Saul Austerlitz - Generation Friends: An Inside Look at the Show That Defined a Television Era

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Copyright 2019 by Saul Austerlitz

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LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING- IN-PUBLICATION DATA

Names: Austerlitz, Saul, author.

Title: Generation Friends : an inside look at the show that defined a television era / Saul Austerlitz.

Description: New York, NY : Dutton, an imprint of Penguin Random House [2019] | Includes bibliographical references.

Identifiers: LCCN 2018058454 (print) | LCCN 2019013605 (ebook) | ISBN 9781524743376 (ebook) | ISBN 9781524743352 (hc)

Subjects: LCSH: Friends (Television program)

Classification: LCC PN1992.77.F76 (ebook) | LCC PN1992.77.F76 A97 2019 (print) | DDC 791.45/72dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018058454

While the author has made every effort to provide accurate telephone numbers, internet addresses, and other contact information at the time of publication, neither the publisher nor the author assumes any responsibility for errors or for changes that occur after publication. Further, the publisher does not have any control over and does not assume any responsibility for author or third-party websites or their content.

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For Nate, my favorite new reader

INTRODUCTION

They would gather, every few minutes, in clumps and packs. They were wielding smartphones, of course, and digital cameras, and disposable models you might pick up at a souvenir shop or pharmacy checkout counter. There were mothers posing with their daughters, European couples who looked as if they had only just stepped off the runway in Milan, and amateur photographers setting up shoots in the middle of the street.

My friend Jennifer and I were having lunch, and we both found ourselves distracted by the onslaught of humanity in the street, although of course we were there for much the same reasons. We were at the Little Owl, a twenty-eight-seat restaurant in the West Village that describes itself as a corner gem with a big porkchop and an even bigger heart. We were there for the superb food, but more so for the location. Based on the establishing shot that displayed the buildings exterior, the Little Owl was in the spot where Central Perk would have beenyou know, if it ever existed. We were on a brief tour to find the traces of Friends in the real New York of early 2018, and we were beginning our search with the polenta (for Jennifer) and the eggplant parmigiana (for me).

There was something ludicrous and obsessive about our expedition. Friends had not only been filmed on a soundstage on the Warner Bros. lot in Los Angeles, it had contained only the faintest traces of New York, regardless of its claims to residency. We were equipped with a blog post listing some of the purported locations of the characters apartments and a handful of other West Village destinations that the show explicitly mentioned or featured as an exterior. The list, which included Rosss apartment, Phoebes apartment, and the Lucille Lortel Theatre, where Joey had performed in a show, was short.

Friends lacked even the New York credibility of Sex and the City or Seinfeld, two other comedy series of the era that had used the city as a backdrop. They had at least made New York a kind of permanent supporting character on their shows, whereas Friends, after a few brief forays onto the subway or into Bloomingdales, had retreated into its preferred interior spaces, including the faux neighborhood spot whose spiritual footprint we were now occupying.

Throughout our lunch, we anticipated the arrival of fellow Friends fanatics, there to commune with the setting of their favorite show. But no one even approached the restaurant. They were mostly standing catty-corner to the restaurant, on the northwest side of the street. The collective agreement to stand only on that corner was baffling. Why not get a bit closer?

Once Jennifer and I concluded our meal and stepped outside ourselves, the riddle answered itself almost instantaneously. Standing on the northwest corner, of course, placed the faade of the familiar building at 90 Bedford Street directly in the backdrop of fans selfies, looking just as it had on television. After all, 90 Bedford had only ever been glimpsed in brief establishing shots on Friends, and only ever from a single angle. To photograph it from any other perspective would be to render it entirely unrecognizable. This was the perspective they wanted to see, and share, and post.

To be a Friends fan touring the West Village in search of relics from the show was to grasp at any and all straws. Rosss apartment was supposed to be across the street, but while we had the address, the building did not look much like it had on the showor perhaps we were remembering it wrong. And the same went for 90 Bedford. Seeing the buildingeven eating lunch inside itthe mind balked at the notion that Rachel and Monica and Chandler and Joey were supposed to have lived right here. Real and imaginary geography did not line up, and it was next to impossible to picture this twenty-first-century bistro superimposed atop that orange couch, and Gunther hunched behind the counter.

There was so little to see on our Friends walking tour that after checking in on Ross, we walked five minutes to 5 Morton Street, where Phoebe was supposed to live, and wound up our corkscrew-shaped tour at the Lucille Lortel Theatre, where Joey had once performed. While I suppose we could have stopped in at Bloomingdales, where Rachel had worked, or the Plaza, where Monica and Chandler had celebrated their engagement, how much would it have added to our understanding of Friends place in New York?

The tour felt like a letdown, even though I had known there was practically nothing to see, but I kept thinking about those tourists who had ventured to the corner of Grove and Bedford to pay homage to the show they loved. There was essentially nothing to do other than snap a selfie, but they kept coming, from New Jersey and from Europe and from everywhere else