Friends Reunion was fascinating but ultimately a slow car crash

Just about everything happens in a few adjacent apartments, and in the Central Perk coffeeshop. The show’s elevator pitch was: “those times when your friends are your family”. That’s maybe never more relevant than during this quarantined, segregated and locked-down year.

At the very least, this brilliant ensemble shows you how to wring as much laughter and soap-operatics out of an indoor life as possible.

So if the original show induces any voltage in you, then Friends: the Reunion on Sky One – the first commercial assembling of the cast since the show’s end in 2004 – would have to be a disaster not to make a connection.

It does, fitfully, and not in the expected places. There’s a historical and even ideological gap that the Reunion show fascinatingly opens up. What were our assumptions and aspirations, from the mid-nineties to the mid-zeroes? How have they set us up for this runaway century?

But there’s also something human, all too human, in watching older celebrities reckon – both emotionally and epidermally – with their younger selves. By the alarming stiffness of their filled, snipped and botoxed faces, we may learn to reckon better with our own ageing. Like all resonant TV hits, Friends was in a complicated dance with the reality of its times. How exactly did a new age masseuse (Phoebe), a nondescript data merchant (Chandler), a cafe waitress (Rachel), a minor academic (Ross), a precarious actor (Joey) and a chef (Monica), earn enough to procure these spacious, big-windowed Manhattan apartments?

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New York’s rent control laws wouldn’t have applied to such young tenants. And when I worked there the 80s and 90s, the tiny rooms of my workaholic colleagues were often fully occupied by their unfolded sofa-beds. So, not much sociological accuracy here. Yet what Friends’ got behaviourally and culturally right was the aspiration of Generations X and Y. They wanted lives where “creativity” and “relationships” were central, a traditional “career” and “status” much less so.

Social scientists also point out that twenty-somethings in the mid-nineties would have grown up in decades where divorce and parental separation was explosively on the rise. Friends almost entirely lacks parental or patriarchal figures, kept well out of the action.

So to watch this show is to witness the starting point for many of our current discussions about lifestyle, work and even politics – particularly about those which the left theorist Paul Mason called the “networked, educated and precarious”. This constituency is currently being fought over by political parties (and corporates) across Europe and America, keen to attract their appetite for authenticity, ethics and aesthetics. Going by the series’ continuing popularity on streaming services, Friends is providing our current precariat with nourishing fantasies about their bohemian viability in the big city. Even as they still languish with their parents, or survive in their box in a multi-occupancy flat, jumping between short-term contracts.

Yet while Friends may still be clicking with wired-up younger generations, its has another particular relationship with reality which the young and woke wouldn’t check for – and which has long been regarded as wrong.

Living in a New York which (even in the mid-90s) was 60% black and brown, it’s a problem how few people of colour (other than white) moved in the world of Friends. Indeed, there’s an Oprah Winfrey interview clip from 1995, where she pointedly asks the ensemble whether they’d consider “getting a black friend… maybe I should come visit”.

In the Friends Reunion show, a galaxy of celebrities are spun around the often bemused-looking original cast – Justin Bieber dressed as a potato, Cindy Crawford in Ross’ leather trousers, Lady Gaga singing Phoebe’s Smelly Cat, and others. However, they manage to feature not one black face.

There’s an interesting sequence in Thursday’s show, involving some carefully-picked global villagers (including the Birmingham-born activist Malala and the South Korean boyband BTS, but also superfans from Ghana, India, Japan and Russia). They all enthuse about how comforting and relatable the show was. beaming its predictable characters into otherwise unstable and exploited lives.

That’s a clever way to divert from Friends’ essential ethnic problem – its baseline assumption that white urban folks will naturally hang together, seeking homogeneity beneath the glittery creativity of their lives. That feels very far from our current world – and just as far from a world you’d want to live in.

Friends’ did do some things with great style. I loved its aura of classic era Hollywood slapstick and repartee. The makers of the show had a Broadway and stage background, so the repartee in the sit-com often crackled like the scripts of Ben Hecht or the lyrics of Cole Porter. My favourite exponent was Matthew Perry’s Chandler Bing (the very name drops the hint, drawing from two classic Hollywood era icons, Raymond and Crosby). If you know the show, then you can imagine the impact of this line uttered by Chandler, as Joey delivers yet one of his more meandering dumb-ass soliloquies: “Okay you have to stop the Q-tip when there’s resistance.”

Again, our enlightened times shine an X-ray through Chandler’s character, showing up his low-key but consistent homophobia (the episode where he recoils from his father’s trans identity, played by Kathleen Turner, is especially primitive viewing).

But I was actually looking forward to seeing Matthew Perry in the Reunion show. I wanted him to hold up his fire shield of irony against the bonfire of vanities around him. (Well-paid to do so, of course: they are all receiving a $2m fee for their participation.)Instead, and poignantly, Chandler/Matthew looked hunted and haunted throughout the production. A brief look at Perry’s biography reveals a churning sea of alcoholism, painkiller addiction and other self-injuries of despair.

It seems to have beached him onto this show in a state of exhaustion. Perry stares stonily ahead at the heart of the forced gaiety, slightly slurred in all of his contributions. He was either unable, or unwilling, to be as manically – sometimes animatronically – positive as his co-workers.

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And as you were pulled into the deep melancholy of his face - which to my mind was often deliberately defocussed and backgrounded by the editors – Perry would deliver something that the bumptious host, James Corden, could never elicit.

“At least to me, I felt like I was going to die if the audience didn’t laugh,” he says at one point. “It’s not healthy for sure but I would sometimes say a line and they wouldn’t laugh and I would sweat and just go into convulsions if I didn’t get the laugh I was supposed to get. I would freak out.”

At another point Perry invokes the whistling, frigid social expanse of the Hollywood party, and the joyful relief when he found another cast-member at one of them. “That would be it, you’d be stuck to them the whole night, no one else was relevant.”

It would be untrue to cast Perry as the only member of the ensemble bringing some grit and candour to the Reunion. At 57, Lisa Kudrow is manifestly embarrassed by her “gloopy” character Phoebe. However, some of them still caught up in the game of playing up their own icons. Schwimmer/Ross is still supercilious, Cox/Monica is still manically shrieking, Aniston/Rachel is still the tearful princess.

Ultimately, the Friends Reunion was a car-crash – but a fascinating, slow-motion one, revealing a lot about our times, and ourselves.

Friends: The Reunion is available on catch-up at Sky One.