Since the finale of "Friends" has been declared a national day of mourning, I am trying to whip up an appropriately solemn sense of loss. If NBC can charge up to 2 million bucks for 30-second ad segments, there must be something more going on than the hope that the cast's Special Bond will survive, along with Joey's spinoff. After all, how nostalgic will we feel when "Fear Factor" or "I Want a Famous Face" eventually die their well-deserved deaths?
Here's a reason to miss "Friends": nostalgie de la boom. Through "Friends" we could keep on living the good life of careless Clinton-era prosperity. One of the silliest wish-fulfillment fantasies of "Friends" was that a group of professionally average (but unusually good-looking) people in New York in their mid-thirties could have plenty of leisure time, along with plenty of money, to hang out and obsess about their relationships rather than just work all the time -- which is what people here really do.
In the mid-1990s, when the show began, the city's workaholism and materialism was in overdrive, fueled by the dot-com heyday. The defining mood of that time was set by an iconic New Yorker cartoon, by Bob Mankoff, that was attached to every upwardly mobile fridge. It featured a stressed looking man on the phone, his appointment book open, saying, "No, Thursday's out. How about never -- is never good for you?"
None of the "Friends" characters worked for a dot-com company, but the ethos of that time framed the mood of the show. Okay, not the sleepless nights of an Internet start-up, but the assumption of a groovy Silicon Valley working environment, where the staff hangs around the water cooler exchanging creativity, swapping wisecracks and playing video games; the faith in spinning a stock-option fortune like so much digital cotton candy without hurting a soul; the you-don't-have-to-wear-a-suit era of T-shirt people with gentle, unthreatening hair who ended up on the cover of Fortune worth a billion dollars -- it all seems so long ago. Right now the Google IPO is bringing the memories flooding back. For the past week, hard-charging business types have been talking sentimentally about Google like old flower children going on about Woodstock. But they know Google is a blip, an anomaly -- a mellow acid flashback, not the dawn of a new era.
After 9/11, when the jobs disappeared, Work not Play became the fantasy of choice. Hence the popularity of "The Apprentice," with its sharklike young competitors selling each other out to get ahead. Gordon Gekko is back. Process rules. When was the last time employees felt as primal as they do on "The Apprentice" about their place of work? Between downsizing, outsourcing, conglomeratizing a mysterious, volatile economy, business life today is complex and insecure. You can't see around the corners. Actual, measurable tasks and fast feedback are disappearing in the culture of layers, the filters of perception. In real life, an assistant brand manager working in the information echelon of the service economy rarely feels the thrill of traction, the buoyancy and verve that once made American business intoxicating.
"The Apprentice" is already a nostalgia piece as much as "Friends." Embodied by the fascination of the Donald's retro-custard hair, it's an ode to the days before the PowerPointification of America. Trump, or perhaps one should say the Trump figure Trump plays on TV, is as much a crazy fantasy for management as for employees. A boss man who can bark "You're fired" without copious papering of the files, without sweaty hours with his human resources director, without even sweatier hours with his communications guru? Dream on. He'd have hostile workplace environment suits up the wazoo.
"Friends" reflects the boom years, too, with its characters' total lack of interest in what's going on in the world. They're focused purely on themselves and each other. Even after 9/11, "Friends" managed to keep coasting along mainly by ignoring the event altogether, pretty much as "Sex and the City" did. Archie Bunker and Meathead used to argue about Vietnam and Richard Nixon on "All in the Family," but no one on "Friends" ever argued about weapons of mass destruction or what to do about Iraq. Politically, the "Friends" characters exuded a vague undertow of social liberalism. It was safe to assume that they were pro-choice, that they didn't condemn premarital sex out of hand (that one we could definitely assume) and that they subscribed to the pleasantly PC view that a family can be assembled from whatever is to hand -- in this case, your friends. The world of this show in its 10th year still seems so communitarian and mild it's like a different planet from the current bifurcated America of two irreconcilable political solitudes, right versus left, where eyes bulge and voices rise whenever the holders of opposite views meet by mistake.
A TV executive in Los Angeles who has been screening next season's crop of pilots tells me he's convinced that the next generation of sitcoms can succeed only if their creators discover a way to tap into the post-9/11 zeitgeist of fear and anxiety with a new kind of comedy. "We haven't found a way in the sitcom form to joke about airport security or terrorism or outsourcing yet," he said. "But somebody will."
Good luck. Surfing between images of torture and bulletins of death, we're going to be glad for the reruns of "Friends."
©2004, Tina Brown
