THEN: The gang's all here for the Friends pilot episode 10 years ago. Clockwise, from left, are Matt LeBlanc, Lisa Kudrow, David Schwimmer, Matthew Perry, Jennifer Aniston and Courteney Cox.
NOW: The Friends today, clockwise from left, Perry, Kudrow, Schwimmer, Cox, LeBlanc and Aniston. "It's a group of people that come together every day to make America laugh," Perry said. "And what better thing is there to do than that?"
Hyped by the network since September, it has been the subject of endless magazine cover stories, tabloid TV news accounts, newspaper stories and media speculation for long as anyone can remember.
For the media coverage alone, the Friends finale, airing Thursday, is a landmark event.
But even as NBC plans for a Super Bowl-sized audience to cap its popular show about six impossibly beautiful people with impossibly spacious apartments in an impossibly grit-free Manhattan wonderland, two questions remain:
Is Friends really a landmark TV comedy? And if not, why do we still like it so much?
Jon Hein, creator of the popular Jump the Shark Web site, has made his name by pointing out when popular shows lose their creative edge, or "jump the shark," as Fonzie and his motorcycle did on Happy Days. Hein's answer to both Friends questions is brutally direct.
"I'm not saying it's a bad show, but one of the all-time great sitcoms? I think not," said Hein, who maintains that Friends jumped the shark when it broke up the Ross Geller and Rachel Green characters, only to pull them back together. Again and again.
(Curiously, fans voting on his Web site believe the series never has jumped the shark.)
"If you look at everything that happens after that point . . . Rachel having a daughter who pretty much disappears for the rest of the season, Ross calling Rachel's name during his wedding to someone else . . . I think it's pretty clear how weak the show has become," Hein said.
Still, he understands why it has remained popular.
"Friends is like a good restaurant: You always know what you're going to get," Hein said. "It's never going to be great, but it always is going to be good. And just because a show has jumped the shark doesn't mean people won't watch it and even love it."
Hein's assessment is echoed by Robert Thompson, head of the Center for the Study of Popular Television at Syracuse University.
"Friends was really good at doing what a sitcom is supposed to do, which is to be an anesthetic," Thompson said. "This show could have been enjoyed half-asleep or half-dead . . . and achieving that is easier said than done."
The lack of quality sitcoms on the air now makes Friends look only more powerful, Thompson said. "We want something that can be enjoyed while we're talking on the phone, doing our laundry. Was it a great, innovative show? No, that was Seinfeld. But as something to watch when you're making the pot roast and calming the child, Friends is perfect."
Leaving the air Thursday after 10 years at the top, Friends is getting a sendoff worthy of its status as one TV's biggest hits.
First comes an hourlong retrospective, "The One With All the Other Ones" (from the first episode, producers decided to use "The One With . . ." titles to reflect the way producers and writers really remember episodes).
Then there's the hourlong finale, marking the six friends' final day together. Locally, NBC affiliate WFLA-Ch. 8, Centro Ybor and WMTX-FM 100.7 have teamed up for an all-evening party that includes a 32-inch TV giveaway, a Friends star look-alike contest and screening of the finale at Centro Ybor's Muvico theater complex, all begining at 5 p.m.
That makes for a two-hour prime time farewell to Ross, Rachel, Joey, Chandler, Monica and Phoebe, the characters who made Friends the top-rated sitcom for six of its 10 seasons.
Friends has touched and mirrored the American psyche more than some might expect, said Elayne Rapping, a professor of American studies at the University at Buffalo in New York.
"Friends was one of the first shows about young people completely unmoored from any social responsibilities . . . an attractive fantasy for young people," Rapping said. She noted that previous sitcoms with a family of friends - say, Murphy Brown, Cheers and The Mary Tyler Moore Show - focused on an older crowd, before the TV industry fixated on young viewers.
As the show's characters have grown, married and had babies, they've reflected a change in what the culture fantasizes about, Rapping said. Now that society has changed, it almost seems appropriate that the show that embodied the nation's slacker youth culture is moving on as well.
"Reality shows . . . (are) a shift from that laid-back "Who cares?' attitude," Rapping said. "Those shows are very much about cutthroat behavior to succeed . . . which is the complete opposite of these young people (sitcoms). They are no longer as meaningful to new generations of young people as they were when they started."
And at a time when today's youth culture springs directly from hip-hop, and reality shows such as American Idol and The Apprentice are filled with participants of color making significant contributions, Friends' lily-white version of New York City seems less relevant than ever.
Even the show's stars echo the ambivalence many feel as Friends comes to a close.
"It's very odd. . . . Fifty percent of me feels that it's the right time . . . to be closing this," Matthew Perry said during a January news conference. "The other 50 percent of me . . . (feels) it's been more than a show. It's a group of people that come together every day to make America laugh. And what better thing is there to do than that?"
