Pivot, Pivot, Pivot
The many innovations of Friends
The much-loved sitcom Friends has been all over the news recently, due to the tragic and untimely demise of lead actor Matthew Perry. Perry played Chandler on the show, one of the six friends who hang out in 1990s/early 2000s New York City and whose escapades were captured in 236 episodes over 10 seasons. Friends started out to mixed critical reception and mass viewership, but over time gained immense popularity around the world, and left an indelible cultural legacy.
Friends was popular for a number of reasons, including consistently well-written plots, well-paced episodes (covered in an earlier post on this blog), and strong performances from the six leads, backed by a stellar supporting cast (including various celebrity spots). However, it was also a show that rethought what a television sitcom could be, and featured several innovations that changed the landscape of comedy.
“I don’t hang up on your friends”
The first, and most obvious innovation, was the focus on a group of friends as the central characters — as the name of the show suggests. Prior to Friends (and another iconic sitcom that ran around the same time — Seinfeld), most sitcoms fell into two categories — workplace comedies (such as M*A*S*H, Cheers, Taxi) and family comedies (such as I Love Lucy, Home Improvement). The other major comedies of the 90s — Everybody Loves Raymond and Frasier were also primarily family comedies.
Friends (and Seinfeld) flipped this on its head by focusing on six friends, with most episodes featuring them hanging out — at the coffee shop, at each others’ apartments, and more. While there are conflicts between the characters, and relationships build between the six, Friends at its core is what is now termed a “hangout comedy.” . As a consequence, there were many more potential plot points, as well as character developments and story arcs — fertile ground for writers to carry through ten seasons without seeming repetitive or reducing the quality of the writing over time.
The impact of this change is not hard to see, with a number of sitcoms coming out since the turn of the millennium using a similar setting — The Big Bang Theory, How I Met Your Mother, New Girl, and many more. An article in Vox argues that Friends ruined television by unleashing this legion of copycats, often without any sense of conflict. While it is true in that the underlying innovation of Friends is that it laid the groundwork for shows that do not need a central premise or conflict beyond a group that spends time together, it also did not restrict itself to this lack of restrictions.
“We were on a break”
Which brings us to the second major innovation of Friends — a shift towards longer story arcs, and increased character development across the lifetime of the show. The will-they-won’t-they storyline for Ross and Rachel (which lasted the entirety of the series), as well as shorter story arcs involving some of the leads and various supporting characters (Chandler and Monica, Phoebe and Mike, Monica and Richard, Chandler and Janice, and many more) added a layer of continuity across episodes and helped draw audiences back with more than just the repetitive situations and eccentricities displayed while hanging out.
Again, Friends was not the only driver of this change — 80s shows such as Cheers, Remington Steele, and Moonlighting had started this trend — but Friends really made it part of the mainstream by having multiple story arcs, as well as keeping the longest of them running through the entire series. This innovation truly changed the face of television comedy — allied with the switch to more multi-episode-drops on streaming services that encourage bingeing, television comedy shows now pretty much have to include nuanced plots and storylines.
“I make jokes when I’m uncomfortable”
Alongside this, Friends also rethought the idea of family — marriages break apart at alarming frequency, bad relationships abound, and parents fall-out at regular intervals. While Friends was hardly progressive (witness the predominantly all-white cast, the transphobia and jokes about homosexuality), it did touch upon many issues that were then almost taboo for the screen — a same-sex wedding, interrace couples, surrogacy, and more.
All through this, the bond between the six friends remains constant. These messages often resonated with 90s kids across the world, and were an accompaniment to the coming-of-age for an entire generation that wrestled with their own sexuality, orientation, and social conventions that were forced upon them. Friends was the first time a show focused on the up-and-coming generation as the stars of the show, and spoke about topics related to this generation.
“How (many jokes) you doin’?”
Friends also innovated on the number of lead characters. Conventional wisdom focuses on two (or at most three) main lead characters, with a couple of others being supporting characters to add conflict and act as foils to the leads. All other characters tend to be recurring characters, who are not central to the plot.
Friends instead had six leads, and almost no supporting characters (though it did have a few recurring characters, most of whom existed for the lifetime of their story arc). It is nearly impossible to distinguish a first-among-equals among the leads — the characters all had a similar number of lines, a similar number of jokes and proportion of jokes among lines. This is virtually unparalleled for a show (barring shows inspired from Friends — like How I Met Your Mother, or the British show Coupling), and also led to another unparalleled knock-on effect — the reduced focus on supporting and recurring characters. Despite being hugely memorable, even the “main” recurring characters such as Janice, Richard, and Mike all featured for less than thirty episodes.
“Maybe I don’t need your money — wait, I said maybe!”
The final innovation is perhaps a knock-on effect of this egalitarian spread of screen time, and is the only off-screen innovation in this list.
Typically, the leads in any show commanded high salaries, while the supporting and recurring characters had per-episode salaries that were orders of magnitude lower. Friends initially was planning to follow the same approach — Jennifer Aniston (Rachel) and David Schwimmer (Ross) were offered significantly higher salaries. However, as revealed by Matthew Perry in his autobiography, Schwimmer encouraged the cast to join in collective bargaining sessions with the network, so as to ensure pay equality for all of them.
This was unprecedented, and although it has not yet become the norm, Friends showed what cast salaries should be like.
“Could it be any more innovative?”
While Friends will rightly be remembered for its multiple iconic episodes, characters, and quotes — Friends should also be remembered for the innovations it brought to television. The shift in themes towards hangout comedies involving multiple characters and longer story arcs that touch upon controversial topics relevant to (then) young generation is visible in its long-term impact — and perhaps over time, collective bargaining will be visible too. Until then, to paraphrase Phoebe, they don’t know that we know that they know the innovation behind the show.
