When that show first came on my friend explained it to me: "people like it because it's kind of funny and all the people on it are pretty hot."
I note that, in that photo, the third from the left is sporting the Dreamworks eyebrow.
(Don't you find this endlessly endearing and representative of my edgy, modern personality?)
Damn you Minivet! TVTropes and I'm on deadline. Bad enough I keep hitting refresh here.
I only watched because I had been a huge Misfits of Science fan. Once I saw how different it was, I stopped.
I wonder if Matt LeBlanc has ever been as balding as he is in that picture since.
That's why we were always surprised when people compared us to Seinfeld.
I'd have thought it would be because the people comparing you to Seinfeld are figments of your imagination.
Is there a handedness thing going on with eyebrow-raising? I can raise my left eyebrow easily but it's a lot harder to raise the right one on its own.
I can only raise both eyebrows at once.
Can you also raise neither eyebrow? Or are you permanently surprised?
I'm an easy audience for anything funny, and when I mean funny, I mean I like dumb jokes. I still never really liked Friends, which sort of surprised me. I liked it enough to sit through an episode occasionally, and there are bits that I still recall as very funny (the episode where someone tries to make trifle but the cookbook page is stuck together so when she turns the page she's in the shepherd's pie recipe? The kind of thing that will reliably amuse me.)
But I never got even remotely interested in what was going to happen to any of the characters, and I'm kind of surprised by that -- again, I'm an easy audience for that sort of thing.
I can raise my left eyebrow easily but it's a lot harder to raise the right one on its own.
Me too.
Do we have any left-handed commenters who can tell us if they raise their right eyebrows more easily?
12 is pretty much how I feel about it if you include my strong desire to kill Ross.
But I never got even remotely interested in what was going to happen to any of the characters, and I'm kind of surprised by that
No, no, no. In between all the jokes, there was this emotional thread. You were invested in these relationships. No one could describe their passion for it.
I can twirl my tongue upside down in either direction, though.
Maybe "twist" is more descriptive than "twirl" there.
14: yes. No - if anything the left one is slightly easier.
15: Funny, I wanted to kill Rachel, Monica, and whatever Matthew Perry's name was more than Ross.
Anyway, the trifle with beef episode was my favorite also.
Wasn't the Seinfeld finale done backwards or something?
Since everyone else is being silly, I guess I have to bring the knowledge.
No, heebie, the chronologically backwards episode of Seinfeld was an episode from the last season but not the finale. As I recall it was one of the funnier episodes of the last season.
In the Seinfeld finale, the main characters were all put on trial for being selfish jerks. It was awful.
I liked it just fine for a spell, and just sort of took it for granted. It was usually on in our living room sophomore year, because at least one roommate was actively into it.
I remember an episode where surely Ross and Rachel were about to finally kiss, and the power went out on our street, and we heard screaming from the house next door.
I watched at least part of the Friends finale too.
Yes, we knew Rachel and Ross were going to wind up together. No, it was not entertaining.
19: Damn. Another beautiful theory spoiled by data.
I remember being confused by the fact that in succession Lisa Kudrow and Jennifer Aniston were held up in tabloids as the super hot one from the show, when it was blindingly obvious that Courtney Cox was the hottest by a long shot. It was about then that I realized the importance of agents in Hollywood.
It fascinates me that the Friends crew are still trying to convince thmselves-- or anyway someone -- that their characters are ones "we" (or actually "you") all cared about. We know enough about Larry David via Curb Yr Enthusiasm that he, quite correctly, sees his comedy creations (Seinfeld et al) as self-absorbed unself-aware robots that you wind up and set running in the world. The Friends characters are similarly self-absorbed and unself-aware cartoons of pathology*, except their creators seem to be (or want to be seen as) invested in their unassailable loveability. Which is non-existent.
*Connoisseurs -- which includes me, as I became completely obsessed with it, and have certainly watched it more often than Matt LeBlanc -- will know that Ross ultimately comes out way ahead as worst-and-most-hateable major character. David Schwimmer doesn't help by being the least competent comic performer by some margin.
For me, at least, they're right about Seinfeld. I file it, alongside Always Sunny, as shows I enjoy when they happen to be on but that I never seek out because I detest the characters.
I thought, This is a Shakespearean soap opera. It's a drama that's really, really funny, and with a complex architecture
This is unfair to Friends, which was occasionally funny. Unlike Shakespeare.
I don't remember Lisa Kudrow being ever considered a hot starlet. She was sort of an improv comedian and the rest of them were actors.
For reference, other sitcoms I have been obsessed with include My Two Dads; We Got it Made; Veronica's Closet...)
... and of course Dharma and Greg
32: So would you rate My Two Dads as peak funny for Paul Reiser, above Mad About You?
Damn. Another beautiful theory spoiled by data.
Wait! I'm left handed and I can only raise my right eyebrow. Ajay is probably an anomaly. Apply for funding!
34: Sorry about the italics foul-up!
Also, has there ever been a wackier premise for a family sit-com?
Not sure Mad About You ever aired in the UK
Data: right handed; left eyebrow; roll tongue clockwise only.
Also not convinced my obsessions are much to do with these shows being how-you-say "funny"
I really wanted to kill McKinley, but then Czolgosz beat me to it.
In the Seinfeld finale, the main characters were all put on trial for being selfish jerks. It was awful.
I think Larry David figured that his series was about people getting away with being shitty human beings, so it might be funny to see them get their comeuppance. The problem is, they were put on trial for doing something that was wildly out of character. They weren't shitty people in that particular way.
You got "Veronica's Closet" but not "Mad About You"? Weird.
39: So, what do you think it is about these shows that causes your obsession? Just curious.
1, by the way, explains the appeal of Friends precisely, and those of you who object are probably the types who don't even own a TV.
It was while watching Friends that I first realized that telling jokes is different from being witty, and that the characters on it were all telling jokes, conveniently set up by other characters, rather than being witty. Thus I disdained it, and it is to this disdain that I attribute my legendary sexual stamina.
Now that I think about it, abstinence is a kind of stamina.
See, I think of my associates as useful primarily to the extent that they set up my jokes, and attempt to do the same in return. Wit is overrated. It is to this knowledge I attribute my uncanny skill with pâtisserie.
When I saw it semi-recently, I was pretty surprised at how hackneyed and staged the jokes seemed. Vaudevillian. I remembered it being a lot funnier.
Keuschheit sounds as if it should mean something a lot dirtier, or at least more interesting, than it does.
See, I think of my associates as useful primarily to the extent that they set up my jokes, and attempt to do the same in return.
I just require that they laugh at my jokes.
I can't decide if 46 is an example of "telling jokes, conveniently set up by other characters" or "being witty." Can you clear this up for me, nosflow?
Vaudevillian.
Slander. WC Fields and Blind Willie McTell are great.
I think -- to be a massive ponce about it -- it's about the internal dialectic these shows* set up between normality and oddness: who's the weirdo, who's the straightie, what gets greenlighted as a joke because it's bizarre behaviour and what gets greenlighted as a joke because it's cliche behaviour.
*as somewhat downlist hit comedies which never quite escape the gravitational pull of their original high-concept set-up
"In English departments the most serious competition is for the role of straight man."
Ack! Mormons! I'm literally hiding under the table right now, with my laptop.
They've knocked three separate times already. Doesn't that mean I have to let them in, according to Jewish law?
You missed my favorite line from the article, from Warren Littlefield:
One morning while I had been studying the overnight ratings from the major markets, I found myself thinking about the people in those cities, particularly the twentysomethings just beginning to make their way.
My brother. I love it so much. The creative process at work.
I wasn't a huge fan, but Friends really was both innovative and culturally significant.
57, 58: I love it when people live-blog perilous situations.
I ask because I really know nothing about TV (I watch it, but in a dully sedated manner) but how innovative?
It broke new ground in laughably unbelievable New York apartments.
Right handed; raise right eyebrow- but when I smile my right eye is often more squinted than my left, in fact an image search reveals an example of this as the second result. Maybe I just have more control over the right side of my face.
I can do anything with my tongue (laydeez.)
I first became aware of Friends when all the women in my apartment complex in college turned out to have slight variations of the same haircut.
Never before had a successful show been made about twentysomethings beginning to make their way in a major city that didn't also feature Norman Fell.
Cast, setting, style of joke, audience appealed to, age range of characters, situations of characters (e.g. coffee shop, purported appeal to slackers, etc.), eventually size and nature of payments to talent, working of romantic drama story arc into episodic sitcom. Remember that when it came out we werent far removed from The Cosby Show and Home Improvement as leading sitcoms, and the difference from eg Cheers is pretty obvious.
Didn't someone determine that they'd either need to be rent controlled or be making something like $400k to afford the size of apartment shown?
The dull schlub who gets the hot babe was a paleontologist, the spacey blond was a masseuse, and the uptight woman was a chef. Completely new.
Wasn't there some explanation about how the apartment was actually owned by someone's aunt?
working of romantic drama story arc into episodic sitcom... the difference from eg Cheers is pretty obvious.
Not so fast, paleo boy.
I'm right-handed and can raise only my right eyebrow. But I do it exceptionally well.
They've knocked three separate times already. Doesn't that mean I have to let them in, according to Jewish law?
Something like that, but you also have to look out for vampire law. If you invite them in, they can come in whenever.
66: Were there any shows that copied aspects of this formula that were successful? I can't think of any.
Monica had inherited her flat from her grandmother. I actually now forget* how Chandler (Monica's brother's best friend at college) ended up with the one opposite.
*(Very briefly I thought How do I not remember this? -- but perhaps in the world of actual sane people not knowing this is considered acceptable?)
