The fallacies: 6 ways "Friends" hurt the sitcom

[TMC]

http://www.nj.com/entertainment/led...73251152460.xml

Alan Sepinwall on TV
The long-running hit changed the face of sitcoms, for better or (mostly) worse
Monday, May 03, 2004
"Friends" (Thursday at 9 p.m., Ch. 4) The gang will be there for each other one last time in the one-hour series finale, preceded at 8 p.m. by a one-hour clip special.

I COME NOT to praise "Friends," but to bury all the knuckleheads who used it as an excuse to ruin TV comedy.

Bear in mind that I hold no ill will towards "Friends" itself. I won't exactly miss it, but only because the last few seasons have been painful, while the excellent early seasons will be in rerun syndication forever.

At its best, "Friends" was a brilliant comic contraption, a snappy blend of off-kilter punchlines and off-kilter behavior. Even at its worst, it was still cheerful and sweet.

The problem isn't with "Friends," but with the havoc that "Friends" inadvertently wreaked on primetime. Imitation is the sincerest form of television, and there may not be another show in TV history that's been as frequently imitated -- or as badly imitated -- as "Friends."

The reason for the show's success -- smart writing, likable actors who knew their way around a punchline, hard-to-bottle chemistry -- were obvious to anyone with half a brain, but a quarter-brain is usually the best you can hope for from the people making the big money decisions in Hollywood.

Instead of searching for sitcom writers with experience, vision and a distinctive sense of humor, they just tried to clone the most surface elements of "Friends," making "Friends" fallacy after "Friends" fallacy. To wit:

"Friends" fallacy No. 1: Young, pretty people are always good at comedy.

Make a quick mental list of the great TV clowns of all time. Now cross off all but the names of those you'd consider conventionally attractive. Pretty short list now, huh?

This isn't to say that good-looking people can't make you laugh. Lucille Ball and Mary Tyler Moore were classic beauties. Bill Cosby and Dick Van Dyke cut fairly dashing figures in their younger years. Nor is it to say that being funny-looking automatically makes someone funny. If it did, Daniel Stern wouldn't have two unwatchable, short-lived comedies being whited-out from his resume.

But before "Friends," a bald fortysomething guy who could do great pratfalls had a much better chance of getting on TV than a twentysomething stiff with six-pack abs. Sitcoms had a great tradition of stars who weren't beautiful, to say the least, from Jackie Gleason and Art Carney to Michael Richards and Jason Alexander. Laughs used to be much more important than looks when it came to sitcom casting.

Then the "Friends" producers hit the jackpot of all time: They found six young, terrifically attractive performers, all of whom had real comic talent. This was a fluke, a convergence of forces likely never to be duplicated, but suddenly it wasn't enough for networks to look for good new comedies; they had to find hot new comedies.

"Seinfeld" wouldn't have gotten on the air at NBC if it were developed after "Friends." "Barney Miller," with its cast full of rumpled middle-aged men, would have been retooled into a sitcom "21 Jump Street."

Overall, sitcom casts are younger and more attractive than they ever were before "Friends." But the pool of actors who are pretty and funny was awfully shallow pre-"Friends," and it dried up completely after the rush to clone the show.


"Friends" Fallacy No. 2: The audience only wants to see hip comedies about single people living in big cities.

If you want to see the havoc "Friends" wreaked on comedy development, look no further than ABC. Pre-"Friends," ABC was known for its family comedies, usually set in blue-collar Midwestern locales ("Roseanne," "Home Improvement," "Grace Under Fire').

Then "Friends" hit, and someone high up in the ranks at ABC had a mid-life crisis and decided he'd rather be running a cool place like NBC -- or, failing that, he'd rather turn ABC into an NBC clone.

Out went the families in the heartland. In came soulless, "edgy" comedies set in large metropolitan areas. Some had their moments, like "Spin City," but most were along the lines of "Two Guys, a Girl and a Pizza Place."

Instead of presenting comedy characters from every geographic and demographic group, now networks only wanted young hotties looking for love in New York.

