Generation Friends by Saul Austerlitz

Author:Saul Austerlitz
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin Publishing Group
Published: 2019-09-16T16:00:00+00:00

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“Embryos” was a triumph for emphasizing a certain tendency in Friends’ handling of its characters that had previously gone mostly unmentioned. What prior sitcom had expressed so deep an interest in its protagonists’ past lives? Most sitcoms existed in an eternal present, where little change was encouraged or acknowledged, and the past was generally a single, flat narrative arc—Mary Richards moving to Minneapolis, or Gilligan and his friends washing up on a desert island. The idea of mining characters’ histories for narrative material was foreign to the sitcom. But from the very outset, Friends was telling us about what had already happened to its characters elsewhere.

The show parceled out bits of the past in tantalizingly small dollops. “The One with the Embryos” gave us a heaping helping of information, but most episodes preferred to stop at a stray reference or two, understanding that the past was an endlessly renewable storytelling resource that it would be wise to use sparingly.

The technique allowed Friends to gesture at a seemingly bottomless reservoir of past adventures. For each character, the glimpses of their past, in both flashback episodes and persistent chatter, offered some additional clarity about their lives prior to Rachel’s arrival at Central Perk.

The characters were obsessed with their pasts: with how to re-create them, undo them, or eclipse them. Over ten seasons, we learn that Chandler attended an all-boys boarding school, where he played the clarinet, was voted class clown, and thought scale models were cool. His father liked to dress in fishnet stockings and was caught making out with the pool boy. He was once kidnapped by his father after Cub Scouts, took a mime class in college, and broke up with his summer-camp girlfriend because she had gotten fat. He regularly wet the bed after his parents got divorced.

Rachel’s father purchased her a boat when she was fifteen (her pony was sick, she explained). She was prom queen, class president, and homecoming queen; had sex with Billy Dreskin on her father’s bed in high school; kissed her sorority sister (played by Winona Ryder) after drinking too much sangria senior year of college; and developed a crush on Joey the first time they met.

Monica weighed two hundred pounds at the age of eleven, and in her earlier, lighter years, enjoyed riding the family dog, Chichi. She hated Ross as a kid and once broke his nose while playing football, and her eating habits taught Ross the mantra “Eat fast or don’t eat.” Her ex-boyfriend Kip was once a key part of their group, only to be excommunicated after the two broke up.

Joey, whose early life we know the least of, once sold T-shirts during spring break in Daytona Beach, played a copy-machine repairman in a porn film, and assumed on their first meeting that Chandler was gay. He had seven dark-haired, outspoken sisters whom Chandler could not keep track of, and his father regularly cheated on his mother—with her blessing, as it turned out.

Phoebe and Monica were once roommates, but Phoebe moved out because of Monica’s neat-freak tendencies.

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