As the year 2019 comes to an end, it’s time for us proud Netflix lovers to make a survey of the best tv-series that we have seen during these past 365 days, and inevitably realize that there are so many shows we haven’t watched yet, and so many good ones that have been on our watch-list for ages that we still haven’t given a try. However, there is always that solid, highly-bingeable series which we just can’t get enough of despite knowing all the dialogues by heart , and – yes – I am talking about Friends. 2019 has been an interesting year indeed for Friends fans. On September 19, this iconic sitcom hit its 25th anniversary, which was celebrated with Friends pop-up stores in New York and Boston. On top of that, on October 15 Jennifer Aniston finally gave in to the numerous requests of us passionate Friends fans (thanks Jen, really appreciate it) and made an Instagram account for the first time, breaking the Guinness world record for the fastest time to reach one million followers. To tease her fans even more, her first post was a picture of the cast of Friends, finally all together…and, if that wasn’t enough to give fans a heart attack, Aniston has recently revealed on The Ellen Show that the cast is ‘working on something’. This, more than ever, brings back the question: will Friends have the long-awaited and asked for reunion?
The Friends reunion would fit in perfectly with the trend of ‘cinematographic panorama’ of the last few years. To explain why, I will take Disney as an example: if the decade between 1989 and 1999 was arguably the ‘Disney Renaissance’ era, we could say that now we are living in a ‘Disney remakes’ era. In fact, Disney seems to be producing sequels on top of other sequels, and continuous live actions of the Classics we loved as children, such as Aladdin, Beauty and the Beast, The Little Mermaid and so on. Why are these revisited and recycled ideas still so popular? Certainly, the audience knows these films are just surrogates of their favourite classics, they know that they will never be as good as the originals, but they go watch them anyway. How is that so? Simply because what is exploited to all its possibilities here is the nostalgia effect. Disney is not the only company putting this into action, others have realized the potential of the nostalgia effect too, and as a consequence a remake of iconic series Gossip Girl is in the works, along with Lizzie McGuire, High School Musical and more.
So why not add a Friends reboot to the list? The problem with these remakes is that they always leave someone highly disappointed and are doomed to never fully satisfy even the most dedicated of audiences, simply because they are never going to be quite the same as the originals. Likewise, long-term fans of Friends will inevitably be disappointed because the Rachel, Ross, Joey, Chandler, Monica and Phoebe they loved and laughed with would not be the same if a reunion was made now. They would be followed around their lives as middle-aged adults, burdened by the responsibilities of their jobs and families, very far from the happy and care-free period in their 20s when they used to live next to each other’s doors and spy on ‘ugly naked guy’ at the window. Fans want a remake so badly (not going to lie, I want it too) because they miss watching these guys’ stories and would love to have a tiny bit of that back when a rewatch just is not enough. What they don’t understand fully is that that period of our friends’ lives is over – and can never come back. Even if it did, the show would not be quite the same, the characters would feel like shells of their former selves, appealing only to maybe to a more adult audience.
If you still don’t believe this, then it is worth considering how the final season has already foreshadowed this, leaving us with a complete alteration of the dynamics we had been following for ten seasons: Chandler and Monica are probably raising their own family outside the vibrant New York’s city centre, which was the setting of all the friends’ adventures. Ross and Rachel and Mike and Phoebe are possibly doing the same thing, and Joey who couldn’t be further from his former best friends, off to California to pursue his career, as the series Joey reveals. Matt LeBlanc himself has commented in these exact terms, by saying: “People want to know what happened to them. But it was about a finite period in a person’s life after college, before you settle down and start a family. To go back and revisit all these years later, well I don’t know what the story would be now. They would all have moved on from that period so it just wouldn’t be the same.”
After all, it is undeniable that the success of this iconic sitcom is due to the fact that it’s unique; a single, precious product fixed in its own time, and for this reason it has preserved its unique quality as it has never been revisited (yet…). Thus, surrendering our nostalgia of the good old times, when we cried and we laughed along with our favourite friends, to make way for a new show, would simply sacrifice the series by means of selling it to the current tendency to commercialize and serialize everything. A remake would take away Friends uniqueness and originality as a single work of art, and throw it on the market to be copied, remade, and revisioned over and over again. It would would lose this quality as the sitcom and become just one on the endless lists of the freshly baked, nostalgia-effect leveraging revisitations. Even if the original cast was to be involved in the remake, it would still remain an attempt to recreate the qualities of the original, as the members of the cast themselves have stated in various interviews. Therefore, we very much agree with Matthew Perry when he says: “The thing is: we ended on such a high. We can’t beat it. Why would we go and do it again?”
Why would someone want to change something that ended on such good terms? Fans just assume that a remake of Friends would be as good and funny as the original because, I mean, it’s Friends that we’re talking about, but the possibility that a remake could actually spoil the beautiful ending should be considered. What if one of our favourite characters died, or Chandler and Monica got divorced or, for example, Rachel ended up abandoning her family after all to pursue her career abroad a couple of years on from the finale? We have talked about how the dynamics have completely changed and a sequel would not be the same as the original Friends, making a darker ending like this plausible, if not obvious, since the characters would now be adults dealing with more serious problems than the ones they were dealing with when we were watching them in their 20s.
The only option this whole reunion thing leaves us with is creating something new within the old; a good and original idea could be that of following the lives of the friends’ children, Ben, Emma, the twins and Phoebe and Mike’s possible children (so we could find out if they actually had any in the end, too). It would be fun to see them going through the same things their parents went through, experiencing crushes in college like the massive one Ross had for Rachel, or falling in love with their best friends just like Chandler and Monica. In some ways, it would be like seeing our friends reborn, living the same events again through their children. It would also give us the opportunity to see our friends interact with their children with the second generation reflecting their parents, maintaining similar attitudes and behaviours and similar inside jokes to the ones we loved so much. Nobody knows what could happen, but what is certain is that Friends fans will for sure watch whatever ‘something’ the cast is working on regardless being in favour or against a sequel.
