C’mon, The Good Place doesn’t belong in this discussion. Sure it’s uplifting, but it’s not feel-good brain candy. Its brilliance is surely more relevant to its popularity.
That comparison is the first thing that came to my mind, too. Friends never appealed to me but Office Space holds up, and she was great in it. What do you mean about her being ruined by trying to be a star or sex symbol? Not trying to argue, just don’t know enough to understand. Explain it to me like I’ve only half-watched a half-dozen episodes, only because it was on every TV at the gym for a while, if you wouldn’t mind.
I knew whodunnit, too, though not from the beginning. (Unless you’re saying you knew it was BOB right from the beginning? Which would be something.) Doesn’t change what I said in any way. Who Killed Laura Palmer wasn’t The Mystery to be solved.
Tell me, why are the owls not what they seem, and what are they? Why was there a fish in the percolator? Did that gum ever come back in style? Did the log really speak? No one knows! The show left factoids (I wouldn’t call them clues - clues fit together, and serve the greater story) lying around like bird droppings. Everyone forgives anything Lynch does. Hell, people think they understand Mullholland Drive, too, which is pretty good, because Lynch certainly doesn’t.
I was never a fan myself; the show as a whole never had anything to offer me. I should mention, though, that I was never particularly interested in sitcoms. I started watching them later than most of my peers (at 9) and largely stopped watching them in my teens. One of the first ones I watched, “Webster”, was very kid-friendly, with topics that were relevant to my age group; ditto for “Full House”. I kind of liked Seinfeld at 13, but by 14 it had lost its appeal - I actually walked out of an episode that I had paid to watch at school during the lunch break. Also, for example I never cared for reruns of “M.A.S.H.”; I found the humor borderline stupid. So “Friends” always seemed like a waste of time.
“The Big Bang Theory” and “Young Sheldon” do have some appeal for me, though the former eventually got quite old.
South Park, which I stopped watching years ago, is a very different show from Friends. Much cruder, funnier, different audience. They once had, as part of a Hanukkah song about dreidels, a summary of the appeal of the show in one verse.
Courtney Cox! I love you! You’re so hot! On that show!
But attractive actors do not a show make. The plots are so ridiculous. The last one I saw had three subplots - geeky guy tries to impress girl by pretending he can play rugger, girl destroys apartment hunting for obscure noise and guy does not want to tell girlfriend he needs to break up with her because of her annoying voice so invents a job in Yemen. These ideas are not terrible. But, to take an example, the joke is he is going to go to… Yemen!! Yemen! That’s craaaazy. Even the name is funny - or meant to be. Ha, ha. Yemen! Good thing there’s a laugh track.
Here are two, off the top of my head.
“We were on a break!”
“Could you BE any more annoying?” (The “catchphrase” was in the use of “be” and how it was said, not the rest of the sentence.)
Probably the closest thing they had to a catchphrase, in the sense of something that was repeated in multiple episodes for comic effect, was Joey’s greeting to an attractive woman: “How you doin’?”
Actually, she was trying to find what a light switch went to, and this episode is in my top 5 Friends episodes. This episode relies on past knowledge of the characters and events, and these actions are perfectly normal for them in the situation they are in. It may just seem odd to a casual viewer because their actions seem counter to what you or I would do, but is exactly what those characters would do.
They did a cold open in which they found the couch occupied and went back home, as well as an episode where one subplot is another group commandeering the couch, both early in the run. In most seasons, the couch was permanently reserved for them because of Gunther’s crush on Rachel.
You are right about the subplot. My problem with Friends is not the fetching actresses, crazy situations or developed characters. It’s the football-in-the-groin lack of subtlety.
No doubt plenty of TV is over-emoted, but Friends so much so that it seems incredibly artificial to me. The laugh track doesn’t help. The writing is incredibly blunt - it would be pretty hard to miss the joke.
I don’t doubt the situations “remain in character”. No doubt if you watch the show for years this is endearing. But if you watched the show with the volume off you would miss precisely nothing - and still get the primary benefit of the show.
