For an India opening up to the world in the ’90s, the series Friends embodied something we were conditioned to think of as the life we needed to aspire to. Oh, to be young and White in Manhattan, to have lifelong friends and part-time lovers, live in adjoining apartments, drink endless cups of coffee and play endless games of foosball. It was the ultimate hangout comedy and we were all supposed to want to be as witty, as wisecracking and let’s face it, as White as them.
Friends star Matthew Perry’s death in a hot tub turns that aspirational story into a cautionary tale as well. Perry’s troubled trajectory was never a secret. In the foreword to his recent memoir Friends, Lovers and the Big Terrible Thing, co-star Lisa Kudrow says the first question people often ask about the series is “How’s Matthew Perry doing?”
He lays it all out in the memoir in grim detail from a colon that exploded due to opioid abuse, years of addiction to pain-killers, two weeks in a coma and 15 stints in rehab. He was not chasing a high he told The New York Times. “I just wanted to sit on my couch, take five Vicodin and watch a movie.” He estimated his treatments cost $9 million. He acknowledged most addicts would not have those resources but said they had something he never did — “the gift of anonymity.”
Stars of a series like Friends could never have anonymity. The whole point of the series was to set them up as the approachable next-door neighbours. Much of it has not aged well. It was not just the unbearable whiteness of being Friends. There was fat-shaming at a time when few used the term, trans-mocking when transgender rights weren’t part of public discourse. LGBT issues were the butt of lazy jokes despite little woke touches like a lesbian wedding (but no kiss allowed). It even had its Kal Ho Naa Ho (2003) Kanta behn moment where the characters Ross and Joey freak out after they accidentally fall asleep on the couch together.“What happened?” Ross shrieks and then says “We fell asleep — that’s all.”
Yet, despite all this, Friends remains exceptionally popular even in the age of cancel culture. San Francisco has a Friends experience “museum” that it hopes will help revitalise its downtown. The 25th anniversary in 2019 had a Friends light show on the Empire State Building in New York while Grammy winner Meghan Trainor sang their theme song “I’ll be there for you.” No matter how much it’s been trashed, Friends has survived in the fickle world of pop culture like few other shows. Other American shows have had more memorable characters (Seinfeld), longer runs (ER) and more critical acclaim (Frasier). But for those of us outside America, Friends felt like a slice of all-American pie.
It must have had something special which makes generations of viewers nostalgic for a Friends reunion in a way they are not about a show like ER. They were monochromatic White but it was a well-meaning clueless kind of whiteness that threatened no-one. The homophobia was giggly rather than toxic and even LGBT viewers felt seen, kind of. They were charming but wilfully blind self-obsessed New Yorkers. That descriptor probably fit Donald Trump in the ’90s as well. But the self-deprecation saved Friends from becoming Trump. Perry’s Chandler said “Hi, I’m Chandler. I make jokes when I’m uncomfortable.” Trump would never be as vulnerable.
The show exuded a kind of warmth that we all wished we had in our lives. We, too, wanted to have close-knit friends who had all the time in the world for us and would always be there for us.That bond was so special I remember cringing when they introduced romance into the series. I was afraid the friendship would not survive the romance. That’s when I realised I was rooting for friends not lovers. The death-do-us part friendship of Sholay (1975) or Anand (1971) that Bollywood gave us was operatic, something to admire but out of reach. This friendship had the easy comfort of purani jeans. We wanted to slip into their lives.
At its best, Friends, despite its comedy, filled some essentially lonely corner in our lives. But Perry’s troubled life, during Friends and after, reminded us that it was, in the end, all make-believe. But we still sang the theme song hoping against hope that our friends, too, would be there for us. And these Friends will, at least in reruns.
Roy is a novelist and the author of Don’t Let Him Know
