Friends title card (Image: Wikipedia)

I recently came across an interesting item in my Facebook feed; a friend of mine was watching Friends, the American TV show that perhaps unknowingly became a cultural force for a generation. He commented in the status field of the post that he was “cracking up” and “loved the show”, ten years after its final episode hit the airwaves.

The six ‘Friends’ (Image: Various, Wikimedia Commons)

It was twenty years ago today that the first episode of Friends premiered in the United States of America. The six friends were Rachel Green (Jennifer Aniston), Ross Geller (David Schwimmer), Chandler Bing (Matthew Perry), Monica Geller (Courteney Cox), Joey Tribbiani (Matt LeBlanc) and Phoebe Buffay (Lisa Kudrow). Even most non-viewers of the show are in some way aware of their characters’ traits, as their characters came to define their actors’ careers to an extent that most are still trying to escape.

The “Central Perk” cafe (Image: Friends Wikia)

The light-hearted banter between the group of Friends, the off-the-wall eccentric or crack-up snappy dialogues written for them, and the (occasionally serious) dilemmas they found themselves in were in many ways more than entertainment; they represented a generation which stood at the end of the century, between the end of the Cold War and the start of the digital revolution. This was the beginning of Generation Y and the tail end of Generation X; those who grew up with hip hop and boy/girl bands, but only just remember the 80s; those who use Facebook, but didn’t grow up with social media (or if they did, it was in the form of MSN Messenger which, notably, is closing down completely on October 31 – the end of an era).

90s America much? The “Friends” apartment. (Image: Friends Wikia)

Friends was in many ways a cultural phenomenon, influencing those who watched it, and those who didn’t. How many people remember (or asked for) ‘The Rachel‘, the haircut which Jennifer Aniston wore for the first two seasons of the show, which hairdressers around the world tried to replicate, and which Aniston herself more recently confessed to hating? How many of us would be familiar with Joey’s pick-up line “how you doin?”? Who can look upon the ridiculous mishmash of colours and hokey styling in both clothes and decoration and admit that their home decoration or fashion during the 1990s and early 2000s was in some way influenced by such media portrayals. And who remembers when The Rembrandts released “I’ll Be There For You“, the theme song to the show which became a hit for the American pop duo?

Jennifer Aniston sports “The Rachel” haircut (Image: Huffington Post)

In many other ways, Friends represented the generation from which it emerged. Despite the tendency for commentators to look favourably upon their own childhood as a time of “innocence” (where the wider world was probably no more innocent than at any other time in history), there are of course certain clues through the show that point to a different era, and which demonstrate how rapidly the world has changed in the past ten years. The lack of mobile phone culture throughout the show; even as mobile phones begin to appear in the show, their presence seems almost quaint now compared with the reliance on cellphones which we see today. The gradual infiltration of the internet into the shows dialogues in later seasons reflects the cautious excitement that many late Gen Xers and early Gen Yers would remember. The ‘cafe culture’ of the Central Perk cafe reflects a time in which, if not in the USA, but at least in much of the world, cafe culture became the norm. The show also explored live-in relationships for much of the world in a way that hitherto hadn’t been portrayed in such depth, yet so casually. And in post Cold War USA, the simplicity (and arguably ignorance) with which the world is portrayed is notable, as are the subtle shifts after the abrupt awakening that took place on September 11 2001.

Cast of Friends in 2004 (Image: imstillakid.com)

In many ways, the debut of Friends twenty years ago today was the beginning of a sub-generation’s coming of age. What followed was a hyper-coloured, often-prefabricated version of reality that included the Spice Girls, Tamagotchi, ICQ messenger, The Backstreet Boys versus *NSYNC, Dawsons Creek, Y2K fears, debates over when the new millennium actually began, the Sydney Olympics and ended for many with that other great New York-based television show of the era, Sex and the City. The fact that 20 years on, Friends can still make people laugh, and despite the often silly dialogues, over-simplistic plots and questionable acting skills, it can still entertain, makes the program an icon of its era.

Friends airs in Australia on GEM TV weeknights from 6:30 – 7:30. In Pakistan, a Punjabi-dubbed version airs on Apna Channel Saturdays at 7pm, and in Pakistan and India the English version airs on Star World weekdays at 1:30pm IST (1pm PKT).