Now, 10 years later, “Friends” leaves the air as nearly the last representative of the once-ubiquitous “Seinfeld” clone. After its two-hour retrospective and finale special on Thursday at 8, prime time will be noticeably short on the singles-in-the-city series that defined TV comedy in the 1990s. The fast-declining “Will & Grace” will be the sole survivor. These shows had their highs (”Sex and the City”) and their lows (”Suddenly Susan”), but they all shared the philosophy that urban friends can serve as family. They were a hipped-up iteration of “The Mary Tyler Moore Show,” with risque characters whose romantic quirks and sex lives were as garish as their bright and overly designed apartments. “The Single Guy,” “Union Square,” “Just Shoot Me” — they were all ensemble vehicles built around the lifestyles of the unhitched and anxious.
…in the last few years, TV comedy has drifted away from urban walk-ups and back into suburban homes, where the foosball tables are in the basement and the coffee is brewed at the kitchen counter. Nowadays, the jokes are about fickle fathering and marital bickering on the likes of “According to Jim,” “Malcolm in the Middle,” “Happy Family,” “Yes, Dear,” and even edgier series such as “The Bernie Mac Show” and “Arrested Development.” And when these sitcoms do deliver dating mishaps and sex-related dialogue, it’s usually between a husband and a wife or — with a Freudian tang — between a protective father and a daughter. While “Friends” offered 20-somethings of the 1990s a Details-magazine-like guide to the quickly-changing mores of sex and dating, the family shows of today reach back to update nuclear-family traditions.
NBC, which has tried desperately to come up with a sitcom to replace “Friends,” has apparently given up. “Joey,” a spinoff set in Los Angeles, is an experiment. The network is counting on “The Apprentice” to anchor its Thursday night.
Viewers grieving over the end of “Friends” and “Frasier” are not just bidding farewell to their favorite sitcoms, they are mourning the genre itself, and that may well justify some hoopla and hyperbole.
There are flaws in the sitcoms-are-dead hypothesis, beyond the fact that it’s the kind of story that gets published every time a major sitcom goes off the air. For one… Most writers vastly overestimate the size of the Friends audience…. During last week’s time slot, more viewers watched CSI than the penultimate episode of Friends. As the South Florida Sun-Sentinel TV writer Tom Jicha pointed out this week, seven out of eight American homes don’t watch Friends, and this season’s ratings wouldn’t have cracked the Top 20 for any show only a decade ago, in 1995. This is mass appeal?
But there’s another, more fundamental problem with hailing Friends as the last great situation comedy: It misstates the genre to which the show belongs. Friends isn’t a sitcom. It’s a soapcom, a soap opera masquerading as a situation comedy…. Somewhere along the way, TV drama and TV comedy switched places. It’s fairer to call shows like Law & Order and CSI “sitdramas” than it is to call Friends a sitcom.
Discuss.
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