Friends is still a hit after 22 years. And I think I know why

http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2016/mar/30/friends-millennials-gentler-simpler-time

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Plonk yourself on the sofa and enjoy The One With the Inexplicable Intergenerational Pull. For the quintessential 90s sitcom, Friends, is finding a whole new audience among the young. Its ratings are up 10% in the UK since last year and it still, 12 years after it finished, pulls in 16 million viewers in syndication in the US – enough to make it a network hit if it were new. Indeed Netflix is sure enough of Monica, Chandler et al’s growing popularity among its target demographic to have just bought the rights to all 236 eps for an estimated $120m.

I can’t believe that I have already lived long enough to be witness to Friends’ second life. It’s like watching a friend’s child go off to university. “But I remember you being born!” you think. “Ten minutes ago! WTAF,” as you probably don’t even say any more these days.

Perhaps millennials find the sanitised, airbrushed version of New York life even more comforting than we did

Theories about its resurgence abound. Perhaps millennials find the sanitised, airbrushed version of New York life led by the perfectly coiffed sextet even more comforting than we did, the escapism offered even more valuable. The Friends’ friends do not, after all, have to negotiate Tinder, social media, a post-crash job market, exponentially increasing rents or any of the other myriad stresses millennials are still desperately trying to evolve strategies to deal with.

Maybe they secretly – or not so secretly – yearn for a life in which six flesh and blood friends instead of a thousand digital ones were all you expected or needed. “I’ll be there for you” goes the theme tune, and they are. I mean, you can’t rely on Chandler for anything but idiosyncratically stressed quips, but at least he’s paying enough attention to make them. Nobody’s distracted by their phones and the possibility of a better time going on somewhere beyond the coffee shop without them. They may be caffeinated to a degree that would prostrate today’s clean-eaters but they are present.

Or maybe it’s just a testament to the fact that, even in a fragmented, frequently dissonant world, quality endures. Friends was immaculately plotted and played by six actors who peaked early and stayed up there for a decade and these things don’t degrade any more than digitised repeats do.

Looking round at life from a vantage point that is closer to Jenna Maroney’s from 30 Rock when she lands a part as a mother in a Gossip Girl-type programme (“I’m 41! Time to die!”), I can only feel grateful that as time and the world itself appears to be collapsing, we have left something of at least minor note behind for the next generation. And that it’s a comedy. God knows, they’re going to need a laugh.

Who dares grins

I thought our long quest for the defining feature of Britishness was over a few weeks ago when we were handed the glory of Boaty McBoatface (which topped – I am laughing again as I type, and I don’t care – the online voting for naming our nations’s new £200m polar research vessel). But now there is a new contender – the “hijack selfie”. Ben Innes from Leeds, who was on the Egyptian flight hijacked by a man wearing an apparent explosives belt, asked for the picture while being held hostage by Seif Aldin Mustafa. “I’m not sure why I did it,” Innes said later. “I just threw caution to the wind while trying to stay cheerful in the face of adversity. I figured if his bomb was real I’d nothing to lose anyway.” This vignette of the idiotic insouciance that makes us us needs nothing more and yet there is this: Innes is a health and safety auditor.

Double think

An overheard snatch of conversation between my husband and four-year-old son this morning. Husband: “Do you know what ‘putting someone right’ means?” Son: “Yes. It means putting what I think into them.” Husband: “Attaboy.” Great, I thought as the walls started closing in around me while the seven hours until drinking time began stretching out to the crack of doom – now I’ve got two of them.