Thinking about Friends (1994-2004) and how the mid-90s were like the last point it woulda made sense for a wannabe actor to settle in New York

Thinking, as always, about the 90s, Seinfeld, and Friends

Seinfeld specifically was a back-to-the city premise – it’s a place where clever adults always have something to talk about – and an exposition of Larry David’s vision of secular Judaism as a model of urbanity – rabbinically arguing, testing, hair-splitting over everyday life, with Festivus as a feast of the Ordeal of Civilization, where we drop our social facades (airing of grievances) and engage in primal contest (feats of strength)

Friends still the city as setting for the new life stage it’s about

I talk about how Ross is supposed to come off as behind the times, the point is that he never intended to live this life, he expected to be married in the suburbs until his wife broke off their engagement (citing a newly realized lesbianism, which means a 90s sensibility of seeking your true self is the thing that disrupted his happy ending, but also that he really needs to develop a better sense of who would be a good match for him)

Rachel’s marriage was more intended for her than by her, in rejecting it she becomes the 90s spirit of seeking your true self as a disruptive force. Which is what powers the Ross/Rachel central spine, ending, as comedies must, with a wedding.

But afer the curtain falls, once they don’t need a stream of new people to date how long do the married Ross and Rachel stay in Manhattan? Joey went to LA, right, (I guess Mad About You was the married-having-kids version of the back to the city show)

And what about the show has to be in Manhattan? The offscreen recurring joke guy they can see naked in his apartment in the next building? I suppose even a coffee shop hosting uh, coffeehouse musicians was pretty novel in the early 90s. (Cappuccino in wide cups used to have some of the symbolic significance lattes do now but calling back the beatniks, see also Mike Meyers’ So I Married An Axe Murderer)

I’ve talked before and… that’s the second post today I know I made but can’t find… here! about HIMYM as the updated successor and how Friends’ arc is Ross gets engaged like three times by his early 30s and finally it sticks, Ted Mosby’s is he realized one of his friends was his real soulmate but by the time they get through all their preliminary stuff they’re 50

So maybe “high maintenance” did never leave. But apparently it really started with When Harry Met Sally?

This is a good piece. It’s a “looking back on previous decades’ pop culture, it wasn’t that ‘19 feminist!” piece but with actual insight to it.

Something that needs pointing out, if your two examples of an assertively classifying, questioning man in late ‘80s pop culture are Seinfeld and the Nora Ephron/Billy Crystal/Rob Reiner-crafted character of Harry Burns, is that this is a specifically New York Jewish boomer type

Born maybe still early enough to get a splash of working class Noo Yawk, sandlot baseball and all, but mostly heir to a psychoanalytic culture that valued mastery through self-knowledge, self-knowledge through probing questions

And I’m realizing, by the late ‘80s that was kind of what was left of White urban culture. Well, South Boston. Like you watch the ‘66 Adam West Batman and its picture of Gotham as continuous with small town whitebread culture, just bigger, it would have been mindboggling from the perspective of 1989. Gotham City in ‘89 was a Tim Burton nightmare realm.

Probably more and more true every day now, though, as the rich whites move back to the cities. But I’m realizing how much that’s the point, this stuff was a vision of urbanity for an increasingly tired-of-suburbia White America. “Look, life in cities isn’t tenements and mugging, it’s urbane wit”, Harry and Seinfeld said.

And they invited people back into the cities, and modeled how they should act - as post-religious, post-Freudian, postmodern post-any grand narrative college-educated Jews. Like, Friends, the huge ‘90s back-to-the-city sitcom, one of the things is the guy who gets through life on a cloud of cynical, self-deprecating “Jewish” humor is Chandler Bing, the gentile office guy, to the point that Phoebe had just been assuming he was the whole time.

Kinda was the world I expected to inherit tbh

me: From the debut of Friends in 1994 to the finale of How I Met Your Mother in 2014, their popularity suggested we at least had a stable consensus on what an idealized modern life course *should* be: move to the city, fall in with a “tribe” of friends who form the core of your social life. Serially date a lot of people who you ultimately don’t make a good pairing with, but from that develop the ability to correctly identify who you DO make a good pair with, preparing you to make a lasting soulmate match. Likely this is a member of your tribe, if only for the same reason that high schoolers tend to date people from the same school - they’re the ones around that know you.
also me: Stable consensus, huh?
me: Excuse me?
also me: By the end of Friends the 34-year-old Ross had seen three different women marry him, the finale is that his soulmate/babymama turns down a career move to stay with him, which resolves both their character issues as established in 1994: HER reluctance to commit to a partner at the expense of chasing some dream of self-fulfillment and HIS frustration that women won’t commit to him, instead chasing some dream of self-fulfillment.
also me: Now the end of HIMYM, by contrast, Ted gives up on the soulmate he’s been orbiting for several years and takes the good-enough-and-available option out of a sense that it’s getting time for him to take the next step on his bourgeois life course.
also me: But that was just the fakeout ending, the real ending is that the soulmate gives him a chance, once she’s a 50-year-old lonely careerist who’s done with her multi-year phase of sleeping with the manipulative scumbag of the friend group.
me: ...
also me: Had you not noticed that?

People act like Ross “I just want to marry a girl and be soulmates forever” Geller was some sort of anachronistic throwback, but Phoebe “I am both the reaction to and continuation of my WASP New Ager parents” Buffay was far more period-bound