I'm not saying that it was the Revolver of TV shows, just that it did some pretty new things and had a new style for an early 90s sitcom. Cheers (which I prefer) had Sam and but it was mostly played as a joke; for the first few seasons of Friends the Ross/Rachel thing was played as basically straight up chick flick style romantic drama.
I think I will admit to having liked Friends. Like I don't sit around saying "they don't make shows like Friends anymore, that's for sure!" but it was often funny and the characters were a palatable mix of like-worthy and hate-worthy. Yes, it was another commercial for the centrality of pairing off and having babies, but I didn't go in expecting Rashomon.
It was while watching Friends that I first realized that telling jokes is different from being witty
neb, you've seen Ridicule, right?
but perhaps in the world of actual sane people not knowing this is considered acceptable?)
Absolutely not acceptable! Hide in shame!
Put another, more aggressively confrontational way, it wa about as innovative in its time as Girls is today, which is to say somewhat innovative.
I'm waiting for a weekly comedy series that addresses interspecies sex, consensual and not, from the persective of a marine mammal.
What was the name of the Brit Friends rip-off? Coupling, right?
The 20 minute live version of the theme song is a total jam.
You know what allows for the kind of bold innovation shows like Friends represent?
That's right.
Breathe in the quote from 59. Live it and love it.
Tremendous research has not cleared up the question that was puzzling me: why Chandler (before the story began) already had the apartment opposite Monica's grandmother*.
*Who was still alive in early shows, but living in Florida: Monica was illegally subletting from her. (Her death is the centrepiece of one of the later stories: we never meet her.)
86: Which reminds me a bit of the following from Didion's Slouching Towards Bethlehem
"There are only three significant pieces of data in the world today," is another thing Chet Helms told me one night. We were at the Avalon and the big strobe was going and the colored lights and the Day-Glo painting and the place was full of high-school kids trying to look turned on. The Avalon sound system projects 126 decibels at 100 feet but to Chet Helms the sound is just there, like the air, and he talks through it. "The first is," he said, "God died last year and was obited by the press. The second is, fifty percent of the population is or will be under twenty-five." A boy shook a tambourine toward us and Chet smiled benevolently at him. "The third," he said, "is that they got twenty billion irresponsible dollars to spend."
Headline I'd like to see: "Increasing Obesity Rates: Will News Sites Have Enough Faceless Pictures of Heavy People To Report the Story."
85: The neb is not a subject.
I kinda liked Friends. It had its moments. The story arc around Phoebe's "Smelly Cat" song was amusing. In fact, someone should do Friends without Friends and digitally remove everyone but Lisa Kudrow from every episode. It would be just as funny and a lot more cerebral. Like a Godard film.
You know what they should have done? A black and white episode of Friends that was a parody of The Honeymooners or I Love Lucy or something like that. What other half-hour sitcoms have had six main characters, besides Cheers? The Facts of Life and Kate and Ally I suppose. Is there weird gender stuff going on there then? I could free associate about sitcoms all day.
67: There's nothing actually unreasonable about the apartments they live in. Monica's apartment is rent controlled and in her grandmother's name, Chandler has a high paying job and that apartment isn't particularly stunning, and Ross is an NYU professor. RWM loves to rant against people who say what 67 says.
re: 81
Yes, although that was quite different in many ways. More baroque plotting, more sex jokes, more outright oddness, less consistent.* Structurally, and in cast terms, close to a straight rip-off, though, yeah.
I passed one of the cast members (Ben Miles) in the street just a week or two back. Tall.
* although funnier, when it was funny.
Roseanne had six main characters. Big Bang Theory has seven now, though it only had five to start with.
Yes, but how is Ross an NYU professor?!
I conjecture that moribundity and clinging to what worked in the past is so much the norm in TV that any move that draws perceptibly closer to current culture is likely to be hailed as amazing and innovative.
What other half-hour sitcoms have had six main characters, besides Cheers?
The Mary Tyler Moore Show and M*A*S*H.
91: To be more Godard-like, Friends should have had more close-ups of the coffee.
RWM loves to rant against people who say what 67 says.
Whoever RWM is I think they need a hobby.
Barney Miller; WKRP in Cincinnati: both seven or more main characters
(But that's how workplace sitcoms work.)
WKRP, or is the question *exactly* six?
92- Ah, but you never saw the other half of the apartment! It was a whole studio that sat 100+ people and camera and lighting equipment and must have added a few thousand square feet. How many of those can you find in Manhattan?
To be really Godard-like, Friends would need close-ups of the rent
Monica's apartment is rent controlled and in her grandmother's name
It was pretty implausible -- an apartment that was that kind of amazing deal is very very very rare even under rent stabilization (rent control is a smaller category that's almost completely gone) and the apartment wouldn't look like that, because it wouldn't have been remodeled since the grandmother moved in. That kind of big-open-space-sorta-loft apartment just isn't going to be the cheap stabilized apartment. You might get a Woody Allen UWS classic six, but not the Friends apartment.
I thought maybe The Dick Van Dyke Show for an early example, but is basically had five.
95: At the beginning he's a postdoc at (a fictional version of) AMNH, and then he's a professor at NYU. It's not totally implausible as a career track (we of course never get to hear anything about his work, so it's hard to judge whether it's good enough for NYU).
I am glad that I'm not the only one who remembers that Monica's apartment was rent controlled and in her grandmother's name.
Wings was on the air for seven years. Crazy, huh?
And the "Monica used to be fat!" joke was a total Wings rip-off.
I'm amazed how on-topic this thread has stayed.
Seinfeld's apartment seemed much more realistic. Small kitchen, single common room, small bathroom, one bedroom down the hall.
Rwm (rhymeswithmaria, she's occasionally commented here a while ago, but she uses the pseud elsewhere, so I prefer to abbreviate) used to live in a rent controlled apartment with a 80 year old roommate. But indeed it was UWS. Nonetheless there do seem to be real life versions of Monica's apartment.
Wikipedia entry on Chanlder Bing: "On a tip from Monica, Chandler later moved to Apartment #19 in Greenwich Village, Manhattan, across the hall from Monica and her roommate Phoebe Buffay." (Why I was baffled: for some reason I thought he moved in before Monica took over her grandmother's flat)
Earlier research turned up the fact that it was "Apartment #4" for the first half of the first series.
Re innovation: Seinfeld in fact got there first, but before that sit-coms were generally family-centred or workplace-centred. Sit-com based round extended groups of friends were unusual.
To be fair, almost every sitcom living space tended to be implausible unless they were making a point of it being downscale (All in the Family/Sanford & Son/Roseanne). I sometimes think people get a warped view of typical suburbia in the late 50s/early 60s from Leave it to Beaver, Father Knows Best, etc. Somehow it was never the small Levittown-esque ranch with carport. It's aspirational subliminal real estate pron all the way down.
rhymeswithmaria
Oh well now I feel bad.
When I watched Wedding Singers in 2005, long after I'd lost the habit of watching sitcoms, I was just blown, away out of proportion to how good it was, by the revelation that this was a sitcom, not in the usual sense of any ongoing comedy but in the sense of a comedy that derived a big chunk of its humor from the inherently funny situations as opposed to, say, banter or pratfalls or visual gags, and the revelatory part is that it wasn't automatically painfully cringe-inducing to watch.
I watched Friends and Frasier growing up, and they had their moments, but all too often the humor was just "look how humiliated they are this time!" As best, those episodes were tragic, comic only in the sense of black comedy. More often it was just a scripted version of Punk'd or one of those asshole reality TV shows, and you don't need scripts for that.
115.last: That was one of the points in that piece arguing for the significance of Diner wasn't it?
I had decided it was somebody named Robert W. Morris, for some reason.
Sit-com based round extended groups of friends were unusual.
Laverne and Shirley, Facts of Life (sort of), Cheers (of course)
Bosom Buddies, Three's Company.
"we of course never get to hear anything about his work": this is not entirely true -- we get snippets of his papers now and then (especially when he's dating Charlie). If Joey is in the audience he always laughs when Ross says "homo erectus".
Cheers is workplace-based in the sense that the bar is where the central characters work. Norm and Cliffie don't work there exactly but they know Sam etc via Sam's work.
Happy Days is friends-based, isn't it?
125: Sorry, I meant Wedding Crashers. The Wedding Singer is a different movie, also an OK comedy I thought, but not the one I was thinking of 10 minutes ago.
Three's Company: the comedy premise is that they all share a flat and are learning to become, not that they're friends to end up sharing a flat.
But I agree this is a super-subtle distinction -- and actually I think the Brit Sit-com that inspired it, Man About the House, is pretty mich the innovating item that Halford claims Friends was.
"learning to become," s/b "learning to become friends'"
(I've never actually watched Three's Company, so I might be wrong about this: I'm basing the judgment on Man About the House)
(My very first published article of significant length anywhere was a detailed comparison and contrast of the treatment of sex in British and US sitcoms: 1985, and not available online)
I pretty much concur with 76. I saw an episode during its first season and thought it was pretty lame, but then was surprised to see it a few years later and find it pretty funny.
I found it very frustrating just how hatable Ross became - it seemed like they wrote him as more pathetic, directed him to be more annoying, and Schwimmer decided to play him as whinier.
It's hard for me to grasp why it's innovative to premise a show around a group of friends, even if there weren't all the Laverne and Shirley and work-place themed similar shows.
I think the thinking is actually "Friends was wildly successful, therefore there must have been something new that they did." Which doesn't hold up - it was just a funny-for-then show featuring super pretty people.
BTW, one innovation - which was stolen from Seinfeld, but used effectively enough that I think they deserve some credit - was in not just having an A story and a B story, but sometimes also having a C story, combining them all cleverly, and often using the various threads to play around with the romantic side and the comedy side.
Haven't seen an episode in years. No idea how funny I'd find it.
