Friends: never without my friends

Here is a soap opera that tells us the day to day life of 6 friends of New York. At first sight nothing to make an exceptional sitcom, except that…

Of course, ingredient number 1, we are predictable and a sitcom with sufficient humour is guaranteed some success. But add to this the fact that the producers bet on normal people, people that work, go to the supermarket and to the bathroom, have fun between friends without having to go out in expensive places and go through the same problems as you and me. To sum up, here is a way to throw light on our day to day lives.
Of course there are main subjects like love, friendship or family that help us to face the urban jungle. We neither can miss the fact that this group of close friends represents a sort of hand-picked family even if each friend’s family is still well represented in the sitcom.

Notice that 2 couples will come out of this group of six friends showing that you can have a love story with a close friend and that it won’t always spoil everything. It also shows that pure friendship is possible between men and women (does it sounds familiar to you? Well, that’s the main objective). The City also plays a major part: NY City, more precisely Manhattan, in the area of Greenwich Village, a place known to be nice, friendly and animated and were people are generally open-minded.

We can bet that the sitcom would not have been so successful if it had happened in a less glamorous city (let’s not bet on a remake made in Dusseldorf or Helsinki).
It is also important to underline that the characters are competing with each others, which gives a dynamic to each episode. As a proof, a new sitcom was born at the end of the series: « Joey ». Our favorite italo-american was the unique survivor of our friends but the recipe didn’t change. We thought we would be following the success of « Friends » but it didn’t go well, only one season has been broadcasted compared to 10 in the case of « Friends ».
Here is some information before we bring this article to a close : the sitcom was supposed to be named « The Six Of Us » but the production chose to change its name to « Friends » in order not to exclude the people watching the sitcom. Nice one…

Are you gonna keep it for yourself ?