Family shows started to make a comeback after "Everybody Loves Raymond" hit, but there's still a mentality in the TV business that a Manhattan-based comedy starring Lea Thompson would be preferable to a rural sitcom starring Wanda Sykes.


"Friends" Fallacy No. 3: Every sitcom must be part comedy, part soap opera.

Other sitcoms, like "Cheers" and "Seinfeld," had told continuing stories before, but never to the extent of "Friends," where every episode may as well have ended with harpsichord music and a melodramatic announcer declaring, "Will Ross tell Rachel how he feels? Will Monica and Chandler adopt their baby? Will Joey ever finish that sandwich? Tune in next week..."

The sitcom as soap thing can work, but only if it happens naturally. The "Friends" writers never intended to put Ross and Rachel together until they saw how David Schwimmer and Jennifer Aniston played off each other.

But after young America became obsessed with that couple, a mandate spread across Hollywood: New comedies must have unrequited love, ongoing plots and as many Very Special Episodes as possible. So the "Frasier" writers played up the minor Niles and Daphne running joke until it took over the show, the writers of "Caroline in the City" had Caroline's blatantly gay assistant fall in love with her, and Dharma and Greg's marriage had to hit the skids every couple of seasons.


"Friends" Fallacy No. 4: The family hour? What family hour?

"Friends" creators Marta Kauffman and David Crane's previous show was the HBO ode to nudity "Dream On," so you knew their next one would be full of sex gags. And it was. Remember Ross' misfiring juice box? Rachel and Monica fighting over the last condom in the apartment? The girls teaching Joey how to "be there for her?"

All funny moments, but they had a chilling effect on the TV world around them. While sex had crept into the "family hour" in the past, no show had ever been this raunchy this often this early in the evening.

The family hour was never an official concept, but there had always been a gentleman's agreement among the networks to leave the grown-up stuff for 9 o'clock or later. After "Friends" moved to 8 o'clock and didn't change its content one iota, the dam burst, flooding the family hour with bedroom and bathroom humor. By the late '90s, it was hard to find a show in early primetime that wasn't laden with sex jokes.

Even worse, they were bad sex jokes. The "Friends" team had an affinity for writing that kind of material, but not everyone can do it. Entire shows sprung up filled with nothing but sex jokes, all of them tawdry and wince-inducing. There's an entire generation of writers who don't seem to know any other kind of humor -- and aren't even good at the one kind they do know.


"Friends" Fallacy No. 5: Anyone who does well on "Friends" automatically deserves their own show.

Jonathan Silverman delivered Ross' son Ben, then became "The Single Guy." Brooke Shields stalked Joey, then got "Suddenly Susan." Tom Selleck dated Monica for a while, then was cast in "The Closer." Paget Brewster dated both Joey and Chandler, then parlayed it into "For Love or Money."

Mercifully, not every "Friends" guest star got their own sitcom -- "The Jean-Claude Van Damme Show," anyone? -- but casting directors seemed to suffer from the delusion that everyone who appeared on the show was inherently funny, as opposed to benefiting from great writing and co-stars.


"Friends" Fallacy No. 6: Sitcoms can and should become huge hits right away.

From the beginning, "Friends" flew to the top of the ratings like it had been shot out of a cannon. That almost never happens. The last sitcom to become a monster immediately was "The Cosby Show" a decade earlier.

Before "Friends," patience was the order of the day for grooming comedy hits. "Cheers" was one of the lowest-rated shows on TV its first season, and it eventually rose to number one. "Seinfeld" was such a loser at first that its initial three seasons had one, four and 12 episodes, respectively, and we all know how it turned out.

But the fluke instant success of "Friends" convinced TV executives that all of their shows should hit right away, or they were worthless. With rare exceptions like "Raymond," which took four years to reach the top, post-"Friends" sitcoms have a much shorter leash than they used to, and promising shows that might have been able to grow into hits over time were no longer given that chance in a penny-wise, pound-foolish new programming world.

