It had to happen eventually. After ten seasons of the “I’ll Be There for You” theme song, a couple of hundred episodes and enough coffee to set the hardest heart aflutter with caffeine overload, Friends had its grand finale last night. Even with the truly monstrous level of hype with which NBC flogged the upcoming show for weeks, we all knew this particular series could not possibly end on an unhappy note, and we were not disappointed. (Note: If you missed it, here come some spoilers, so you may want to skip this until you do see it. If you did see it, or if you didn’t and don’t care, read on.)
To recap: Monica and Chandler became the proud parents of twins via adoption and headed to their new life in Westchester, Phoebe and her new husband Mike resolved to have kids of their own, and Ross and Rachel finally ended up together. (He really was her lobster after all.) Even Gunther, after pining away for Rachel for most of the series, finally confessed his love only to be shot down. Only Joey did not have a life-changing event in the finale, but take heart -- a spinoff in which he moves to Los Angeles is coming this fall.
Friends gave us quite a few memorable moments over its ten-year run. Ross gave away his first ex-wife when she married her girlfriend in a ceremony officiated by Newt Gingrich’s sister, drove off the second when he mistakenly said Rachel’s name during the ceremony, and then divorced the third one (Rachel herself) after a drunken Las Vegas wedding. Chandler and Monica fell in love, scrambled to hide their relationship, brought it out into the open, got married, dealt with infertility and decided to adopt. (To which one of my son’s favorite babysitters, who was herself adopted, cheered, “Adoption rules!”)
Joey played a doctor on Days of Our Lives until the writers killed him off by dropping him down an elevator shaft, got the lead in a horrendously bad detective show where his sidekick was a robot, and along the way slept with every woman in sight. Rachel became a high-powered fashion executive, hired a hunky assistant solely for his looks (it seems the sexual harassment rules of the '90s never quite found their way into her office), and had a daughter out of wedlock. Phoebe became the surrogate mother for her brother’s triplets, made a music video, and tried to seduce Chandler, all while having the same delightfully ditzy presence through the years.
Me, I’m still wondering how everyone was able to afford those big Manhattan apartments while working as...well, nothing, apparently, as everyone always had time to hang out in a coffee shop in the middle of the day.
The show mirrored trends in the entertainment industry, not always for the better. As TV turned to the anorexic look, Rachel and Monica both changed from perfectly attractive and curvy women who were constantly inundated with men to shrill, bony stick figures who couldn’t get arrested. The allegedly Jewish characters of Ross and Monica always had Christmas trees everywhere with an occasional menorah or Jewish star barely visible in the background. Why couldn’t we see an episode where Ross takes his son Ben to synagogue or Monica has everyone over for a Passover Seder? (Ross did, however, dress up as the “Holiday Armadillo” to teach Ben about Chanukah.)
But, in the end, when you got right down to it, Friends was about six people who always stuck it out through thick and thin, navigating plot points both reasonable and ridiculous, uttering jokes ranging from classic gags to the occasional clunker. And as much as we wanted to smack them from time to time, they ended up being just regular people, with neuroses and bizarre personalities just like everyone else.
So let’s raise a cup of our favorite coffee to Friends. As long as it lives on in syndication, continuing to make the show’s creators and stars filthy rich, it will continue to be part of television history. And I still want to know if that orange couch from Central Perk will go to the Smithsonian.