I'm sorry, how has no one commented on this:
he was doing a show called LAX 2194 [a Fox pilot about baggage handlers in the year 2194]WTF, Fox?
134: Phineas and Ferb does that better.
134 to 133, as it happens.
I think that, by weighting all 6 characters equally, playing with the A and B stories is more interesting. Any Cheers plot that didn't include Sam and Diane was, inherently, a B plot. In Friends, the characters could be split in any way, and there was no obvious rule about which plot was primary (yes, Ross & Rachel was the main thread through the series, but that didn't make every episode that referenced their relationship an episode with an A plot about those 2).
Before Friends began, there was a fair amount of publicity about how new and different it was -- I remember a very long article in Rolling Stone, for example. (I don't think I read it, I think a colleague showed it to me in amusement.)
Sit-com based round extended groups of friends were unusual.
Quite a few of my peers commented on this at the time (we were essentially exactly the age of the characters. Still are, I suppose).
Interestingly (if that word can continue to be used here) I associate the kind of buzz it had, and where its newness was said to be sited, with the way people talked about 30something. Obviously 30something was several years earlier, and the people in it were older, and it wasn't a comedy: so the association I'm making is a reach if it's contentful at all: the novelty being something to do with the "kind of people being depicted" -- as an age group, but also as representative of a "generation" -- but not actually the same age group or the same generation.
H-G seems to think that "Sit-com based round extended groups of friends" is synonymous with "sit[-]com in which the characters are friends." Cheers was not about a group of friends; many of the characters don't like each other, and the 2 who are ostensibly best friends (Norm & Cliff) AFAIK never even meet the women in each others' lives (Cliff's ma, Norm's wife). LaVerne & Shirley is about a pair of friends and their lives - every other character is secondary, and they're all love interests, family members, or colleagues. I could go on.
I'm not saying Friends was absolutely unique or ground-breaking, but it was different.
Bosom Buddies, which I thought was absolutely brilliantly funny (I was a kid, but I liked smart comedies), turns out to be awful. Some of that is how poorly sitcoms age, but jeez. Barney Miller is still quite funny.
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Couches! Fire! Science! Couches on fire!
Where's Megan?
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and the apartment wouldn't look like that, because it wouldn't have been remodeled since the grandmother moved in
Oh come on. Everyone in rent controlled apartments has kitchens nice enough to run a professional catering business out of them.
AB tried to make me watch 30something, but I bailed after 4 or 5 episodes. I think that she watched it as a teen who was fascinated by that window into adulthood, but I found it excruciating, for all sorts of reasons. It's possible it was getting good enough to watch as it settled in to the characters, but the overall datedness, on top of its actual flaws, was too much.
H-G seems to think that "Sit-com based round extended groups of friends" is synonymous with "sit[-]com in which the characters are friends."
I don't think these are synonymous. I just don't get why it's innovative to go from one to the other.
141.last: I liked Bosom Buddies as a kid as well, and I think it's been ill-served by its subject matter: cross-dressing jokes have aged more dramatically than most.
Well, look, if the show had been called A Number of People Who Know Each Other and Spend Time Together For No Particular Reason But Who Are Not Friends Exactly would it be hailed as innovative by people on the internet? I think not.
It's pretty common in NYC for people to lots of work on apartments they don't own. It has always struck me as slightly insane, since in more than one case I can think of the remodels resulted in the landlord jacking the rent way the hell up. A very dear friend of mine has a mindblowing yet relatively cheap *illegal sublet* on Union Sq. that he rehabbed top to bottom.
141: Would Happy Days count as a bunch-of-friends sitcom predecessor? There was a family element, but the nucleus was Richie/Ralph/Potsie/Fonzie.
How many shows did Happy Days spin-off? Three?
Was Cosby Show or Friends more innovative? I mean, Cosby's family was UMC black, which hadn't been done before, but Friends were friends.
I didn't start watching Friends until about halfway through its run (or whenever the Ross marriage to the English woman was going on), but I remember thinking it was amusing without being memorably funny. Also, lots of embarrassment comedy that I could barely watch.
It's very different than Cheers in many ways, obviously, but once I'd watched it for a while I thought the two were similar on the soap opera/extended romantic drama played out over many episodes scale.
148: I'll argue this one to the death, but that's not a "Grandma lived in it for decades, and now the poor granddaughter moved in" story. That's a middle/upper-income adult with a rental deal. The apartment's not impossible, but it's really really really implausible.
Am I crazy or was there a Newsweek cover circa 1995: "The Schwimming of America". And it was about how he was like the first sensitive guy on TV?
Google gets me nothing so maybe it was a weird dream.
149: I think the family element was too strong. First of all, IIRC Richie really was the protagonist at first - it was about him and his life. Second of all, Fonzie wasn't a peer, so even to the extent that it was about friends, it was 3 pals, and then the Cunninghams, and then the Fonz.
And Joanie loving Chachi, of course.
140: Laverne and Shirley, Mork and Mindy, Joanie Loves Chachi... that's all I've got. It feels like I'm missing something, though.
With all the chaff Halford dumped, he's getting away with claiming that the style of joke was innovative. If anything, after Seinfeld it was a reversion.
That said, it ran so damn long that it probably covered some of that ground - I bet there were episodes with Raplph & Pottsie getting the A story while Richie was relegated to a B story.
154 sounds crazy.
I'm sorry, what generation was Mork from Ork supposed to represent?
156: Wikipedia also gives Out of the Blue, Blansky's Beauties, and two animated series. I'd heard of none of these.
153: I'm saying that the granddaughter can easily paint the walls in contrasting colors and buy nicer appliances. Monica was never supposed to be impoverished. Actually, grandma needn't have been impoverished either. Lots of people live in rent-controlled apartments, like Jessica Lange.
161: Or is it Faye Dunaway? Someone like that.
Homer: Enough with what's out! What's in?
Moe: Ice-blended mocha drinks and David Schwimmer.
Homer: Hm, yes, he is handsome in an ugly sort of way.
161: I was thinking that the floorplan looked like someone had done a serious-moving-walls-around-remodeling in the 80s or later. The open kitchen, bedrooms opening straight off the living room rather than a hallway... it doesn't look like an old apartment.
I can't imagine rewatching 30something with anything but a researcher's eye. It was tremendously pleased with itself.
The argument at 137 -- about equal weighting of a relatively large number of characters, and there not obviously being A, B or C-plots -- is what can make the step between "sit[-]com[s] in which the characters are friends" and "Sit-com[s] based round extended groups of friends" potentially innovative, because it requires that writers think about plot generation and plot resolution in a somewhat different way. For example, the issue of whether newcomers (ie bfs and gfs) "fit into the group" has way more significance as a plot point than I can really recall in earlier sitcoms. (Earlier, that is, than Seinfeld.)
(Open discussion of sex is relevant here: should characters choose hot but unlikeable sexual partners over the companionship of old chums? This was never raised in Happy Days, I don't think, and wasn't germane in Cheers...)
154: Ha ha ha no I think I was conflating The Teshing of America and Triumph of a Coffee Bar Hamlet !
So the innovation wasn't so much 'group of friends' as it was 'level structure - no clear center, plots involving any character are likely to be of equal importance'? If that's it, then don't a bunch of workplace sitcoms qualify? That seems to pull in Taxi and Barney Miller, for example.
The Simpsons of course got into going beyond A and B stories, but I'm not sure how early that got started. It's very family sitcom in the first couple of seasons.
Doing existing structures well is a nice thing. Can't that be an acceptable compliment for Friends? Do we have to dilute "innovative"?
Roseanne had poor fat people, Mary Tyler Moore had a working woman, and Friends had friends. Each was equally innovative in its own way.
Workplace sitcoms don't really generate the tension between being part of the "inner group of equals" and the drive to find love (or anyway sex) outside it. Cheers actually did, somewhat -- because the bar was a kind of safespace haven, and because you could bring potential lovers into that space and see if they fitted (Frasier ended up staying, for example). But in the end Diane actually left, and the show continued: because its actual centre was Sam not being ablr to grow up, I guess.
But from the start, Friends was about whether hook-ups with outsiders would break up the central group as a whole -- Chandler's first gf Janice recurs as the poster child of this, being everything the group-fur-sich is repelled by.
But from the start, Friends was about whether hook-ups with outsiders would break up the central group as a whole
Maybe we should use a word other than "innovative" to describe this. "Group of friendsy"?
From link in 168:
This is a well that's so deep. Everybody's discovering how many layers there are to John Tesh
151: I mean, Cosby's family was UMC black, which hadn't been done before,
It's like the Jefferson's never moved on up.
If that's it, then don't a bunch of workplace sitcoms qualify?
I think workplace comedies are, ipso facto, not friend comedies. The situation is the workplace, and how disparate people interact within it. They might be friendly, but that doesn't make it a story about friends. The only "situation" in Friends is that there are these 6 people who are friends and hang out (and occasionally song) together. In workplace comedies, the show ends when the workplace goes away - the Korean War ends, the ol' one-two is shut down - but in Friends, it ends when the friends' lives move on from each other.
The point isn't that Friends was the uniquest snowflake that ever fell, but that it genuinely did things differently. Most sitcoms are pretty much clones of each other; there might be an angle (Roseanne was Cosby with poor fat people, MTM was Dick Van Dyke with different genders and Rhoda instead of, well, MTM), but they're trying to recreate an existing success.
No sane person would say, Friends is just Barney Miller, but instead of cops, they're slackers. It was, in a lot of ways, Seinfeld, Jr., but it made several crucially different decisions (most obviously, but not only, relating to emotional content).
Halford's 75 certainly offers a description of originality that is ... original:
Cheers (which I prefer) had Sam and but it was mostly played as a joke; for the first few seasons of Friends the Ross/Rachel thing was played as basically straight up chick flick style romantic drama.
