Soon enough, I found myself timing my workouts to line up with the reruns. I knew the TBS schedule by heart, the distance between work and the gym, and the exact time I had to leave the office in order to make it in time. A few years later, I was a full-time freelancer, working from home, and it became even easier. All I had to do was wake up earlier so I could wrap up work by 5:00 or so, and I would make it to the gym just in time for “The One with Ross’s Sandwich.” By now, I could admit the truth: 5:30 p.m. had become my new prime time, and Friends was once again Must-See TV.
Let’s be clear: I did other stuff, too. I had a life. I was a writer, living in New York City. I had my own nice apartment (not Monica nice, but no one had that). I got to live in it with my very nice boyfriend, who soon became my very nice fiancé. I had my hardships, like everyone does, but I had much more to be grateful for. You couldn’t have paid me to go back and relive my twenties—especially not those early years, eating drunk pizza on the street. So why, as I inched into my thirties, was I suddenly clinging to a twenty-year-old show about twenty-something people?
I didn’t figure it out until that day a few months ago, when I breezed into the gym, turned on Friends—and it wasn’t there. Something had happened. Channel 46 was no longer TBS, but some god-awful sports network. I frantically clicked through the channels, mentally drafting an email to gym management about the great wrong they had done in changing cable providers. I looked around at my fellow rerun-watchers, expecting a row of outraged faces, but found none. Maybe I’d been wrong about the 5:30 crowd and the slightly embarrassing bond I thought we shared. Was I the gym weirdo? A good ten minutes passed as I stood motionless on the machine, absently thumbing the buttons and staring, wide-eyed, into space. (Yes, for sure, I was the weirdo now.)
In that moment, I thought of all the other times I’d gone back to Friends reruns: sick days, sleepless nights in unfamiliar hotel rooms, the day I got rejected by [insert job and/or romantic prospect]. It was a soothing balm on a lousy day—that much I already knew. But I’d also returned to Friends during periods of deep sadness and anxiety: while mourning the death of a grandparent, or waiting to hear back on biopsy results. On days like that, Friends wasn’t numbing, but comforting and warm. I leaned on the familiar jokes and unabashed sincerity. And I was not the only one. In the weeks after my little mental meltdown on the Arc Trainer, I spoke to others who said the same. Usually, it would start with my shame-faced confession: “So, turns out I’m emotionally dependent on a sitcom! How’ve you been?”
Many of my peers responded with stories of their own Friends phases. Some recalled watching it after 9/11. A lot of people mentioned the 2016 election or the 2017 mass shooting in Las Vegas. Friends was what they turned on when they just couldn’t absorb any more news coverage. For those who grew up on the show, it was a reminder of that earlier, simpler time—not in the world necessarily, but in their own lives. Many watched the show during personal low points or times of high stress: breakups, unemployment, the sleep-deprived first months with a new baby. Why Friends? I’d ask. Was it because the show touched on all those topics, but in an optimistic way? Were they seeking out that emotional resonance? “Uh, no,” they told me. “It’s just a funny show.”
These people use the term comfort food when talking about Friends. They refer to its lightness, its detachment from reality. They watch it because they can’t relate. It’s ridiculous! Six adults with perfect hair who hang out in a coffeehouse in the middle of the day? Who’s paying for those giant lattes? Friends, for them, is pure escapism.
For others, it’s something else entirely. As I began to write this book, I spoke with more people, from all over the US and the world, about their relationship to Friends. And everyone seemed to have one, even if they’d never been a fan—even if they’d never seen a full episode. My friend Chrissy, who grew up as a dual citizen in both America and Switzerland, is one of the latter. Friends, she said, was equally huge in both countries, despite the cultural differences. “For Europeans who had never been to the US, Friends was America,” Chrissy told me. I thought she was referring to things like sweatpants and not being able to afford health care, and other parts of American life that they don’t really have in Europe. Again, I was corrected. “It was the friendliness,” she told me. “Americans smile the moment you meet them. They talk to you like you already know each other.” To the Swiss, she said, American tourists came across like suspiciously nice aliens. Friends, with its high-energy humor and chummy characters, helped make sense of that. Maybe Americans were just an overly friendly bunch. Or maybe just New Yorkers.
I spoke with style editor Elana Fishman, who was raised in South Florida and now lives in Manhattan. Fishman is a diehard Friends fan, and she, too, got her sense of New York life from the show. She spent her high-school years watching the DVDs with her sister every afternoon, and while she understood that Friends was a fantasy, there was something about it that felt true. “On some level, I thought, ‘Okay, this is not at all realistic—but what if it could be?’” she told me. Fishman dreamed of going to college in New York, then starting a journalism career there. Friends gave her excitement and hope; it wasn’t an escape from reality but a glimpse into the future. Her life wouldn’t be exactly like Friends, she knew. But maybe it would be close. “[I thought,] ‘Maybe I’ll move to New York, make a best friend who has a rent-controlled apartment in Greenwich Village, and we’ll live there! And it’ll be great! And we’ll have the guys across the hall who are our best friends.’” Those things could happen. It would be pretty fortuitous for all of them to happen all at once, but not impossible. And really, only one of them mattered. “I didn’t have a lot of friends in high school,” Fishman added quietly, trailing off into a chuckle. “So, watching Friends—it was like a double comfort. I was going to make it to New York, and find that group of friends.” She laughed again. “I know, it’s sad!”
I don’t think it’s sad. I think it’s right on the money. I think it’s the very reason Friends remains one of the most-watched shows on television, to this day. A reported 16 million Americans watch the reruns weekly. That’s as many or more viewers than some of the episodes got during Friends’ first run. And that’s just the people watching it on TV. Netflix has retained the streaming rights since 2015, and since its wildly popular US debut, the company has been rolling out the series to 118 million (and counting) subscribers worldwide. In those markets, too, the Friends fandom remains huge and steady, and in some, it’s actually growing. In 2016, ratings were up by 10% in the UK, where the reruns air on Comedy Central—a channel whose primary demographic is aged 16–34. Teenagers—who weren’t even born when Friends went off the air—lie around on the couch, watching it after school. Young adults come home to their cramped apartments late at night (perhaps still full of street pizza), bring their laptops into bed, and fall asleep to an episode. And not-so-young adults, like me, watch reruns on exercise machines.
Friends has managed to transcend age, nationality, cultural barriers, and even its own dated, unrelatable flaws. Because, underneath all that, it is a show about something truly universal: friendship. It’s a show about the transitional period of early adulthood, when you and your peers are untethered from family, unattached to partners, and equal parts excited and uncertain about the future. The only sure thing you have is each other.
Cultural critic Martha Bayles calls it “the sweet spot”—a fleeting period of enormous freedom and encroaching responsibility, where friends band together in families of their own making. “In most countries, young people have neither the resources nor the adult approval to experience the sweet spot,” she writes in her book, Through a Screen Darkly. Yet Friends is just as popular with them. It is, she writes, “a chance to live vicariously in the sweet spot.” Indeed, even for those of us who had it, the sweet spot was never as sweet as it was on Friends. Our problems were never solved so tidily, our hair was never that good, and again, nobody had that apartment. The truth is, not even our friendships were that perfect. Some of us were lonely in those years, and some of our friend-families were dysfunctional. For others, the real sweetness