Friends

For the past ten years or so, a regular feature in the TV review pages of all the broadsheets has been the Friends puff, along the lines of “oh boy, tonight it’s Friends again, and this episode is absolutely a must-see! Monica and Joey get together with Ross but Phoebe doesn’t know and thinks Chandler is with Rachel but then… It all ends hilariously as usual and the laughs are non-stop. Why (oh why) can’t we in Britain produce anything remotely as good as this?” I can’t recall any programme ever receiving so much adulation from the critics.

One explanation for this is that Friends is in fact a brilliant series, and fully deserves all this acclaim. This is easily refuted by the simple expedient of actually watching it. Okay, I may not have made it right through many episodes in full, but I’ve seen enough to judge, and brilliant it’s not. It’s slick, it’s professional, it delivers a guaranteed 4.7 laughs per minute, but it’s horribly smug and vacuous. I’ll admit to a slight prejudice in that I find the Ross character played by David Schwimmer (see, I know the names) completely unbearable. In fact the one episode I would gladly watch all the way through would be “The one where Ross gets the shit kicked out of him”. Also Phoebe, the weird one (kookie? ditzy? screwball? pain-in-the-arse?) is a little, um, hard to take. Come to think of it, I’m not that crazy about Rachel either…

Now the great Aaronovitch spends a whole column singing the praises of this wretched series, and with stunning originality wonders why (oh why) we can’t come up with anything as good in this country. He comes near to the truth here:

An American psychoanalyst of my acquaintance, one of the most intelligent men I know, now speaks exactly like Ross. And I don’t think Ross got it from him. So, if it was all just rubbish, then that says ominous things about society, television, my friend and my daughter.

but fails to draw the correct conclusions.

It’s a common theme that we in the UK think US TV comedy is wonderful, while in the US they think UK TV comedy is wonderful – check out the comments on Amazon.com for the DVDs of series like Blackadder, Red Dwarf, Father Ted, The League of Gentlemen and The Office. I tend to side with the Americans on this one, with The Simpsons as the exception that proves the rule.