US TV: Life begins as finale credits roll :: Namibia Internet Gateway cc ::

Articles: US TV: Life begins as finale credits roll

Posted by admin on Monday, May 10, 2004 - 06:33 AM

On Thursday, the Friends disbanded to other homes, to other lives, to other relationships. Ultimately, that should have been a relief.
Over the past decade, in 22-minute stretches, these characters strived to embody the young American adult, carrying a huge cultural weight on their shoulders. It was a tiresome - and increasingly embarrassing - burden. For years, Friends has suffered from a tension that often crops up on long-running hit series. The writers come up with the lines and storylines, but the performers get all the credit, so eventually, you see scripts pushing characters in retributive, ridiculous directions. Ross, for example, had a rough bout with a spray-tan booth and struggled to fit into leather pants. Monica is monomaniacal about cleaning and winning, while pretty woman Rachel routinely gets dumped and downgraded in spite of her looks. As they cracked on Chandler's bitterness, Phoebe's flakiness, Joey's cluelessness, the scribes took the quirks of the Central Perk Six to their cruellest limits. More importantly, the group was forced to stay together longer than it should have. The show's premise was that 20-somethings think of their friends as family. But even the creators of the series acknowledged that its success depended on the ability of each friend to grow. Yes, they turned 30, some got married and some had kids. But only the finale allowed them to outgrow each other and the ties that bound them to singledom. NBC kept Friends around not because it was fascinating television but because it was familiar. Viewers approached the last season and the finale as their reward for having hung in there, for keeping the book open on what would become of this bunch. Still, the last episode - which ended with a surprise extra baby for adoptive parents Chandler and Monica, and a not-so-surprise rekindling of Ross's and Rachel's romance - was destined to disappoint. Hit series such as Friends never end like good novels, with subtle grace notes and a little elegy. They don't even end like hit movies, with satisfying sunset shots or fades to black. The impulse for all these shows is to destroy what they have created. The ghastly Seinfeld finale involved a trial with testimony from supporting characters whom Jerry, Elaine, George and Kramer had offended, showing just how dysfunctional, even malevolent, the quartet had been. The Sex and the City finale was full of treacle and yuck, with Carrie Bradshaw dangled as a coquettish prize between sugar daddies. Instead of the one who had just begun to ignore her, she chose the one who had ignored her all along - another sad amplification of bad old ways substituting for the start of something new. The Friends ending fell into a similar trap. Rachel and Ross have too long been the show's centre, with the writers squeezing and yanking their love story like toffee. Just like Carrie, Rachel was tempted to an unpredictable fate in Paris, but still attached to her old life and her old flame. It would be more realistic if Ross and Rachel had parted ways long ago. Friends opened with Monica's first-date sex conquest and was supposed to show us city-dwelling, serial monogamists. But this was city life for country folk - an ersatz way to sell New York's sexual mores to the masses. Both Friends and NBC's other Thursday hit, Frasier, came to the airwaves in the same era, a year apart. The series' respective home cities, New York and Seattle, began their emblematic heydays in the 1990s boom years, and the new millennium's crushing psychological blows were never addressed. Everyone in Frasier's world is still hopelessly, helplessly rich and desperate to demonstrate it. The Friends cast wilfully kept up their blithe patter after the twin towers fell, offering an "everything's fine" denial peppered with laughter. For all the sadness people feel over the loss of these two series, their departure is bound to create room for larger, more timely replacements. The world has outgrown these stuck individuals, and the networks have too. Now, Frasier's Niles and Friends' Chandler could actually be gay, as clearly intended in the original scripts. More than that, young unmarrieds in New York can be depicted as they really are, struggling in Brooklyn, which offers a feistier art and rock scene than Manhattan has recently known. And fey divorcees such as the Crane brothers can be liberated from their own self-absorption. Whatever destructive send-up the writers include in their send-offs, we should cheer for the characters who are free from a much-prolonged confinement.

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