Opinion Friends with benefits
Why intimate social networks,rather than family,have come the focus of TV sitcoms.
For most of television history,sitcoms have been about families. But over the past several years,things have shifted. Todays shows are often about groups of unrelated friends who have the time to lounge around apartments,coffee shops and workplaces exchanging witticisms about each other and the passing scene.
As Neal Gabler wrote in the Los Angeles Times this week,Over the last 20 years,beginning with Seinfeld,and moving on through Friends,Sex and the City and more recently Desperate Housewives,Glee,The Big Bang Theory,How I Met Your Mother, and at least a half-dozen other shows… television has become a kind of friendship machine dispensing groups of people in constant and intimate contact with one another.
These flock comedies serve an obvious dramatic function. In an age of quick cuts and interlacing,,it helps to have a multitude of characters on hand zooming in and out of scenes. But the change also reflects something deeper about the patterns of friendship in society. With people delaying marriage and childbearing into their 30s,young people now spend long periods of their lives outside of traditional families,living among diverse friendship tribes. These friendship networks are emotionally complicated and deeply satisfying ; ripe ground for a comedy of manners.
Then,when these people do get married,friendship becomes the great challenge. So these flock comedies serve another purpose for the middle-aged. They appeal to people who want to watch fictional characters enjoying the long,uninterrupted bonding experiences that they no longer have time or energy for.
The shows also serve one final purpose. They help people negotiate the transition between dyadic friendships and networked friendships. Throughout history,the most famous friendships were one on one. Most essayistic celebrations of friendship have also been about the deep and total commitment that can exist between one person and another. In his book,The Four Loves,C.S. Lewis paints a wonderful picture of such an ideal: It seems no wonder if our ancestors regarded Friendship as something that raised us almost above humanity. This love,free from instinct,free from all duties but those which love has freely assumed,almost wholly free from jealousy,and free without qualification from the need to be needed,is eminently spiritual. It is the sort of love one can imagine between angels.
But todays friendships those represented in the flock comedies and perhaps in real life are less likely to be one on one. Instead,individual relationships tend to be deeply embedded in a complex web of group relationships.
DAVID BROOKS
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