So Friends had the vision to incorporate standard romantic comedy into its plot. Heck, Moonlighting, to pick an easy example, was doing this (and lampooning it) a decade before.
159 was to 156 because 156 said it was to 140, but it was really to 150. Which makes more sense.
I think there were more Happy Days spinoffs because a show or two that really had no relationship were ostensibly linked - like how Phoebe Buffet's evil twin was a recurring character in Mad About You, but the shows weren't spinoffs. Or something like that.
Roseanne was Cosby with poor fat people
Okay fine, let's abandon 'innovative' as a measure. How about 'transgressive'? Roseanne as a tv show was a lot more transgressive than Friends.
174
But from the start, Friends was about whether hook-ups with outsiders would break up the central group as a whole
Well, also whether a romantic relationship developing among friends would ruin friendships; Ross-and-Rachel was a plot in the pilot. And types of relationships aside, I'm pretty sure that there were a lot of what-it's-like-being-young-modern-and-urban moments too.
But, OK, let's ignore the young-and-modern stuff, and treat the outgroup and ingroup stuff as the same kinds of thing. Even if we can reach comity around the statement that Friends was the first show to focus throughout the series on how romantic relationships interacted with friendships, or however you want to phrase it, the next question is, "so what?" You can find something unique in anything if you slice it thin enough. I'd still be willing to bet that had less to do with its success than stuff like marketing did. It was nowhere near the zeitgeist of its times that I love Lucy was of its times, at least not judging by ratings.
179: Uh, Moonlighting wasn't a sitcom. Romantic comedy ≠ sitcom. The point is that Friends was 100% sitcom, yet it took its romantic arc seriously.
BTW, Unfogged should be much more Friends-friendly, since it contained one of the great expressions of CHANGEBAD:
Rachel [asking Ross about the girl he hooked up with]: OK, let's talk about it. How was she?
Ross: It was... different.
Rachel: Different! Different better?
Ross: Nobody likes change...
181.last: Sure. Who'd deny it? It's not as if Roseanne was ignored during its run.
No one's saying that Friends was the greatest or most fascinating show of all time. They're saying that, unlike some popular shows (Happy Days), it merited its success, in part because it did some interesting things.
184: It's not trolling. I love that line.
the outgroup and ingroup stuff as the same kinds of thing: as the same kinds of thing as what? As I said, my obsession with shows tends to be about how they depict in-groups and out-groups, odd versus normal etc etc. I've tried to dig down to what I think was unusual here -- in the sense that I hadn't spotted it before, at least in this form. It's not much but there is a little: I'm agnostic about how significant it is at a wider level (I'm watching fromn the UK, for a start).
I don't really have an answer to "so what" -- does it mean why am I interested in stuff like this? I don't know. I always have been. I'm interested in how and where change occurs in culture, especially pop culture, at its margins and sometimes unnoticed at its centre. Sometimes things that look like big changes actually aren't -- all the old stuff carries on underneath and through them -- and sometimes things that very much look like continuities are deceptive. You probably don't discover which is what till you (a) slice fine enough and (b) step back enough.
I tend to agree that "innovative" is rarely a helpful word per se: I'm more interested in whether the (perhaps minor) quasi-innovation I've suggested is new is the reason the show was such a hit with anyone else (because if it is, that's rather intriguing), but I make no grand claims either way, and I'm not entirely sure how I'd take the question to the next level.
They're saying that, unlike some popular shows (Happy Days), it merited its success, in part because it did some interesting things.
I think this is more a question of taste than you're willing to admit. I didn't find Friends that interesting, and don't particularly buy that the things you're positing as 'innovative' are the chief reasons for its success. Whereas I personally find the ways that Roseanne was transgressive much more interesting.
As a general rule, any show that had Martin Mull is better than any show that doesn't have Martin Mull.
(My default assumption is that bigger deep shifts evolve out of quite small technical shifts which alter the relationships within the group making the work than occur from attempts to reflect broad sociological currents; the latter are often pretty shallow. Technology trumps intentionality, or something like that. But I'm not especially dogmatic about this -- because it's a question I'm exploring not an answer I'm imposing. I'm not convinced it's the issue here anyway: it feels like it might be, which is why my ears pricked up a bit, but it could easily a phantasm.)
On the innovation question, I think of what Friends did as sit-comming The Real World. "Find out what happens when people keep being polite and stop getting real, "etc.
I'm not much of a cultural critic, but it seems pretty uncontroversial that Friends was seen as innovative in tone, style, and type of humor (e.g. the way that sex was referred to) -- there was a whole bunch of commentary about it being a new kind of GenX show at the time. Formal structural innovation in a genre isn't the only form of innovation -- types of personalities cast, branding, the types of people supposedly "represented" by the show are important, too. Cf. my comparison to Girls which is right now being heralded as wildly innovative.
I've also seen it claimed that Friends was the first true ensemble sitcom -- i.e., there really wasn't a lead character and all of the characters were more or less equal, with perhaps Rachel as a primus inter pares. Cheers is perhaps a counter-example, but Sam dominated Cheers in a way that no character really dominated Friends. But I'm not enough of a culture critic to really make the case.
I have never seen a full episode of Friends.
I think this is more a question of taste than you're willing to admit.
I think you'd be surprised at what I'd be willing to admit.
I don't think that Friends was primarily a success because people saw the first episode and marveled at its structure. But I think it's telling that all the people arguing that it wasn't innovative have come up with absolutely terrible examples of why it might not be so.
Family Ties was not an innovative show. It would not take 20 overeducated procrastinators 189 comments to successfully make that argument.
Friends was much more successful than the average sitcom, more successful than even the average sitcom that survives to a second season. Was this purely because it featured attractive people and some humor? I think it's hard to argue that it was unusual in combining these features - a lot harder than arguing that it had innovative (or whatever word you want - not imitative, which is what 95% of sitcoms are) structural features.
BTW, can anyone explain to me how the term "high concept" came to be used the way it is in Hollywood? If I understand correctly, it's used mostly to describe extremely low concepts (A truck driver with a chimp sidekick!), but not ironically so.
LB, what distinguishes the real life example I linked in 114 from the manifestly impossible appartment in Friends?
I can't believe that anyone is defending Friends without the cover of presidential anonymity, personally.
Larry Sanders and Jerry Springer both started two years before Friends, superior innovators in emotional tone and format, respectively.
tierce, have you had a chance to ins[ect/enjoy Night Court? Like most TV, early seasons > later seasons
Since no one will actually click on the great article in 195, here's the key section:
Before "Friends," network and ad execs were still measuring success by household ratings. After "Friends," it was almost exclusively about adults 18-49.
"Advertisers saw that demo as a very appealing audience that had a great deal of disposable income," says Warner Bros. TV exec VP Craig Hunegs. "They were ripe for the picking."
It's no surprise, then, that network execs, struggling to find a lifeboat, looked to the "Friends" formula to stay afloat.
But the networks nearly drowned in a pool of their own "Friends" clones. And the sitcom biz is still recovering from the race to gorge viewers with every imaginable twist on "the hip young pals living in the big city" concept.
"Every other network had Nielsen envy," says former NBC Entertainment prexy Warren Littlefield. "It became the benchmark for where you wanted to play. They saw such a huge, pure 18-49 delivery, it was monstrous. Everyone said, 'Why don't we have that?' "
ABC took the most drastic step, tossing out its old formula and hiring the NBC exec who helped develop "Friends," Jamie Tarses, to remake the Alphabet into a home for hip, urban series. The network quickly abandoned middle-of-the-road family shows like "Home Improvement" in favor of young-adult laffers like "Drew Carey Show" and "Two Guys, a Girl and a Pizza Place."
....
And as a studio, Warner Bros. was able to extract time period guarantees and hefty license fee boosts from NBC.
Those moves played a role in pushing NBC toward scheduling more in-studio product for a time. "Will & Grace" worked, but most other NBC-owned product probably stayed on longer than it should, keeping the net from adding other potential smash sitcoms.
The result of all this?
ABC continued its downward slide and eventually gave up the young-adult ghost to recapture its old identity. NBC saw its comedy fortunes diminish, as shows like "Union Square" and "Coupling" didn't live up to the "Must See TV" moniker. Peacock now just airs two sitcoms on Thursday night, where its four-laffer block used to dominate.
Meanwhile, the industry's super-rich overall deals yielded little of note, more or less collapsing that business. Overall deals, thrown around like candy a few years ago, are now a rare commodity.
But most importantly, viewers said "enough." They turned to franchise dramas ("CSI," "Law & Order" and their spinoffs) and reality TV, and virtually gave up on yuks.
Though note that the article in 195 deals with the mid-2000s world, and is now dated.
Well, first, I did say not impossible, just very very implausible. Second, I'm not a camera person, but I think that picture is taken to make the room in 114 look bigger -- note that the couch is a little 2-cushion deal, and see how the walls don't look square because the lens is distorting the shape of the room. It's a nice apartment, but I think it's half the size of the one in Friends.
But mostly, the apartment in 114 is a wild enough deal to be worth writing a story about -- it's not a 'yeah, people get deals like that' story, it's a 'check out this wildly unusual dream apartment, at this crazy controlled rent.' Not impossible, and it's a big city so lots of things happen once or twice here and there, but really really unlikely.
Never seen Night Court, no: it probably has been broadcast over here, but not on a channel I know to access.
After "Friends," it was almost exclusively about adults 18-49: this is a pretty important takeaway for me. I was just starting to write something about the niche-stratification of broadcasting, but to be honest while I know a lot about it in the UK, I'm pretty much totally in the dark about it in the US; when it happened; how it happened etc. Linking Friends to MTV's The Real World makes sense, in terms of inheriting and honing a broadish but still limited niche audience sensibility. Zeitgeist means something completely different in the age of niche-broadcasting.