Again, I blame "Friends" itself for none of this. It would be like making God the fall guy for the Crusades. The "Friends" writers, directors and stars were just trying to make a cute and funny show, and they succeeded more often than not. But the aftermath of their innocent work has been bloody, horrifying to watch, and so damaging that it could take years to recover.



Alan Sepinwall can be reached at asepinwall@starledger.com, or by writing him at 1 Star-Ledger Plaza, Newark, N.J. 07102-1200.

[dawsongirl]

Good article.

[Mr. Television]

I read that article earlier on today and agree with it 100%.

[barwars]

very good article.

especially the part about having to be goodlooking -- that really irritates me.

[jamesanthony]

All 6 points are valid. I agree with the soap opera fallacy. Is there such a thing as a comedy with self-contained episodes anymore? And the fallacy about the lack of less than gorgeous people headlining sitcoms is dead on accurate. The single urban requirement is nothing new- back in 1971 CBS dumped almost all its older rural sitcoms and varieties because the demographic didn't buy enough of the sponsor products. Unfortunately the replacement shows all flopped big time. And the fallacy about a show having to become an instant hit explains why shows can get the axe after just 4 to 6 weeks despite a lot of hype and promotion.

[Pitooey]

Good article

[Chocoholic]

Good article. I agree with it a lot.

[Dean Winchester]

I loved Friends and I admit I was sad last night, but I do agree with the guys assessment.

The one that annoys me most is the way that NBC has stopped giving shows "room to grow" all because Friends was an instant hit. Yes, Friends was a blockbuster and went out on top, but Seinfeld and Cheers are two other classic series on NBC and neither series became a top 10 hit until their fourth year.

I agree and disagree with the soap opera thing. I hate it when a sitcom gets TOO dramatic (the last season of Sex And The City wasn't even a comedy), but I also love a tv series having continuation. But it seems like because a show like Friends or Sex And The City succeeded in giving a soap-like atmosphere to the ratings, every sitcom on tv wanted to do the same.

I don't like the "hip people in big city" change either. Friends worked because the cast clicked and we loved them. The show would've worked whether in Wyoming, Delaware OR New York City.

I also agree with the "attractive cast" shows. The only attractive Seinfeld cast member was Julia Louis-Dreyfus, but it didn't keep people from tuning in because Jerry Seinfeld or Michael Richards weren't models. With a sitcom, you should be funny first, and everything else second. On Friends, they struck gold by finding a cast that is attractive AND funny... there's a few other exceptions that worked (such as Suddenly Susan and Sex And The City), but 9 out of 10 times, it didn't.

[barwars]

good points Buffy.


Friends was a good sitcom, but what it DID for sitcoms.... not very good.

[Central Perk]

I have to disagree with the article in some ways. I mean Friends was its own show it wasn't telling others to copy it. The only thing I hate that Friends has done is giving the impression that new shows should have instant great ratings. Networks need to learn to be patient with new shows.

[TMC]

http://www.slate.com/articles/news_a...5/friends.html

But there's another, more fundamental problem with hailing Friends as the last great situation comedy: It misstates the genre to which the showbelongs. Friends isn't a sitcom. It's a soapcom, a soap opera masquerading as a situation comedy. The earworm theme song, the laugh track, and the gooey sentimentalism all conspire to fool viewers and critics into thinking they're watching a family sitcom like Growing Pains or Family Ties updated for urban tribes (a Golden Girls for the pre-retirement set). But the beautiful people with opulent lifestyles, the explicit sexual content (everybody's slept with everybody, Ross's ex-wife is a lesbian, Chandler's dad is a transvestite, etc.), the long multi-episode story arcs, and each season's cliffhanger ending are the show's real hallmarks. Days of Our Lives isn't the only soap opera that Joey has a role in. And this one's got jokes to boot.

Somewhere along the way, TV drama and TV comedy switched places. It's fairer to call shows like Law & Order and CSI "sitdramas" than it is to call Friends a sitcom. Law & Order's syndicated success hinges on the tidiness of each episode. You can shuffle them all together and deal them out in any order you like, and viewers won't even notice. But if you shuffled episodes from Friends' 10 seasons and aired them in random order, you wouldn't have the slightest bit of continuity from show to show. Friends is Dallaswithout the shootings.

