The reunion episode of FRIENDS—an American sitcom that hardly needs an introduction—is going to air on May 27. And fans in India, like everywhere else, can’t keep calm.
Messages such as ‘Oh my heart, I needed this so much!’, ‘You can’t, can’t share it’, and ‘One week to go’ are floating on social media along with the trailer of Friends: The reunion that has clocked over 17.5 million views since it dropped on May 19.
In the two-minute teaser, actors Courteney Cox, Lisa Kudrow, Jennifer Aniston, Matt LeBlanc, David Schwimmer, and Matthew Perry, are seen returning to the studio in Burbank, California, where they had shot the '90s show as friends Monica, Phoebe, Rachel, Joey, Ross, and Chandler, respectively.
The cast has come together for the first time since the series folded up in 2004, so the age has definitely caught up but their friendly banter remains.
This comeback is huge for some millennials in India: It’s a throwback to the nights when they would gather in college dorms and PG hostels, around a laptop with YouTube or a hard disk loaded with all the 10 seasons, to follow the lives of these six friends in New York.
Understandably, they can’t wait to see what the reunion episode has in store. The episode will air on the streaming service HBO Max that doesn’t service here. In India, Zee5 will stream the show - though the date for its India release hasn't been announced yet.
Despite this snag, the anticipation is building up. Diehard fans say FRIENDS hasn’t gotten old or boring for them, even 17 years after it went off air. These fans have outgrown their college books, looks and outlook on life. Yet they hold on to FRIENDS-themed T-shirts, mugs and posters.
Friendship goals
Why do they hold on to these items - and the show, you ask?
Punita Maheshwari flubs her response as she takes the question, going from ‘There will come a time when I’ll outgrow the show’ to ‘I am not sure if I will’ over a laugh.
The 27-year-old gender campaigner in Bengaluru explains, “The show is a blueprint of how friendships should be. The way the ‘friends’ stood (up) for each other was inspiring. In fact, the lead actors have stayed in touch off the screen and that gives hope to our own friendships.”
Maheshwari means it. Just like Monica, she wants to keep her circle of friends together. To gather 10 or 11 of her pals, to watch the reunion episode may just be a step in that direction, she says.
But for journalist Akhila Damodaran, the series is an escape from reality. “So many things that happen on the show can’t happen in India, even in the coming years. Whether it’s staying with friends of all genders or having a roomie that doesn’t contribute to cooking or washing. Or, how Ross took care of the baby he had with Rachel out of a one-night stand and how they continued to date other people through this. From birthing your brother’s children via surrogacy to talking about sex freely, it is sort of a fantasy world,” says the 29-year-old.
Damodaran wants to catch the reunion “first day, first show-style”, before spoilers start coming her way. And she wants to mark the moment with another reunion. “Sonia (Dutta Gupta) and I first watched the show six years ago when we were roomies. She is like Monica, a little obsessed with cleaning, while I am a little laidback like Rachel. But now she is in Kolkata while I am in Bengaluru, so we may have to get on a Zoom call or share screens to watch whenever we get to,” she says.
Greater expectations
Anand B.K., a 29-year-old project manager in Bengaluru, says he has a plan in place: “I have a few friends in the US (where HBO Max is operational). So I am planning to catch the episode by logging into a VPN service.”
Anand says he is as much a fan of the actors behind these scenes, and so he’s glad about the way the comeback episode has been conceived.
“It’s about the reunion of the main cast and not about what happened to the ‘friends’ 10 years later. It’s unscripted and improvised, so it’s going to quite emotional.” Well, the cast did tear up in the teaser.
Roy, however, was hoping for more: hoping for the cast to re-enact famous scenes and lines such as ‘the apartment quiz scene’ (which the teaser has let out). On Roy’s wish list are Joey’s 'How you doin' one-liner and 'Joey doesn't share food', and when and how Monica taught Chandler about women's erogenous zones.
Not all was fun but...
Given the buzz on social media, it may look like all FRIENDS viewers are dying to watch this get-together but that’s not entirely true.
Amrita Manekar, 30, from Varanasi, says: “I was just entering my college life when I started watching FRIENDS and I could relate to these friends. They stayed together and fought the challenges of life together. But by the 10th season, they had grown apart. They had left their apartments to lead individual lives and I could not relate to them. It was over for me. I am not watching the reunion.”
Then there are Millennials like Radha (name changed on request) who stopped watching the show after Season 3. She says that like many shows of the '90s, she finds it "problematic". Yet she fears her unpopular opinion may get the fans trolling her.
“I found the under-representation of other races like Black Americans or Hispanics in major roles an issue. Also, I feel all characters were pigeonholed into their eccentricities with no room for evolution,” she says.
Radha is not alone in calling out the series, which has also been panned for peddling homophobia, sexism and objectification of women to body-shaming.
Psychologist Sulagna Mondal from Bengaluru likes the show overall but doesn’t hide her disapproval of how “it used LGBTQ characters like Carol and Chandler's dad for comedic purposes”, for instance.
The fans we spoke to earlier in the article are aware of these problems. This is a show from the '90s, which was a world quite different from today’s, argues Damodaran. She adds: “The show gave an equal amount of screen time and equal pay to the main actors. And when the makers decided to increase the salary of Jennifer Aniston and David Schwimmer later, these actors spoke up against the disparity. It’s a big thing and it happened in the 90s.”
Anand says that it’s not right to deem the entire series problematic. “If you haven’t watched the show, you must,” he says.
“I just wish they came back with many episodes, not just one,” Damodaran says.
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