"Friends" as a work of Bourgeois mythology

2021 and we are still talking about it.

You could pluck out an obscure reference from any episode and throw it at someone born the year it ended and there's every chance they'd get it. I was seven the year it was all wrapped up and it remains one of my most vivid cultural memories of the 2000s. As our parents generation said goodbye to characters so embedded in the fabric of 1990s television that they were household names, the hype around the last episode was so obsessive that it rubbed off on their kids, many of whom could by now appreciate a good "Joey-stupid, Phoebe-weird" joke by now if little else about it. On May 6, 2004 it finally all ended. Monica and Chandler adopted, Rachel got off the plane and Joey got a spinoff *shudders*.

And then came the reruns.

Every single day. Two episodes an evening, back to back on E4. Every episode of all ten seasons, start to finish. Young me was hooked. The simple narratives, accessible characters and rhythmically timed jokes became a part of my evening routine when I came home from school. So obsessed was I with this fantastical version of adult life that it became my portal into what I envisioned my own adult life would resemble. That is, spending large swathes of the day hanging out in a café before heading off to work for an hour or two now and again. This vision of adulthood was channelled into my impressionable young head on a daily basis throughout the entirety of the ten seasons before I was back where I started, at the finale.

And then they aired every single episode again, two a day, start to finish. I should have had my fill by then, but still I dipped in and out, less compulsively, but still enjoying it. That's the problem, by the time you finish watching the show so much time has passed that the humour of season one seems fresh to you again. On and on, ad nauseam, this sitcom was aired constantly as the background to the lives of kids with lazy parents in the 2000s. Further and further into my mind sank this carefree depiction of life in your 20s, where you could, with just a little effort, progress your way up the corporate ladder in the career of your choosing. That is, after having to first suffer the indignity of being a waiter. A running joke in Central Perk is the lonely, white haired middle aged man named Gunther, deemed a failure in life due to his career in the service industry. The depiction of those in service orientated jobs ranges from punchlines such as Gunther to props for our more important and often inexplicably affluent main group. Never once did I make the connection between these depictions and the fact that my mother had been a waiter when I was young.

In fact, the only example of one of the characters lifting a finger for work is when Rachel works as a waiter; Monica's career in hospitality, in contrast, is remarkably effort free and economically rewarding; Ross coasts into a career as a university lecturer, whilst caring for a son, maintaining a social life and still basing it all around his all around his all important hours of the day spent in Central Perk; Chandler's career similarly drifts upwards with minimal effort; Joey, meanwhile, is a usually out of work actor who nonetheless never seems to struggle for money in a way which really impacts his mood or behaviour.

All of which leads us on to Phoebe, the one character who is shown to have a had a difficult upbringing. Phoebe is a masseuse. That's it. She just is a masseuse. She was also homeless for a period as a teenager with a mother who committed suicide. Never once is the vast disparity between these periods in her life bridged. Never once does her difficult past show any psychological impact on the woman, other than her being a little bit "quirky". She was homeless, now she is a massage therapist with a nice apartment in Manhattan. This is the version of reality in which Friends is set. Phoebe's incredible rags to riches life story is never deemed interesting enough to mention because, in this reality, it's not all that incredible. After all, anyone can succeed if they just apply themselves to their given career choice.

This is a thoroughly bourgeois worldview. Moreover, it is one which is essential to the capacity of those born into privilege's ability to convince everyone, including themselves, that their economic standing is owed largely to their own innate ability and talent. The likes of Phoebe have no more difficulty succeeding than the likes of Monica and Ross despite the drastic differences in their economic background, because success is the result of the individual's determination, not their material conditions. By implication, the likes of Gunther have, in contrast, been unsuccessful in surmounting the economic ladder due to their own personal shortcomings as an individual, not due to the conditions which they were born into. This is the myth on which America stands.

None of which is to argue that Friends was somehow an act of capitalist propaganda. It's just a sitcom, and a pretty funny one at that. It simply happens to conveys a distinctly Bourgeois perspective which, in turn, appeals to wealthy TV production companies who hold similar worldviews. As a result, the mythology on which this worldview is based became further instilled in the minds of many a young, impressionable viewer, regardless of their economic standing in life.

For the generation that grew up with endless repeats of Friends running somewhere in the background, the expectation of a leisurely adult life has been met by the reality of stagnant wages and longer hours as we await the next opportunity to shout "PIVOT!" for a cheap laugh.