Friends

Friends is a famous US sitcom that ran for 10 seasons spread over 10 years between 1994 and 2004. When the sitcom finally ended in 2004, 266 episodes had been aired. 

Started with virtual unknown actors, the six main leads gained immense popularity as the sitcom progressed episode after episode and season after season. Today Jeniffer Aniston, Courtney Cox, Lisa Kudrow, Matt Leblanc, Mathew Parry and David Schwimmer are well known names in Hollywood.  

I recently watched all the ten seasons on OTT and felt deeply connected with the 6 lead characters having this déjà vu feeling as to why 6 friends had to ultimately call it quits and go their respective ways! And there’s so much trivia around this iconic show – reunion of the protagonists after years, compilation of special moments, talk shows with the main actors, feelings of the actors for each other ( they continue to be best friends more than 2 decades after the last episode was aired) and death of Mathew Parry. 

The premise of the show is simple – friendship is above everything else. Characters have their angularities, ambiguities, oddities – but they are loveable and are always there for each other. The show has humour as its essence, though some of the situations, dialogues and scenes , including live-in arrangements could be too much for the sensibilities of Indian audience. However, there’s no denying that longevity of the show, its freshness and connect with the viewers over a prolonged period is something that our content makers can well learn. Some of the points that I could arrive at towards this end are;

(1) actors enjoyed great bonhomie in as much as they negotiated uniform salaries with the producers

(2) all 6 got equal importance and there were no show stealers

(3) none of the characters had to be changed by resorting to plastic surgery or other such unbelievable things seen in domestic shows 

(4) script always ensured situational humour and never appeared stretched. There were no generational leaps. 

When the show ended, the six actors had become the highest paid TV stars, earning a grand sum of 1 Mio dollar per episode. Thanks to OTT, we now have access to all these iconic shows about which we had only heard.