Am I one of the few who really doesn’t care if tonight is the Friends finale?
This morning, the front page of my local paper features the following: coverage of the president’s non-apology; a story about whether or not slots should be allowed at Arlington Park; a piece on how gasoline is getting expensive; and an article about Rosemont mayor Donald Stephens’ whining about how it cost the state over $1 billion because they didn’t give him the last Illinois casino license 5 years ago (ahh, something about those pesky alleged mob ties).
At the top of the page, though– above a photo of people protesting outside the barbed wire at Abu Ghraib prison– is a piece talking about Friends’ final show tonight, and a mini-guide that tells us how to plan out our viewing this evening (an hour-long retrospective begins at 7:00, followed by the two-hour finale at 8:00, and as a bonus, WGN-TV is showing the pilot episode at 6:00). The article jumps inside the paper to a lengthy analysis of the characters, their development, blah blah blah.
My question: Is this really that important?
I admit that I used to watch the show, and I thought it was cute in the beginning: all these attractive New York single people throwing their glib little comments at each other, living these fantasy lifestyles (and yes, I realize that was the whole point of the show). There were even some great one-liners in the show that I’ve been known to use in conversation. (The line in the subject of this blog entry was spoken by Chandler to Monica while they were watching home movies of an overweight Monica at her prom. The line above was preceded by Monica explaining, “you know, the camera adds ten pounds.”)
All that said, though, Friends is the TV equivalent of those meringue cookies: light, sweet, and very little substance. It’s sort of like you consume this thing and then it melts away and aside from the sweet aftertaste it’s like it was never there in the first place.
Now, I know people who are fanatical about the show, and I suppose this is a big deal to them, but we’re not talking about the M*A*S*H finale (which I admit I have never seen in its entirety) or even the final Mary Tyler Moore show. Friends just never seemed to be about anything.
The Brits had it right with many of their sitcoms– they ended them after x number of episodes. The Blackadder series were great because they were specifically written so that they couldn’t go beyond six episodes each. And the final episode of the last series, Blackadder Goes Forth, stands as the finest “final show” I’ve ever seen.
Okay, so I’m not a joiner. I won’t be watching the show tonight– I have other, uh, more important things to take care of.