"Friends" and vacation from history

The reunification of the heroes of the series "Friends" fans have been waiting for seventeen years. Instead, they received the reunification of the actors who played these friends

An hour and a half release called “Friends: The Reunion” was released on May 27 on the HBO MAX channel. In form, this is a talk show (it is conducted by James Korden, an English comedian and a TV presenter) with nostalgic inserts from the series and the backstage filming of those years, with the appearance of stars like Lady Gaga, Justin Bieber and David Baekham, who admitted love for the series, as well as with the stories of the audience from different countries about how the series saved them-he taught how to admit to recognize them-he taught him to admit to admit. In love or amused during an illness of a relative.

The episode was shown in the live broadcast in thirteen countries, including China (Camo Gaga and Bieber there, however, cut it out), and the number of revised original series on a variety of platforms has significantly jumped (not so long ago, by the way, Netflix paid $ 100 million for extending the rights to show the series). At the same time, in the press and blogs, this episode with “reunion seventeen years later” caused criticism up to the fierce.

Because almost everything was discussed in the “new” episode - from the possible fate of the heroes to the failed novels of the actors, but they did not talk about what the series is scolded and even rejected today.

The fact is that "friends" are organically unsplained. Moreover, unlike the current comic show, where such non -prolongation is possible as an artifact (that is, it is essentially ridiculed), in “friends” it is the norm.

The approach of the creators of the series can be described as follows: we take life as it is, grin it extremely and offer you.

In this sense, the unacceptable mocking of Monica’s excess weight on American television (one of the main characters at school was very fat, and everyone reminds her endlessly); The male heroes are constantly demonstrated by the horror of the male heroes that they, God forbid, will take them for gays; The self-propelled and, in general, all the encouraged male chauvinism of the alpha male Joei-all this, of course, exaggerated, as in the comedy and relies, but realistic. So such people behave. As well as “Friends, which is constantly recruited in the series“ Race Diversity ”, dark -skinned secondary heroes began to be introduced only in recent seasons - it quite truthfully reflects the circle of communication of such heroes at that time.

True, this “realism” is not that a conscious gesture, rather, the creators of the comedy series did not consider it necessary to introduce an echo of public changes there - there is a huge list of social shifts that happened in America for those ten years (1994 - 2004) until the series was on the air that did not crawl into the expected series even sideways. From dramatic changes in relation to African Americans to the wave of trials about sexual harassment and related conversations about a change in cultural and social attitude to a woman at a time when equal political rights are more or less conquered.

None of this in “Friends” is indeed played. And, in general, in the sense of attitudes towards a woman, this show is just a hymn of objectification. He reaches the apogee in the famous conversation of Ross and Joe (“What if there is only one woman for everyone in the world?” Asks Ross. Joe replies: “There are as many women in the world as varieties of ice cream, you just need to get a spoon”). And there is a lot of similar here.

But without caught the “wind” of public changes, the series “Friends” caught a very important thing. And he did not even catch, but immediately embodied himself.

For the Americans, the “nineties” as an era fit into an absolutely accurate temporary frame (Friends seasons are slightly “overlapping”, as if for, but it doesn’t matter). This era begins on December 22, 1989 and end on September 11, 2001. From the fall of the Berlin wall to the fall of the World Commercial Center. From the end of the Cold War to the start of the war with terror. This period is often called the “vacation that the history”, the time, when some obvious external threats disappeared, while others did not have time to arise. When you could relax, have fun and take care of yourself.

The series Friends is such a “occupation by oneself”, its private, but (finally!) Not a public and non-political life of ten seasons. Today such a show is no longer possible.

The time (in any case, the time reflected in American television) has become less free, but safer, and the discussion is whether in this sense our acquisitions of our losses are one of the most pressing, but at the same time of the most meaningless today's conversations. There are too many politics in such analysis, on the one hand, and cruelty, on the other. So I am glad that Rossa, Rachel, Chandler, Monica, Joey and Fibi (that is, playing their artists, but this is not important), did not force it to discuss it.

After all, not for the depth of reasoning, we love them.

We just love them.