I think you'd be surprised at what I'd be willing to admit.
Confessional thread!
196: I don't know, but I always assumed that the high in high concept referred to the importance of the concept in relation to the rest of the show. I Love Lucy was pretty low concept -- sure, Ricky was a Cuban bandleader and Lucy wanted to get into show business, but it was really about Lucy as a physical comedian, any other married-couple concept would have been pretty much the same show.
BJ and the Bear, once you know truck-driver/chimp, that's everything you need to know about the show: the concept is the highest importance element, not the actors or the scripts.
To ins[ect/enjoy Night Court?
The first part of a very ambitious cultural studies dissertation title.
High concept cultural studies
Funny, I remember liking Night Court a lot, but nothing from it sticks.
BJ and the Bear -- this show is important in the history of culture because it led to the band being called Minus the Bear.
Anything featuring Greg Evigan is important in the history of the culture. (Confession: I have never actually seen Stripped to Kill.)
re: 201
Size isn't always the key thing, either. At least in my experience (Glasgow, London, Oxford) the difference in price between a small flat with X bedrooms and a large flat with same-X bedrooms isn't that great. Our place in London is really quite large. The living room in particular is a big space, but price-wise it's not much more than the poky mould-ridden shite-holes we saw. It's expensive, but you couldn't find much that was a lot less expensive even if you went for a smaller place with the same number of rooms.
It seems like before Friends and Seinfeld, sitcoms were pretty much all set around traditional institutions like family, work, and school - Cheers is both in a workplace and a place where people go after work, there are a bunch of variations where someone works for a family in the home and maybe has a family too, etc.. In retrospect, it's surprising that there hadn't been a show yet that was all about putting young hot single people on the screen every week and not much else.
It's like you never saw Three's Company.
208. The normal/wierdo trope that Tierce mentions is prominent there. I like that idea as a filter, I think it's is a useful way to look at sitcoms because it's commonly used and is revealing.
Another aspect of the economics of Friends: The cast hey formed a union after the show became a hit. Initially, the six cast members agreed among themselves that none of them would start working on the next season unless mamagement renegotiated their contracts and they all agreed to the terms. They also insisted that they all get paid equally, which meant a bigger pay jump for some than for others. Since any one cast member was replaceable, but all six were not, it was an excellent negotiaitng tactic. They held up the beginning of filming for a few days some years until management caved.
They did much better for themselves than other ensemble casts had over the years, and they also lasted more seasons than most shows. Go union!
You're a camera guy -- am I making it up, or is that picture taken in a way that distorts the size of the room? I'm actually not sure, but the walls look very out of true, and the couch looks small.
55 suggests that Stormcrow is my brother by another mother. I lurrrrrrrve that book.
Three's Company is a "home" comedy - plenty of those. It also has a pretty big central conceit.
214: My mom wouldn't let me watch it because it was a "jiggle show".
220: Same here, but only for the original run.
216 strongly goes to my argument in 190: the fact of this (unusual) union activism being what drove the (equally unusual) need for equality in the writing (no ABC-stories etc); and that the greater number of permutations of possible relations among equals kept the overall ensemble fresher than would the more routine reiteration of unequal relationships seen elsewhere -- the latter being what causes most creative collectives to sour to one another, and feel stale to the world at large.
(Of course the technical change in script-writing is not the driver here, as I was suggesting -- it's actually a change in salary negotiation technique....)
In retrospect, it's surprising that there hadn't been a show yet that was all about putting young hot single people on the screen every week and not much else.
It's like 90210, but the actors play people their own age.
Re Night Court, Mrs. K-sky recently made me confess that I derived about 90% of my sense of self from Judge Harry T. Stone.
208 - Dan is a hound; Harry is a tool in a hat who does magic tricks; Markie Post has cute hair; Bull is giant and dimwitted; Selma is old/Flo is sassy; Mac is the straight man and wears a sweater-vest.
225 to 224, I'm sad to say. Don't wear a fedora, k-sky!
MATT LeBLANC: David was in the position to make the most money. He was the A-story--Ross and Rachel. He could have commanded alone more than anyone else, and David Schwimmer quoted the idea of socialist theater to us. Did he know ultimately there would be more value in that for all of us as a whole? I don't know. I think it was a genuine gesture from him, and I always say that. It was him.
David Schwimmer, I love you a little more today.
225: Oh, I remember the setup, I just don't recall any particular funny moment.
the more routine reiteration of unequal relationships seen elsewhere -- the latter being what causes most creative collectives to sour to one anothe Hello, Larry.
229: Special guest star Mel Torme shows up and does a musical number, but the biggest Mel Torme fan of them all misses it. That also works for 226 (because ogged, pbuh, was the biggest Mel Torme of us all).
227: You're on FB. You know I do.
Also I'm related to Mel Torme through my grandmother's sister-in-law.
The reveal on the two part season finale where Harry was going to put Groucho glasses on the Statue of Liberty.
The thematic elements of Friends were not as original as people are saying. It was essentially a Seinfeld ripoff, form the apartment to the coffee shop.
The Mary Tyler Moore show was all about "hot young single chick with a cool apartment in the big city", although some of the cast was older. Mary dated a fair amount in the early seasons, then went home and traded wisecracks with Valerie Harper. Sound familiar?
Once I knew who Mel Torme was, I thought quite a bit less of young Judge Stone. I hate that style of music.
Dan: "When I judged the Miss New York transit contest, I got off at every stop."
234.2: Yes, but the center of the show was the workplace.
The Velvet Unfog
(i cannot be the first to have made this joke)
Re: 234 et al. Innovation in entertainment TV is a pretty ambiguous concept. On the one hand, there's a lot of structural innovation involved in the The Wonder Years.. On the other hand, it's a baby boomer reflecting at length about how being young in the late 1960s was the most amazing, never-to-be-repeated-in-world-history experience ever.
The historical-cultural significance of Friends is primarily its role in the career of Jennifer Aniston, which led to her marrying Brad Pitt, and his subsequently leaving her for Angelina Jolie As anyone who has spent much time in a supermarket knows, the Aniston-Pitt-Jolie triangle is the most important news story of the 21st century.
The union thing was interesting.
I was never into "Friends" when it was on, but at the same time, it must have had a strong influence in how young-adult life was depicted in popular culture more broadly, and that picture--of a close-knit circle of friends, more than job or romantic entanglements, being the center of one's life--has become an important touchstone. If you're a young person, you see the way groups of friends are depicted as being how life is lived, and there's a model for you on living your own life. It's okay that you're not about to get married and start a family, it's okay if you're not quite sure what's happening with your career; you've got your friends.
I have nothing to contribute about whether "Friends" was particularly innovative about its depiction of this, but given the changes in economic and family structure over the last quarter of the 20th century, with age of married rising, post-secondary education becoming increasingly necessary, employment-for-life abandoned wholesale, the decay of the rustbelt and increasing prominence of a few global cities, etc., there was clearly a need for mainstream television to be telling stories that reflected this sort of thing.
I wish there were more Jennifer Aniston Sundance flicks. The Good Girl and Friends With Money were both very good.
And re: the solidarity stuff, here's what the producer of "Law and Order" was willing to be quoted as saying:
DICK WOLF (producer of Law & Order): When they made the Friends deal, the $100,000-apiece [per episode] deal, I was pretty upset. What I would have done was come out the first day, say I was disappointed the cast had chosen to negotiate in the press, and I had the unpleasant news that Matt LeBlanc wouldn't be on the show next year. I guarantee that you'd never have gotten to a second name.
||
NMM to Vidal Sassoon, who was apparently an actual person (and an interesting one, it seems).
|>
Next somebody will tell me there's a Steve Prell or Gary Suave.
Was there an Alberto? Or just Rula Lenska?
Was there a Head? Or just Shoulders?
My superhero screenplay has a list of throwaway characters that includes spiky-haired villain Vidal Assassoon.
Ross is an NYU professor
A friend of mine just turned down a job at NYU. Part of what they offered him: $1500/month apartment. A big one, according to his slightly disappointed girlfriend.
If his girl friend wants to go for a big one...
NYU faculty housing is really quite something. Stunning appartments, way below market rates, amazing location.
252: Is $1500 the market value of the apartment, or the subsidized rent he'd have been paying?
And by "value" of course I mean rental value, not purchase price.
That Dick Wolf quote got me thinking about how the IP regime here is a bit strange. Do the producers own the actors characters? That is, if the want to swap out one actor for another in the same role that's legal, but if the actors wanted to move their characters to a different show they couldn't?
255: The rent he would have been paying.
Obviously a subsidized rate. I'm guessing we're talking about an appt that would get over 3K on the open market. I knew someone living in an easily $4K appt that they didn't have to pay at all for.
245: Of course he wants to be quoted saying it. He wants people to be afraid of taking a tough negotiating stance against him.
The tactic in 245 is similar to the reason Bo and Luke were replaced by Coy and Vance for half a season of The Dukes of Hazzard. They brought back John Schneider and Tom Wopat after the show's ratings tanked.
re: 217
Sure. Extremely wide-angle lenses introduce distortion, and also odd perspective effects. The relative proportions of things get changed by the angles, so you get exaggerated artificial foreshortening, too. So yes, you are right and your eyes aren't fooling you. It's a cheap estate-agent (realtor) trick.
The old-school puritanical side of me gets annoyed at this shit in a newspaper or magazine -- the laziness and lack of craft in it -- because you _can_ take the same wide-angle shots without all those problems if you can be arsed doing it 'old-school'. Architectural photographers, and people who photograph interiors used to [and still do at the the high end] use cameras that allowed for tilting and shifting -- either with camera bodies that allow for it, or lenses that do -- to fix that 'in-camera'.
