The Friends reunion was the very best of America as it used to be: hokey and warm

It is just a TV show, and that’s why making such an enormous fuss about it is one of the most American things it’s possible to do. The Friends reunion, which aired in Australia on Thursday, was billed as not just a show, but a television event.

Its producers hired a popular talk show host to run it (James Corden). It included a fashion runway, and cameos from Lady Gaga, Cindy Crawford, Tom Selleck and Ross and Monica’s parents.

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The six stars of the show were reportedly paid $2.5 million each to appear on the reunion, which amounted to about one and a three-quarter hours of television.

They were applauded onto the stage, in front of a live audience, like they had just rescued a soccer team of Thai children from a cave.

Americans treat their celebrities like Nobel prize winners, and their TV shows like actual friends.

They pay them much more than is decent.

That’s why the Friends reunion, which was nostalgic, warm and utterly over the top, was so blissfully American. It was a reminder of all the wonderful qualities of the United States, before its brand evolved, in the 17 years since Friends ended, into chaotic end-stage democracy/possible failed state.

The Friends reunion was a nice reminder of a time when America seemed to represent geniality and hokeyness, wisecracks and togetherness, rather than racist police and an orange president with no fidelity to democracy.

Visiting the world of Friends again felt like burrowing under the doona, a small comfort that is easily achieved. Yes, it was kind of awkward.

The show cut between interviews with the creators David Crane and Marta Kaufmann, round-the-couch chats with cast members, an on-set quiz with the stars about details from the show, and free-flowing reminiscences between the cast as they wandered around the old set. It really did feel like visiting a beloved old home, knowing you could never move back in, and never have those times back.

Friends: The Reunion ... James Corden with Jennifer Aniston, Courteney Cox, Matthew Perry, Lisa Kudrow, David Schwimmer and Matt LeBlanc. Credit: Warner Bros

The stars themselves had either aged or showed the confronting signs of their extreme efforts not to age. But once again, that’s Hollywood.

There was no mention of the darker stuff that’s transpired since the show ended – the divorces and the drug addictions. As Crane said, Friends is “about that time in your life when your friends were your family”.

Nobody wants to see what happens after, when grown-up problems and the compromises of mid-life steal onto the empty stage.

Watching the show I was struck anew by the completeness of the world it created. It was mostly shot between three sets (Monica’s apartment, Chandler and Joey’s apartment, the Central Perk cafe) which were obviously built on a soundstage in Los Angeles, thousands of kilometres from the New York the show sought to portray. There were rarely any street scenes.

Unlike its fellow 90s-to-noughties nostalgia piece Sex and the City, Friends was a show pretending to be set in New York, rather than a show where the city became an extra character, directing storylines.

Perhaps that’s what gave Friends its universality and its innate friendliness – it was a place where nothing too bad ever happened, and where no one ever tried to make you think, but they did make you laugh consistently.

The physical comedy of the show was of the best American tradition, feel-good laughs with no edge to them. One of the funniest scenes of the old show excerpted was of Ross, Chandler and Rachel trying to get a large couch up a poky stairwell, with Ross shouting increasingly frantic instructions. Anyone who has ever moved out of home has experienced some version of this scene.

Watching with 2021 eyes, the lack of cast diversity is as glaring as it is in Sex and the City, which, viewed with 2021 eyes, is about over-privileged white women obsessed with men, who speak about sex constantly but are horrified when one of their number (Miranda) breastfeeds openly.

The Friends reunion attempts to redress its anglo-centricity obliquely, by airing interviews with fans from Zambia and India, who earnestly talk about how Friends helped them through bereavement and loneliness.

Even Nobel Peace Prize winner Malala Yousafzai appears to talk about how she watches it happily with her bestie. This is truly the American dream, and I mean that sincerely – the Taliban tried to kill her for attending school; now she snuggles in her PJs with a girlfriend, watching one of America’s most popular exports.

Yes, it’s all a little Oprah-esque and sappy, but it’s believable. Light, comic television can soothe like little else, when the time is right.

What are we to make of this noughties nostalgia?

Sex and the City will be back soon, in a dramatised form, and given the abject egregiousness of the second Sex and the City movie, we can have no great hopes for it. Yet still, many of us will watch it.

Heartbreak High is being remade in Australia. In the US, The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air is getting rebooted. The Office and ER have filmed reunion episodes.

Alongside the nostalgia is a flowering of television as an art form, powered by disruptive streaming services. The new generation of television is gloriously diverse in race, gender and sexuality, and sometimes more political in its themes.

Much of the best of it still comes from the US. It is the only country that could pull off a scene in which Lady Gaga covers Smelly Cat, the ridiculous original song that Phoebe sings as she busks in the subway, accompanied by Lisa Kudrow (who played Phoebe), and jazzed up by the arrival of a gospel choir which appears on set.

For no apparent reason except: because it’s possible.

Long may it prosper.

Twitter: @JacquelineMaley

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