But these six actors working together, on anything, on nothing - it was the highlight of many a person’s week. The writers could engineer plots for the directors to orchestrate. That thereness was the show’s intangible hook. The theme song didn’t lie: They really were there for each other, punch lines and all. Income turns those three against the other three, until Monica loses her job and Joey valiantly offers to pay for her $4 coffee - with Chandler’s money. Everybody goes out for a nice dinner to celebrate Monica’s promotion, and Phoebe, Joey and Rachel order the cheapest items on the menu, then balk at evenly dividing the bill.
Not so on “Friends.” Matters of behavior and economic inequality only seemed to bring them together. But on “Seinfeld,” the city and the characters’ righteous belief in their own norms spurred them on to increasingly lunatic misanthropy. And many an early episode involved defending social etiquette (“Those are not the rules!” Ross barks at a foe in a laundromat) and trying out twisted dating schemes (Monica and Joey try to bust up a couple in order to have the newly single partners for themselves). They, too, were a white cohort living in New York City (the West Village rather than Seinfeld’s Upper West Side). Of course, the friends started out with a touch of the Jerrys. “The genius of “Seinfeld” (and “The Simpsons,” too) has everything to do with the “com” arising from the “sit.” What trouble will Jerry and the gang instigate? Whether you’re watching an episode for the first time or the 27th, the inciting premise is a major element of the pleasure. “Friends” actually is enormously easy to watch. (Do you use the number keys on your remote? I’ll bet you don’t even have a remote at this point.)īut, really, it’s simplicity. That means if you’re a chronologist like me, the five-channel trip from NY1 - past the local news, TNT and “The Simpsons” - always terminates at Chandler, Joey, Monica, Phoebe, Rachel and Ross. “Friends” debuted on NBC in the fall of 1994, ran for an entire decade, typically had around 25 to 30 million viewers a week (sometimes many more) and now airs in Nickelodeon’s Nick Nite block, which my cable conglomerate has stationed near the top of the channel pyramid.