A semi-perfect blendship
Friends: The Reunion
The most shocking revelation of the Friends reunion might be that the actors never met until their first table read. From their very first moments among the squashy chairs of Central Perk in 1993, the chemistry among Jennifer Aniston, Courteney Cox, Lisa Kudrow, Matt Leblanc, Matthew Perry and David Schwimmer was so natural it became easy for audiences to imagine not just that the characters were friends, but they were the viewers’ friends too.
Recapturing that spark in a reunion special without the smokescreens of their characters is another challenge entirely, especially since, “the six cast members have been in a room all together only once ... until today.”
The stakes set, the Friends walk onto the meticulously re-created set individually, starting with wide-eyed Schwimmer and ending with skittish Perry. Aniston, Cox and Kudrow still have an easy familiarity with each other. Leblanc brings the most boisterous energy to the table.
Perry has mentioned in the past how his addiction struggles affected his time on the show.
The special ultimately declines to discuss any of his troubled experience explicitly, but it nonetheless lingers around the margins with palpable unease. When his castmates talk about staying in touch with each other, he cracks a joke about how he doesn’t hear “from anyone” so dryly it’s impossible to tell if it’s actually a joke.
Later, Perry, who played Chandler, remembers how he felt every night “like I was going to die if they didn’t laugh,” and acknowledges that “it wasn’t healthy, for sure.” Kudrow responds with concern that they never knew that, at which point it cuts to the next nostalgia trip.
They wander around the set marvelling at how small it feels now, give each other gentle grief for their inability to remember lines, and reveal the trinkets they swiped (a mug for Aniston, a cookie jar for Kudrow). They do a few intimate table reads of pivotal moments from episodes like The One Where Everybody Finds Out and The One Where Ross Finds Out (That Rachel Likes Him). Even in these short scenes, the actors manage to snap right back into their old rhythm with an almost spooky recall. (Aniston, it seems, can still recite most of
her old lines off-book.)
The reunion is so insistent on the show being nothing but a benign joy, in fact, that it only made me think harder about all the ways it wasn’t. Friends famously included so few non-white characters in its version of New York City that most every subsequent sitcom trying to capture its appeal feels obligated to include a joke about it.
The series featured a surprisingly progressive storyline about Ross’s lesbian
ex-wife and new partner raising his son, but also included so many homophobic and transphobic jokes that it became a cornerstone of Chandler’s personality.
Digging in to shortcomings would have made for a more interesting special, but it also wouldn’t have reflected the show, which largely left unpleasantries outside of its comically enormous apartments.