Fanboys Anonymous

The recent news posts in entertainment have included some delicately stirring news. A Friends reunion? A new season? A movie? Ten years later, could this be? This raises a plethora of questions involving the practicality in the return of cancelled series and even reboots. In this article, however, I will tell you guys why reuniting a cast that already put the final dot on the show is like giving a bad face lift to a gracefully seasoned woman. Or dude.

Cast of Friends, left to right: Matt LeBlanc, Courteney Cox, Matthew Perry, Lisa Kudrow, Jennifer Aniston, David Schwimmer

I've read through a few articles regarding the rumors and response commentaries from the "Big Six" actors (Schwimmer, Aniston, LeBlanc, Perry, Kudrow, Cox), and it took me an intensely savage level of courage to be as impartial as possible. The pang of nostalgia hit me like Houdini's last gut-punch. Friends was my generation's Laverne & Shirley, Happy Days, and Three's Company all in one for ten years, so can you really blame me?

There is a major difference between canceling a show for a few seasons and then bringing it back, like Family Guy, and reviving a passed-away, megalodon of a series such as Friends. First, the credibility is zero, and not because the actors are on par or not with the suggestion. Regardless of intent, it would be purely artificial, nay, science fiction-esque if it were to happen again. Why?

There was so much we could relate to the show during its run because the cast represented the vast generation of kids and young adults watching who had hopes for the future. Friends paralleled our need to construct something out of simple, everyday experiences and proved that true friendship was the only thing we could rely on as we grew, no matter how many bumps we hit in the road. Now, however, both the cast and the people they represent have changed.

There is a galaxy of distance between the life of a single, 25-year-old New Yorker and a near 50-year-old parent hanging out at a coffee shop with his friends. The proposed reality of a reunion just doesn't exist. There are children to care for, careers, personal health, and relationship issues. All of these things were present in the original seasons, of course, but after a certain age, an adult has to split from the herd to care for his or her family above all else. How would such a storyline progress? Joey went to L.A. and made it, according to the Joey series. Rachel and Ross ended together with a daughter to take care for. Chandler and Monica moved out of the city to raise twins. Phoebe married Mike. Four different worlds were created, and if a show were unlikely to succeed, a movie would be even less likely.

Even if they somehow managed to make the show split into different nuclei (in which one episode would revolve around the Bings and the next would be a Ross and Rachel episode) and make it work, the show would still lack the essence of them all together at the end of the day. Humans evolve throughout their lives, and the characters everyone loved would have grown and changed, no matter what brilliant writers came on board. Even if we assumed that the target audience would be the one that has grown along with the actors (and hence characters), the middle-aged adult life keeps the group's friendship at a natural, however inevitable, distance.

The show always happened in two places—Monica's apartment and Central Perk (with the exception of a few particular episodes, i.e. London, U.K.). The plausibility of uniting them all in the landmark locations that made the show in the first place is way far out. It would be better to simply make a new show called Reunion rather than Friends. That's a possibility I wouldn't necessarily frown upon. There is, of course, one huge aspect to consider: 50% of the show was the appeal of the cast that we all know and love. The other half was the theme song. It was catchy and perfectly in-trend with the post-early '90s college-rock frenzy that was going on. No one ever spoke the words "I'll be there for you" without a guitar riff going off in their heads again. I wonder if *Bass-DropBRRRpfffKLANG!Boooooom* would better suit as a theme for the second decade of 2000? I jest, of course, but this is also an open protest to Hollywood face lifts and mandatory artificial youth. I would want them to be middle-aged human beings, not plastic mannequins going with the trend.

Among all of this complaining and conservative behavior, I wouldn't mind a reunion at all. If good writing and dialogue acrobatics were performed seamlessly and with genuine intent, I would turn as many blind eyes as I could to logic and reason. When I see the Friends logo or a picture of the six together, I really just want to sit back and feel at home again, no matter where I am, as long as I can tune in for a few jokes in Greenwich Village.

See you in 10 years for the same article on Friends 2 (How I Met Your Mother)! Tell me in the comments below what you think of the Friends reunion rumors or of TV show reboots in general. Then go listen to Jefferson Airplane's Embryonic Journey!

Friends characters, left to right: Joey, Phoebe, Rachel, Ross, (Emma in stroller), Chandler, and Monica. Thanks guys!