When Jennifer Aniston and David Schwimmer re-read the scene of Ross and Rachel’s first kiss (Season 2, “The One Where Ross Finds Out”, 1995) during yesterday’s Friends: The Reunion, I thought my heart might explode.
Because of the weight of that defining moment in a will-they-won’t-they for the ages. Because Aniston and Schwimmer had just revealed that during those early seasons they had each been “crushing hard” on one another but were always in other relationships – and that Aniston had bemoaned that her first kiss with Schwimmer would be in front of a camera. Because Aniston didn’t need to look down at her script to remember the lines.
It was a gift to fans, shed new light on a legend, and their own reverence for it told us that this series, which billions of us treasure and keep alive, decades later, is still just as important to them, too. Obviously, I cried.
Friends, for me and my generation and maybe yours, is more than a sitcom. It shaped the way we speak, dress, laugh, love. It changed the comedy that came after it, transformed the nature of celebrity, provided a blueprint for what we expected from relationships, from friendships, from adulthood. It is as ubiquitous now as it was in the 90s – a place to go for comfort, safety, joy, solace and company. It is part of the scaffolding of our cultural and social life.
A long time ago, I discarded my childish hopes of a reunion. It would be too easy to get wrong – a “where are they now” episode would always have been heartbreakingly doomed and further relegate the show to history, and forcing the cast to reminisce too soon might have been a chore as they forged their “solo” careers (or painted them as has-beens, desperately hung up on the past).
Seventeen years, it would appear, is an arbitrary gap but just the right amount of time to leave before returning. This two-hour special caught them long down their splintered paths and at an age when Aniston, Schwimmer, Courteney Cox, Matthew Perry, Lisa Kudrow and Matt Le Blanc – together in public for the first time since the finale – could celebrate Friends’ legacy and all that they owe to it.
Oh, it was a love-in: overpolished, hyper-American in its sincerity and full of saccharine filler and daft segments (I did not need to see Lady Gaga perform “Smelly Cat” and will try to erase Cara Delevingne’s sashay as the Holiday Armadillo from my memory).
And in the interviews, there was not much trivia I had not already committed to memory – except that Cox always kept a script in the sink and wrote Monica’s lines on the apples in the fruit bowl or on the kitchen table – when Matt Le Blanc noticed, while filming, she told him to “mind your business”, so he rubbed them off while she wasn’t looking.
Or that Janice’s iconic cackle was created as a way for Maggie Wheeler to disguise her real-life corpsing during her scenes with Perry. The only hint at bracing honesty came when he, the most reserved of the group and the one for whom celebrity took its gravest toll (he has suffered addiction and alcohol issues), said he thought he would die when he didn’t get a laugh. “I would freak out. I felt like that every single night.”
But the reunion’s power came in the simplest moments. When pacing the old apartment sets weeping – “it’s worse than you imagine” said Aniston, the teariest – or trading quotes and stories and memories as if the audience was not there, the chemistry between the six was still magical. Constantly, they squealed and hugged and grabbed each other.
Their dynamic was not the one we recognise from the show, but the real, private one they shared as six twenty-somethings who grew up together, inseparable for a decade as their youth and lives grew consumed by a job and a kind of fame only they could understand.
Their natural, unrehearsed displays of emotion were profoundly moving when they came – authentic and gentle against all the gimmick and gloss. “At my age, to say ‘floopy’? Stop. You have to grow up!” said Kudrow, when asked if she would ever play Phoebe again. This show proved the group had left Friends behind, but not each other. After 2004, when it was over, a choked-up Perry said, close to the end, “if one of us bumped into each other, that was it. You sat with the person all night long… You had met someone special to you… That’s just the way it is.”