I’ll be there for you…
Monday, August 28th, 2006Earlier this summer I acquired all ten seasons of Friends on DVD. I started with season 6 earlier this year, then kind of cascaded into the other nine. By the time I finished watching all of them several weeks ago, I was sick of it.
So, I’ve finally started over with season one, and I’m going to watch them in order this time. There are a lot of elements that tend to make the later seasons kind of grating while the earlier seasons are a lot more fun to watch. For one thing, Courteney Cox and Jennifer Aniston are still cute and curvy — I think first season Rachel, in particular, is adorable. But check out her and Monica in later seasons, it’s like they just stumbled out of Auschwitz. 
The show also seems to have suffered from its own fame. Pretty much all of the season premieres from season 7 onwards are excruciatingly boring, because the writers have locked themselves into tying up whatever loose ends they left us with at the end of last season. More often than not, the plot of the episode is one long “hilarious” misunderstanding that takes the whole episode to clear up, primarily because everyone refuses to sit down and listen to each other!! IMO, the last time the “I have to tell you something important, but oops! I keep getting interrupted!” plotline was actually funny was when I Love Lucy did it.
Someone on JumpTheShark mentioned, and I agree, that as the show went on, the actors became overconfident in the funniness of the show — they were so ridiculously popular that they could have read the phone book and the audience would have been in stitches anyway, so the comedy suffered.
Not only did the comedy suffer, but at times it became completely overshadowed by the drama — often “Ross and Rachel” stuff, but, for example, practically all of season 7 was a bunch of drawn out pre-wedding Monica and Chandler crap. And don’t get me wrong, I like Monica and Chandler. I loved their relationship in season 6. But that was because it was a nice little undercurrent, not the overwhelming focus of every episode. And sorry, but the season 7 finale, with Chandler conveniently getting cold feet was just ridiculous, especially given the fact that his feet were warm, warm, warm prior to the finale.
I’m sure my griping will continue as the series wears on. Right now I’m almost at the end of season one, and as far as I’m concerned, this season was solid from start to finish. This is classic Friends. You can watch it end to end, front to back, and it will never wear thin. I’d recommend it wholeheartedly to anyone. Let’s see if the rest of it improves on me this time around.
August 29th, 2006 at 8:49 pm
I am not convinced that the programme ever had any merit. Part of the problem is that it was set in New York but written by people who had no clue about the reality of living there. Do you really think they could possibly afford such nice apartments? How many ethnic minorities did you see on the show? How often did you see them take the bus or subway?