Julius Shulman will be rolling in his grave.
My favorite Law and Order actor was Annabella Sciorra, and she was only on for a few months. I wonder if she asked for a raise.
245: Law & Order did successfully replace the entire cast several times, so it wasn't an idle threat.
257: I't's especially surreal when a character shares the name of the actor. The famous cse involved David Letterman's move form NBC to CBS, when NBC initially claimed he couldn't use the various bits of schtick that the NBC writers had written fomr him.
Or maybe a show where she could use two facial expressions.
Law and Order was a plot driven show, though. Friends was character driven. Losing Matthew Perry would have been a huge blow in a way that losing, uh, Fred Thompson, who is the only guy I can remember, was not.
267: In any case, replacing him with Herman Cain in the latest season was a ratings win.
267: That gave me a great idea. What if they did a whole season of a show in which they did the same script each time but with different actors?
High concept, right?
L&O had a couple very key characters; Lennie Briscoe and Jack McCoy are the obvious ones. That said, the show survived the loss of the former (originally because of a spin-off, though Orbach died shortly afterwards). I think Friends could have survived losing Joey or Phoebe.
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Is there an entomologist in the Mineshaft? There are swarms of little bugs all over the front of my house that I've never seen before. What are they? Why are there suddenly dozens and dozens of them? Will it hurt when they gnaw my flesh or will their venom have already killed me?
Photo in the pool.
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269: or the same actors and different characters. The creator of 24 apparently wanted to do the Da Vinci code as season 3 (since it takes place in 24 hours), but couldn't get the rights.
I think a production company could make money putting on Shakespeare's plays. Do an act an episode, and hire actors on the cheap.
What if they did a whole season of a show in which they did the same script each time but with different actors?
The Hal Hartley movie Flirt shows the same scenario three times with different characters. I liked it, personally, but it's definitely "high-concept".
SVU is the character-driven L&O, and it had way less turnover than original flavor did. Though in the end the did refuse to pay what one of the main characters wanted.
But they never replaced all the L&O (original) actors all at once, right?
I mean original L&O, not original actors.
Michael Moriarty was my all-time favourite L&O character and was also kicked off for my all-time favourite reason: picking a public fight with the Janet Reno over the plot content of L&O.
They're extremely harmless looking; it's just that they're suddenly everywhere.
LB is quite right on the apartment, sure it's plausible but ... And, of course, it really does just fall into the standard sitcom TV living setups. There is a TV Trope called Friends Rent Control which includes this nice quote:
"Without a doubt, the combined forces of Carrie, Samantha, Charlotte, and Miranda have been more devastating to life in New York than anything dreamed up by Roland Emmerich or Michael Bay. As a cable series, Sex turned New York's way of life upside down -- convincing millions of Midwest dreamers that they could afford a one-bedroom Manhattan apartment by writing a single newspaper column every four months, that they could subsist entirely on Cosmos and pastries, and that they would magically have enough free time and disposable income to lunch with the girls in between Manolo Blahnik shopping sprees. Utterly devastating."-- Premiere.com, "20 Movies That Destroy New York"
Are they ladybugs? The antennae look a bit long, but the shape is right otherwise: ladybird population in the UK goes up and down markedly year-on-year because aphid population (which is what they eat) is very easily affected by changes in weather. So some years they're everywhere and some years you never see any.
I want to see a picture of bugs! Would someone mind pointing me to the flickr pool?
282: Yeah, they look vaguely familiar, but can't pin them down. I thought Bing had a visual search feature, but not finding it.
Meanwhile, clicking through from TV Trope: Friends Rent Control brings us to the following list.
Harem Genre tropes:
Accidental Pervert
Balanced Harem
Battle Harem
Belligerent Sexual Tension
Bromantic Foil
The Casanova
Chick Magnet
Crash into Hello
First Girl Wins
Harem Hero
Harem Nanny
Harem Seeker
Innocent Cohabitation
Last Girl Wins
Love Dodecahedron
Lover Tug of War
Not Blood Siblings
Not What It Looks Like
Ordinary High School Student
Pervert Revenge Mode
Pretty Freeloaders
Supporting Harem
Tenchi Solution
Themed Harem
Those Two Guys
Unwanted Harem
Sitcom apartments are probably more plausible than Texas ranch/pioneer homes located in Monument Valley. John Ford has a lot to answer for.
285: Bugs.
Someone has to give you access, though. I don't even know who that is anymore -- is Armsmasher still the gatekeeper?
I just made it public in my photostream.
Citation needed, but an interesting bit from the TV Tropes page:
Averted (mostly) in The Cosby Show. Supposedly the show was originally supposed to be about a working class family, but when someone saw the set they said that the Huxtable family would have to have better jobs to afford a house like that.
I'm going with Guatemalan Death Beetle.
Accidental Pervert
That's my story, Your Honor.
291: Interesting. I recall B.C. in later interviews being pretty proud of depicting an extended family of educated, accomplished, prosperous African-Americans, but something hindsight something success something many fathers something.
(I just watched the pilot of Friends on youtube. It wasn't funny. Humor ages badly almost always, right? MTM is very charming but rarely hilarious. On the other hand, we watched The Lady Eve this weekend and the scene with the horse and a few others are laugh-out-loud funny.)
I like that tierce de lollardie* has such a detailed knowledge of Friends!
*is this a play on tierce de picardie? I can't remember the explain-your-pseud thread.
Thanks Sir Kraab! I believe they are pentatomid nymphs! Pentatomid = stink bug, but the nymphs may not stink. There are a zillion of them because they probably just hatched from a nearby egg cluster (you could look around for a group of tiny open canisters on the side of your house). Yes quite harmless.
Here's a potential ID or cousin (the window title says beetle but that's wrong, from before the creature got identified by the bugguide folk. Beetle larvae are wormlike).
294: Hmm, more citation needed stuff, but Wikipedia has:
After meeting with them, Cosby returned to Carsey and Werner with his own ideas: the family would be blue-collared, with a stay-at-home mother and a limousine driving father with two sons and two daughters. Carsey and Werner were convinced by Cosby later on, as a change of heart to make the family well-off financially, by making the mother a lawyer and the father a doctor.I'm going to hazard that the "upscaled to fit the house" story is an apocryphal appropriation of this.
Pentatomid eggs and hatchlings. So cool.
193: I have never seen a whole episode of any Law & Order show!
Confessional thread!
Someone linked me to this anonymous confessional thread on reddit (which is apparently something horrible?) that went way off the deep end. I almost linked it last night re: pulling one's lower lip over the top of one's head because there was a thread about someone deliberately distorting his face every day so that people thought he looked much different than he did, and it was sorta interesting.
193, 299: I should have confessed that among my qualifications for opining on the apartment was also never having watched an entire Friends episode. To me David Schwimmer is the hang-dog guy boinking his not really a dead friend's mother (Barbara Hershey) in The Pallbearer.
Wasn't that here, when people were recommending interesting facts I could claim about myself?
177, 297: I think the comparison of The Cosby Show to The Jeffersons is something that needs to be unpacked a bit more. As I recall, a big part of the humor of The Jeffersons was that they were still culturally working-class, with George being the ultimate chancer. Whereas, on The Cosby Show there are a number of ongoing gags/situations (all the stuff with their handyman, or Theo and Vanessa's friends, for instance) where the comedy has to do with the Cosbys' innate UMC-ness (e.g. several generations of alumni of a fictionalized Spellman).
I think it's interesting too that, in the wake of Cosby, you got shows like Rock and Family Matters, where the interest is in the upper working class/aristocracy of labor African-American culture of big cities, and then in the late '90s, early '00s, we're on to The Parkers, where it's again about working-class people trying to better themselves. I'm not sure where Moesha and Martin fit into this.
Of all the shows discussed, I think my favorite gag was the one from The Parkers where everyone has gone to the opening of a new nightclub, owned by one of the supporting characters. A lounge lizard type is hitting on Kim (Countess Vaughn) with the regrettable line "Girl, you so fine I'd drink a gallon of your bathwater!", to which Kim innocently replies: "Oh, I only take showers. Do you drink shower water too?"
Someone should write a sitcom called How I Invented a Genuinely New Sex Act in which every episode is framed by someone who promises to tell his friends the answer to the title question, but somehow never quite gets around to it.
303: Because every time he's just about to explain it his toilet explodes.
For some reason I thought The Jeffersons, which I don't think I ever watched, was older than Good Times, which I remember fondly without actually remembering much beyond dynamite. But not only were they contemporaneous, The Jeffersons was still running when I got to be old enough to watch tv.
I must have been able to watch Good Times because re-runs ran before my bedtime. Although, I guess The Jeffersons probably had re-runs on tv while the show was still being produced.
201: Important differences between the UK and everywhere else. Residential property is sold without any mention of floor space here. Like New Yorkers, French people quote everything in terms of square metres, which makes as much sense to Brits as if you asked if you had an octopus in every room.
Brits don't know how to use the octopus and that's why NIH is going broke.
More seriously, the idea of area in a Cartesian space can't be that hard to understand nor its usefulness is purchasing a place to life.
and then in the late '90s, early '00s, we're on to The Parkers, where it's again about working-class people trying to better themselves. I'm not sure where Moesha and Martin fit into this.
Black shows became shows for black audiences. Audience fragmentation.
Good Times and The Jeffersons, interestingly, were not niche shows for a black audience, but were designed to pick up a mass audience of primarily white people in prime time. There's an interesting story to be written (maybe it already has been) about mainstream white fascination with black characters on 1970s TV; there was a time when 3/10 of the top-rated shows on TV were Good Times, Sanford & Sons, and The Jeffersons, and the most popular TV show of all time was Roots, which means that millions of white people watched it with fascination. The Parkers, OTOH, (like Martin in this respect) exists in a world in which TV audiences have fragmented and shows with primarily black characters are expected to appeal to a primarily black audience.
