saving grace it was that this reunion wasn’t a precursor to a revival. Sitcoms being reborn, like some bizarre Jurassic Park DNA project, rarely work well. The return of Will & Grace bombed, the various reincarnations of Roseanne haven’t fared any better, and the plan to revive Frasier (see my post Still listening?) has already met with casting headwinds. Perhaps, then HBO Max is actually on to something by buying up every episode of Friends, and hoping that those now in middle age will want to relive their younger, child-free days, or that kids might discover it for the first time. That, though, is unlikely. As comedically perfect as the gang of 1994-2004 were, they probably offer very little to today’s audiences. Six impossibly good looking white twentysomethings? Could they be any less relevant?