Rather than wrapping up plots in 30 minutes, as sitcoms do, Friends stretches them over several episodes, or even several seasons (or in the case of Ross and Rachel, all 10). A conventional sitcom plot, such as Chandler kicking Joey out of his apartment, gets a three-show treatment on Friends. Most sitcoms would feel obliged to slap "To Be Continued … " on any plot that lasts longer than half an hour. But the soapcom only very rarely begins even with a "Previously on Friends … " summation for the uninitiated. Believe it or not, Friends is structurally most similar to a show like The X-Files: Episodes are occasionally self-contained, but most expand upon series-long story arcs that grows more convoluted and harder for non-devotees to follow with each passing season.

On sitcoms, of course, big changes sometimes happen. As with Friends, characters get married, or have babies, or go to London. But the writers of sitcoms use such plot devices as exogenous shocks to try to revive a dying system. Can't think of anything new to write? Have the family adopt a homeless kid! Friends, by contrast, never pretended that it was about a static environment, an unchanging "situation" in which to insert comedy. You don't tune in to Friends to watch wacky hijinks—Will Chandler get stuck in an ATM booth? Will Phoebe land a music video?—but to find out what happens next in a plotline you've been following. How will Ross react when he sees Rachel with flowers at the airport? Whose room did Ross walk into, Rachel's or Bonnie's? Will Emily abandon Ross for saying Rachel's name at the altar? What will happen after Ross and Rachel's drunken Las Vegas wedding? Even Cheers, which had soapcom elements, didn't rely on plot to this extent.

Which is why, I think, when the writers of Friends referred to the demise of another TV show last week, it wasn't a sitcom. One of the most enjoyable things about Friends is the occasional ways that it comments upon itself as television. In the beginning, the frame of reference for the show was the sitcom universe. In the pilot alone, Rachel watches the Joanie and Chachi wedding from Happy Days ("See, but Joanie loved Chachi! That's the difference!" she says), and Monica refers to Joey and Chandler as "Lenny and Squiggy." Ten years later, the point of comparison is a different one: Bemoaning Rachel's imminent departure for Paris, Chandler says, "It feels like when Melrose Place got cancelled." Exactly.

[benjamoon]

^^^ No offense because I know you didn't write it but that's a really dumb article. So sitcoms have to be contained to one half hour? That's a backwards way of thinking to a genre that has always been presented different ways. It's not a "soapcom" - it's simply one style of sitcom that had been done before Friends. Bewitched devoted several episodes to the discovery of Tabitha being a witch. I Love Lucy had story arcs of Lucy's pregnancy, Ricky's screen test & waiting for Hollywood, the Hollywood trip, the Europe trip, the Connecticut decision and move. It's a style that is sometimes done today (The Office, How I Met Your Mother, etc) and sometimes not (Modern Family, The Middle, etc). Nothing wrong with having story arcs, that doesn't make it a soap opera.

[Sal]

There's really only two things that I would directly blame Friends for:

1. "Joey", the sequel. Enough said.

2. America's continuing 24/7 obsession with all things Jennifer Aniston.


You could also modify Fallacy #5 (Any guest star who does well on Friends gets their own show) to include the cast itself, who have gone on to do a few sitcoms of their own with varying degrees of success, from the horror that is "Joey" to the minor hit that "Cougar Town" became. Speaking of that rule, I notice the author didn't mention that Charlie Sheen also appeared on the show, so there goes that argument!

Everything else is NBC's fault!

[James]

I totally agree with #4, the assault on the "family hour." Man, I HATED THAT SHOW!!!

[noveel]

Originally Posted by James

I totally agree with #4, the assault on the "family hour." Man, I HATED THAT SHOW!!!

but most families have more than one TV today, the family hour is an outdated concept from the days when families only had 3 or 4 channels and just one TV, families can't even agree on what to watch these days with so many choices