I just got a phone call from a realtor who sounded stoned out of his mind.
I should have asked him to do some conversions from square meters to square feet.
I just got a phone call from a realtor who sounded stoned out of his mind.
What, like, just out of the blue?
I mean, I know the real estate market is still pretty bad most places, but I hadn't realized they'd started cold-calling random people.
I'm looking for a new apartment and have searched on a few websites that required me to enter a phone number to see their listings. So now they're all calling me and trying to set up meetings.
One of the facts that I remember being reported about Friends was that it wasn't nearly as popular among black audiences as it was among whites.
316: More evidence that The Bell Curve guy just ignored facts that didn't fit his theory.
And then there's What's Happening?
How many impressionable children watched the Very Special Episode where the Doobie Brothers explain why making bootleg concert tapes is wrong and resolved, then and there, to devote their lives to IP law?
315: Just because your apartment is unlivable?
Or is this a groundhog you had to move for?
My apartment isn't quite as nice after being repaired, it's not very conveniently located, and I'm going to get a substantial pay raise. So I want to move.
Sometimes I get confused because the regular characters have roles in A, B, and C plotlines.
318 -- Good God. I feel like this is the breakthrough I never had in therapy.
I think it's interesting too that, in the wake of Cosby, you got shows like Rock and Family Matters, where the interest is in the upper working class/aristocracy of labor African-American culture of big cities
Roc? The show about a garbage collector?
Brits don't know how to use the octopus and that's why NIH is going broke.
Awesome. New mouseover?
309: Halford, have you ever sampled Todd Gitlin's Inside Prime Time? I've looked at a few chapters recently, chiefly the final section on The Politics of Prime Time (the chapter on Hill Street Blues is interesting).
Nope! Sure looks interesting, though.
Friends, though: okay, I didn't actually like any of the characters. I didn't think Ross was any more or less annoying than the other characters. It was quite shallow (which is okay for the kind of sit-com it was).
I can't escape the notion that it became so popular because hot (-ish) young people being silly, overall, was very attractive to lots of younger people at that time.
329: There's some pretty interesting stuff there about the Lou Grant show -- Ed Asner's vehicle, and spinoff of the Mary Tyler Moore show. Asner took it in directions uncomfortable at the time, right around the same time MASH and All in the Family were around. That was a seminal period for sit-coms. I sort of can't take Friends seriously by comparison.
305: For some reason I thought The Jeffersons, which I don't think I ever watched, was older than Good Times ...
The Jefferson were the Bunker's next-door neighbors for a few years before the show got spun off.
The A-Team was of similar importance for drama on TV.
330.last and in all other times and places
Ok, I actually just watched a few of the first "Friends" episodes, and I'm not at all surprised that it did so well. I think it's easy to overlook how appealing the whole story is, as an aspirational narrative for young people. It's not just that they're hot and silly, it's that it's so comforting--everything about it, right up to the theme song, is about how awesome it is to have great friends, and that when you do, life's fine.
335: True enough in some sense, but it's a little boring to some people in some times and places, don't you think? Plus, seriously, I did not think Matthew Perry or Jennifer Aniston or Matt LeBlanc were hot.
It's not just that they're hot and silly, it's that it's so comforting
I'll buy that. Of course, comforting to a certain demographic. Otherwise you'd be a little put off by it all.
The One About the Demographic That Marketing Says We Need.
They just seem kind of spastic to me, which I don't find very attractive.
Suzy: Would you eat them with a fox?
Johnny Bravo: If the fox were Courtney Cox. But since that is not the case, get those cookies away from my face.
The One Where Satan Gets Mia Farrow Pregnant.
I may not have understood the assignment.
I did not think Matthew Perry or Jennifer Aniston or Matt LeBlanc were hot
parsimon must surround herself with unusually beautiful people.
The one about the bartender with the really tight shirt.
337: I did not think Matthew Perry or Jennifer Aniston or Matt LeBlanc were hot.
While Jennifer Aniston serves as a latter day Terri Garr for me. Of course that's not creepy even one little bit ...
The One Where Halford Was Wrong.
The one where the man on the cusp of middle age wonders if five beers are too much on a Wednesday.
The one where the forty year old guy is deluded about the lower bound of middle age.
The One Where Moby Forgot To Capitalize.
The one where some guy buys me a beer regardless.
347: There are a lot of attractive people in various real life places (artists seem to tend in that direction), but I don't hang out with them on any ongoing basis.
No, I just find some of the characters on Friends kind of generic-attractive, like passably good, which they could turn into hot if they weren't so damn spastic and shallow. The Ross character is the only one with a male body type I'd be interested in, personally. Chandler is completely uninteresting, attractiveness-wise. Jennifer Aniston has thin lips.
There! I've said it!
I mean, there is just little to no sensuality about many of them, except for Phoebe and sometimes Courtney Cox and Ross maybe sometimes.
There are a zillion of them because they probably just hatched from a nearby egg cluster (you could look around for a group of tiny open canisters on the side of your house).
I couldn't find any eggs, but the bugs have nearly all dispersed, which makes the recently hatched theory look correct. So long, baby pentatomids. Please don't come back when you're all grown up and stinky.
355.2 come to the dark side Parsimon. We have cake.
325: That's right, just Roc. He had "a good job, working for the city." And the dad on Family Matters was a cop, right? I think that fits under an upper-working class rubric. Compare that to the occupations of people on Good Times or Sanford and Son.
The Ones Where The Jeffersons Say "Nigger".
The One Where Moby Buys Bread On The Way Home To Hide How Drunk He Is By Being Considerate.
336 is right. Same story for Sex & the City: it's comforting to think no matter what goes wrong in your financially improbable, marriage-monomaniacal, glibly materialistic life, your three friends (the smart one, the kind one, the funny one) will always show up to down a few cloying novelty beverages with you. Ok that didn't sound comforting after all, but my first year in New York with like 2/3 of a friend, I found it pathetically consoling.
349 is all kinds of wrong. Apologize to Teri Garr.
363: I won't. You apologize to Jennifer Aniston.
358: Is there a dark side to what I said? All I meant to say is that I'll go with pretty for the Friends characters, but not hot (with some exceptions). There's a difference, isn't there?
That's fine: a sit-com can be comforting and attractive because it's filled with pretty people, but this "hot" business is slightly baffling to me.
I was in high school for the best years of Friends (the beginning). My friends and I even got together to watch the season finale - the one where Rachel was standing at the airport waiting to declare her love to returning Ross, not knowing he was coming back with a girlfriend/wife.
It was popular with us because it had pretty* people and was funny. Like a 90210, but with jokes. People love watching will they/won't they stories (coughdowntonabbeycough). As for it's ground breakingness, I can see the similarities with Seinfeld but the characters on Friends weren't so annoying and dislikable.
*not hot generally. Chandler was funny enough that he got into hot, for me, but everyone else was just attractive (and then Ross got so annoying (remember when he had a monkey and one wife? by the third ex-wife it was just getting ridiculous - why did they think we wanted Ross and Rachel to hook up? She could totally do better. Not to mention the OCD/whininess of Monica (see also Cougar Town (and now to get myself out of all these parentheses)))).
remember when he had a monkey and one wife?
"Curious George isn't curious anymore."
I do remember that.
Maybe the monkey was the ground breaking part.
John Deere tried that and it was just a mess.
I don't know about anyone else, but I was using hot to mean generally more than averagely attractive, but requiring fewer letters to type.
Rachel could totally do better? Seinfeld's characters were more annoying?
I am thinking now that Friends was really appealing to a high school crowd.
Chandler was funny enough that he got into hot, for me
Not fair though how him and Joey got all tubby. No way would that have been allowed for the female stars.
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Since the other active thread is not a legal thread, I'm going to ask this here: For purposes of collecting unemployment, is it usually considered "for cause" if you get fired because you tell your employer that you are looking for other work? I.e. if you did, and they said "You can't quit, you're fired!" before you had found another job, could you get unemployment? Does it vary a lot by state?
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Why would you tell that to your employer?
I dunno, so as not to leave them in the lurch and to allow for an orderly transfer of power? To make it possible for them to give you positive recommendations? Assume an organization of a size that there is no HR department.
Ross was a jerk who wouldn't let things go. Rachel was generally unobjectionable. Seinfeld was uninteresting.
I don't think that counts as "for cause" but I think your employer can fuck with you for a long time before establishing that. On a related note, when somebody says "What are you thinking about?", you don't need to describe everything in your mind.
364 - Unless she hung out with Elvis watching him break bricks with his fists, Jennifer Anniston will never be as cool as Teri Garr.
371: I'm old now and I stand by my high school opinions.
Well Chandler/Perry initially lost all the weight because of his drug addiction. I think he had a break-down and had to go into rehab before they could get back to filming. So, the weight thing was weird.
Ross was such a jerk! And a bad prof. He reminds me of Ted from How I Met Your Mother actually. Both guys I started out liking and hoping they found someone nice (yes, I know) but then when they reenacted the same dating mistakes for the nth time, I just gave up.
378: Look, I take a back seat to no man (well, maybe JRoth) when it comes to perving over Teri Garr, but I take an equal delight in Jenifer Aniston, and you haters can just go hate with your name misspellings and all.
376: Ross was a jerk who wouldn't let things go. Rachel was generally unobjectionable.
It's possible I didn't follow the show closely enough all the way through. I think I left off when Ross and Rachel had a baby together, which did obviously change things. Rachel did, admittedly, seem less objectionable after that.
154, 168 The Teshing of America and Triumph of a Coffee Bar Hamlet !
