RIP Matthew Perry

This was one of the funnier Chandler Bing moments.

 

Are we kind of at a point now where when someone dies under similar circumstances at a relying age the story needs to answer the question of whether or not they were vaccinated?

 

No.

 

There was a critical piece about Friends that addressed what the commenter saw as "WASP entitlement couched in pseudo tribalism." Can't remember if it appeared in an issue of Village Voice or The Journal of Pop Culture Studies. One of the things that was seen as a bug and not a feature was how it created a normative acceptance of the idea that "Together is better." Having not seen the show, I do not know if the complaint that there was a tacit acceptance of bullying the square pegs who inevitably crossed their collective path.

Could that have been an unspoken reason why people claim to hate it? I don't have strong feelings about it one way or the other. However, I've seen similar expressions of antipathy aimed at anything that smacks of a collective of protagonists when they represent a group that is already fairly privileged in the eyes of most. Taylor Swift's "Squad" circa 2018 comes to mind. One columnist wrote something to the effect of, "Imagine your thoughts about seeing that group walking toward you down the hallway of your school when you were fifteen years old."

Maybe I'm off base here.

 

I had a lot more fun with "Wings." Hilarious ensemble cast of characters. Underrated sitcom of that era.

And Lowell Mather!




YMMV

 

I didn't read the piece, but part of the charm/backstory of Friends was that other than Rachel, they WEREN'T the kids who would have bullied you walking down the hall in high school. Phoebe was basically homeless. Chandler was messed up b/c his parents were divorced & his Dad was transgender. Monica was fat. Ross was a dork who was into dinosaurs. Joey was handsome but a lunkhead. Of course, it's easy enough to see them as they were as adults and think of them as the adult version of those kids you never liked in high school. But I think another reason it resonated was most of us who have ever attended a high school reunion have realized those intervening years had a way of closing the gap between the cool kids and everyone else and that people who wouldn't have paid any attention to one another in high school have a knack for getting along as adults.

 

The way Ms. Madison feels about Friends, I feel about Seinfeld. I always thought of Friends as more accessible. They were at Central Perk but I didn’t see it as such a New York-centric show. You could’ve put them all in a hipster coffee shop in Chicago and it’d be the same.

 

Fun show. Church was great....Roy was funny....first time I saw one the great comedic actors of the age Tony Shalhoub...and Steven Weber is an underrated comedic actor as well (see him in Party Down as a crazed Russian gangster just sprung from prison).

And speaking of forgotten 1990s sitcoms....I had a mad crush on the wife from Dave's World.

 

And @YankeeFan could drop in for a two-minute sidejack every episode.

 

Still amazed that he tried to organize one of the SJ outings and thought everyone giving him their credit card numbers so he could block off rooms was a good idea.

 

He was also very good with Debra Messing in Ned and Stacy.

The TSwift piece was in Jezebel. I thought it showed some interesting parallels in terms of cultural influences. Interesting the Friends crew were the oddballs as kids.

Now if someone could explain the appeal of Nashville to me...

Dave's World was great. It lasted just the right amount of time.

Woah.

 

No one kills mindless fun faster than a “critic.”