Friends is a wonderful well established comedy series aired on star world.The show runs for 25 minutes and is based on 6 twenty-something city based friends and their lives and loves. Each character is different and brings their own personality to the show resulting in a good blend of camaraderie and fun, and yet at the same time, an incredible bond of friendship and some very moving moments. My husband loves to watch this because it makes him laugh, especially the antics of Joey and Chandler. I laugh too, but there is something very special about this show, that I can only describe as giving you that feel-good factor but sometimes producing the odd tear or two. It’s wacky, great fun and yet is a little bit more too, with the added unusual bonus of an American comedy appealing to a worldwide audience.
The characters are all very easy to love, and each has their own very strong and individual personality. Monica is obsessed with cleanliness and being the absolute best at everything. This girl takes competitiveness to a new dimension! But despite her sometimes very odd compulsive behaviour, she has great warmth and is a source of advice and support for her good friends. The last two series of the show concentrated on her developing relationship with Chandler, another of the Friends. Witty, always ready with a joke and master of the one-liner, he is forever being mistaken as gay and has spent much of his later life shying away from commitment and his parents who embarrass him dreadfully; his father is gay and dresses in women’s clothing, his mother a selfish egomaniac! Despite Chandler’s fears and misgivings, and the inevitable panic as his wedding to Monica approached, the two did finally do the deed in the last episode of the show and we wait for the new series to watch them embark on married life together with all the fun and strife the new union is sure to bring.
Then there’s Joey, loveable, Italian and downright dim at times struggling to be an actor. Stupid is his middle name, and yet you can’t help but love him as one of the warmest characters and he is a huge hit with the ladies, they just can’t resist his Italian charm and good looks. Then Phoebe, the wacky blonde one, sings songs about smelly cats and has an opinion on everything! Very much obsessed with the ‘other world’ and was once convinced her late mother had returned as a cat!
Rachel is your typical beautiful spoilt rich kid turned good, struggling to make a career for herself and find her own way in the world without constant hand-outs from Daddy. Her on/off relationship with Ross made the program as far as I’m concerned in the earlier series, the ‘will they, won’t they’ ongoing saga certainly made for compulsive viewing! Ross, Monica’s brother, the ’nerd’ of the friends and Chandler’s former college roommate, but despite this has managed to marry three times. His first wife turned out to be a lesbian, his second wife, an English girl, left him on the day of the wedding when he mentioned Rachel’s name during the service and his third bride? None other than Rachel on a drunken weekend in Las Vegas! The wedding was quickly annulled although Ross still carries (and will always carry) a torch for his first love Rachel!
The show is still very funny, and still offers something for everyone. But as time goes on, we see the storylines becoming more bland, and the characters losing their initial appeal. Things have never been as good since the demise of the on/off relationship between Ross and Rachel, which had you gripped to your seats and desperately wanting more. The whole show seems to becoming more jaded and predictable with each new episode, with Joey and Phoebe continuing to provide the hi-jinx, and Chandler and Monica the high drama and emotion. Rachel’s role in the show seems to be losing it’s defining edge and the whole thing is now becoming very flat. Is it time for the series to come to its natural end I wonder? Time will tell….