That issue
http://www.highbeam.com/publications/newsweek-p5473/april-1995
had some other great timely and timeless titles:
* Hey Edgar, why MCA
* Turkey invades Iraq
* We were wrong, terribly wrong.' (excerpt from 'In Retrospect'; includes related articles)(Cover Story)
* Looking the part doesn't mean I'm a stereotypical twentysomething.(Column)
* Why Newt is no joke.(House Speaker Newt Gingrich)
I wouldn't be going too far if I said that all the characters were typecast, would I? The girls -- women -- were nice and hot (-ish), if somewhat vacant, and the boys were caddish, though they tried. No?
Not fair though how him and Joey got all tubby
Supposedly Perry was just as fucked in the head over his weight as any starlet. The weight ranges were different, but the unhealthiness was the same.
I didn't think LeBlanc got all that tubby, but maybe you're right. A guy with a decent build can definitely put on 10 (not-belly) pounds without anyone saying boo.
Jenifer Aniston ... with your name misspellings
I think I need to go to Standpipe's blog to figure this one out.
384: Not sure what you mean by typecast. Phoebe was a ditzy blonde, but she was also artsy and had a history as a violent homeless person. Ross was a dopey loser, but apparently he had sex appeal.
I mean, yes, they were all types, especially as originally written, but I feel as if typecast implies a direct line between actor and cliche'd role. I think you could pick 6 different types and rearrange the actors to fit them all (I wouldn't say that the actors could all have played any one of these types - that would suggest bad casting, amazing acting, or exceptionally bland roles, which is an overstatement even if you want to be nasty).
Hmm. Something just clicked to me about the chemistry among the characters (set aside what the actors did with the roles). One thing about the show that was very true to life was that the friends drove each other nuts without knowing they were doing it.
I'm not saying this was innovative at all - lack of self-awareness is crucial to being a sitcom character - but I think that the show did a good job of playing with it. So, for example, Chandler loved Joey, but that didn't lessen his frustration at Joey's stupidity, even as Joey was mostly oblivious to this. By always bearing that dynamic in mind, the writers were able to work a lot of shorthand interaction. Some of it was heavyhanded, of course, but my point is that I think this was a big part of the relatability.
Again, not original, but successful.
373
Since the other active thread is not a legal thread, I'm going to ask this here: For purposes of collecting unemployment, is it usually considered "for cause" if you get fired because you tell your employer that you are looking for other work? I.e. if you did, and they said "You can't quit, you're fired!" before you had found another job, could you get unemployment? Does it vary a lot by state?
IANAL but I wouldn't think that would qualify as for cause (this is a bit dependent on exactly what was said). In any case I don't see any downside to applying for unemployment.
This has already happened right? If not, don't tell your employer you are looking until you get an offer.
I think Parsimon meant stereotyped rather than typecast, right?
I feel as if typecast implies a direct line between actor and cliche'd role
Right, yes, sorry: I didn't mean typecast in the sense that the actor him/herself was cast into a type. Just the roles; Phoebe and Ross were a little different (weirdo musician, paleontology professor, each acting that part), but the rest were just so standard and cliched, it seemed to me.
I'm stepping as carefully as I can here, but Friends just seems incredibly generic (if gracefully done with its pretty people and apartments). Maybe it seems that way because it ushered in a new sit-com style which we've now seen duplicated in, e.g. How I Met Your Mother and probably others, and in fact it was revolutionary at the time. I never watched it at the time -- found it boring -- and have only seen it in repeats.
You know what's actually good -- to my surprise -- is Scrubs.
Friends was an instruction manual for people around my age who were starting to make their way in the world. It was like those John Hughes high-school movies, but in more convenient, weekly format: Here are a bunch of types of people, crudely drawn; learn to recognize yourself and the people around you in them; here are some various forms of relationships; here are some milestones along the proper life path, and some ways in which things might go wrong; here is what (per tierce's brilliant comment) is considered normal and what is considered weird; etc. During your 20s, you are supposed to do these various kinds of things for some number of years, then get married and have children. The New York setting is misleading; it's a more mythical New York than the one in Sesame Street, merely compressed humanity for comic convenience (and the aspirational element). People live out their Friends lives in small cities and exurbs.
Huh. Do you endorse or recommend that particular instruction manual, Bave?
It's like I've always said, Bave. The imagination is essentially creative, and always seeks for a new form. The boy-burglar is simply the inevitable result of life's imitative instinct. He is Fact, occupied as Fact usually is, with trying to reproduce Fiction, and what we see in him is repeated on an extended scale throughout the whole of life. Schopenhauer has analysed the pessimism that characterises modern thought, but Hamlet invented it. The world has become sad because a puppet was once melancholy. The Nihilist, that strange martyr who has no faith, who goes to the stake without enthusiasm, and dies for what he does not believe in, is a purely literary product. He was invented by young Tourgénieff, and completed by Dostoieffski. Robespierre came out of the pages of Rousseau as surely as the People's Palace rose out of the débris of a novel. Literature always anticipates life. It does not copy it, but moulds it to its purpose. The nineteenth century, as we know it, is largely an invention of Balzac. Our Luciens de Rubempré, our Rastignacs, and De Marsays made their first appearance on the stage of the Comédie Humaine. We are merely carrying out, with footnotes and unnecessary additions, the whim or fancy or creative vision of a great novelist. I once asked a lady, who knew Thackeray intimately, whether he had had any model for Becky Sharp. She told me that Becky was an invention, but that the idea of the character had been partly suggested by a governess who lived in the neighbourhood of Kensington Square, and was the companion of a very selfish and rich old woman. I inquired what became of the governess, and she replied that, oddly enough, some years after the appearance of Vanity Fair, she ran away with the nephew of the lady with whom she was living, and for a short time made a great splash in society, quite in Mrs. Rawdon Crawley's style, and entirely by Mrs. Rawdon Crawley's methods. Ultimately she came to grief, disappeared to the Continent, and used to be occasionally seen at Monte Carlo and other gambling places.
I'm convinced the pitch for Community was "Scrubs at a community college."
I loved Friends when it was on, but we bought the box set a couple of Christmases ago (it was very very cheap and the kids had been watching random repeated episodes) and I didn't love it this time round, although I was surprised at how much talk of sex there was. We watched it all together and got to about series 3. The 9 year old adored it and has watched all 10. The teenagers - kid B who generally likes anything rom-commy, kid A who just loves tv full stop and would probably be in heaven to meet tierce - weren't grabbed.
We're watching ER all the way through at the moment (nearly finished series 2), and they love that, so it's not just that Friends has dated. Kid A has been watching Ally McBeal and adores that too. I also got them My So-called Life, but they have only watched the first episode - at the end of it, Angela says "I guess we're all looking for our real parents" which produced gales of laughter (you live with your real parents, you melodramatic teenager!) and has become a bit of a catchphrase.
Sitcoms are chicken soup for my pathetic soul. I like most of them.
Halford's linked article is interesting, but it seems to me it says more about a shift in the advertising industry than anything else. They realised/decided that it might make sense to target a particular demographic, ie the one that earns money and buys stuff, and Friends was a successful show aimed at that demographic.
As for sitcoms centred around friends qua friends, I'm kind of surprised nobody (well, OK, Tierce) has mentioned The Likely Lads.
Hill Street Blues is (apparently) a famous case in advertising history. My ex was a Film & TV Studies 'major' [ahem], and used to talk a lot about the shift when advertisers discovered that there were shows that didn't have very high ratings but where the ratings were concentrated in a demographic they really wanted to reach. So, early 80s ish.
re: 400
More a duo, though. Which I suppose also fits with other similar US shows.
Oh god, I went through a phase of watching repeats of The Likely Lads (during a babysitting job I had? Can't date it), and had a massive crush on James Bolam! Still find myself watching Cold Case (?) sometimes because of him. Lots of that was based around the other one's relationship with his girlfriend though.
397
... although I was surprised at how much talk of sex there was. ...
Yes Friends is noticeably raunchier than Seinfeld. Don't know how it compares to other TV or if that qualifies as innovative.
your three friends (the smart one, the kind one, the funny one)
Did people identify (or try to identify others) with Friends characters the way they did with Sex and the City characters? It seems like they didn't in the same way. This is surely due in large part to the SATC characters having been drawn so very broadly from the start, but also to the fact that it was more explicitly about dating, and thus more likely to be invoked in the gazillion articles telling women how to get a man.
I strongly associate both Friends and ER with a particular period of the mid 90s and my time in grad school.
At some point around 2002 I realized that they were still on and it struck me a very strange in a time warp sort of way. "Wait...weren't these shows a Thing back in 1995? And they're still around?"
The last season of Roseanne was so stupid.
. It's not just that they're hot and silly, it's that it's so comforting--everything about it, right up to the theme song, is about how awesome it is to have great friends, and that when you do, life's fine.
This is exactly right.
That was when I was in college. We'd watch Seinfeldvtogether, the Simpsons and ER.
I remember that the Friends actors coordinated on their salaries from way back when it was on the air, but I remember that story being spun as "isn't it cute, they're friends in real life too," rather than the more important story about solidarity and stuff. Figures.
I almost want to attribute the show's success and whatever uniqueness it had to that solidarity, actually - it forced the writers to make good use of all six, it kept individuals in the cast from leaving to go do their own thing - but that conforms a bit too neatly to my own opinions for me to assume it without evidence.
As for the characters being stereotyped (the dumb one, the bossy one, etc.), I don't think they started out that way, but became that way after more and more extreme jokes. I think Joey, for example, started out as ditzy but basically normal and eventually developed actual mental problems. Since people have already mentioned TVTropes, I'd point out that they call this Flanderization.
Seinfeldvtogether
Was this a spinoff series?