Though some may argue the series' status as a classic, there's no disputing the numbers.
Viewer estimates range from 40- to 100-million for the finale, and NBC is reportedly selling advertising spots for $2-million for 30 seconds. If the finale's actual viewership comes close to the higher figure, it will have drawn an audience comparable to the most-watched TV episode ever, CBS's 1983 farewell to M*A*S*H, which drew 77 percent of all people watching TV.
That explains why splashy goodbyes to popular series have become such a big business at NBC. The network has a similarly megasized two-hour farewell planned for perpetually overshadowed Frasier at 8 p.m. the following Thursday, May 13.
"With the exception of what's happening on HBO and the finales of big reality shows, this is the beginning of the end of the infamous must-see TV and appointment television shows," said David Blum, a senior vice president at Baltimore advertising agency Eisner Communications. The company released a study in April predicting that 47 percent of adult Americans will watch the Friends finale.
"What's interesting is what reality TV has done to shorten the life of all TV series," Blum said. "A reality show is over in one season; you start over with a new cast. So the opportunity for advertisers to take advantage one of the last (big sitcoms) is being seen in the advertising prices."
According to Eisner's survey of 1,000 Americans, 4 percent plan to watch the finale in a public place, with the audience tilting young, female, white and from middle America. And the audience, like critics and the show's stars, seem to think it's a perfect time for the series to end.
"People think it's time to move on . . . for the characters and for themselves," Blum said. "They're going to tune in, and they want to see what happens. But there's not going to be a huge sense of, "Boy, we wish this show was still on.' "
The popularity of Friends has always fluctuated with the times, according to the guy who wrote the book - okay, two books - on the show, Rolling Stone writer David Wild. He penned the official companion book, Friends, in 1995 and Friends ... 'til the End: The One With All Ten Years, in stores this week.
Overexposure after the first season - including a deluge of show-related merchandise, a slew of magazine covers, the Rachel hairstyle and Perry's unique punch line delivery (could it be any more pervasive these days?) - brought a serious Friends backlash, Wild said.
But the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, renewed interest in the show, which lured back fans with its vision of a comfortable, hassle-free, untraumatized New York.
Wild said Friends is worth savoring because sitcoms are "a dying art form," with few able to match the quality of Friends, Sex and the City, Frasier and Everybody Loves Raymond, all of which are leaving the air this year or next.
"In a way, Friends was the antidote to Seinfeld, because the characters were so likable and relatable," he said. "I'd speak at colleges, and people would say, "The friends are just like me,' and they'd be punk rockers or African-American. And how many shows go out this strong at the end of their 10th season?"
With story lines about Jennifer Aniston's Rachel Green searching for identity outside her upbringing as a spoiled rich girl, Perry's Chandler Bing learning to commit to a relationship and Matt LeBlanc's Joey Tribbiani emerging as a stalwart, loyal pal, the series has traced the evolution of a generation.
"The show started out about being in your 20s and that freedom. . . . Then it became a show about defining yourself . . . catching people in those years where you're losing your freedom," Wild said. "They did a good job of capturing a moment in the culture and a moment in our lives. There's a lot of silly, stupid, pandering TV comedy out there, and Friends deserves credit for taking it up a notch."
If NBC executives would have originally had their way, it wouldn't have been so.
"They pushed us to add an older character," said executive producer David Crane, noting that the romance between Ross and Rachel wasn't planned when they pitched the show to NBC, but it emerged as they wrote the pilot episode. "They said, "Can't you add Pops, who owns the coffeehouse?' We had to make the argument over and over again that it was not a show for (one) generation but a show for everybody."
As it turns out, it was both, fueled by an ensemble of true equals who have traded status as "the popular one" since the show began. "Looking around (at other shows), nobody ever had a true ensemble . . . (where) you can follow any one of six characters into a story," Crane said. "This gives a series legs because you can always go to a new place."
The toughest place for Crane and fellow executive producers Marta Kauffman and Kevin Bright this season was writing the finale. Crane and Kauffman said they couldn't complete one scene, which was to be the last, because it would have ended the possibility of any more stories.
"We wanted to do a finale that was of the show. . . . It wasn't set in the future, and it didn't take us away from what the show is," Crane said. "You want to tell a satisfying story, and you want to tell a surprising story. And balancing those two ideas is tough."
Jump the Shark's Hein said he knows how the show will end and so does every longtime fan.
"I'm going to go out on a limb and say Ross is going to end up with Rachel," he said, laughing. "You already know what's going to happen with Joey (he moves to California for the spinoff sitcom Joey, to air at 8 p.m. Thursday this fall). NBC is to be credited and blamed; they're getting the eyeballs for a big finale, but they've also raised expectations to an incredible degree."
University at Buffalo professor Rapping said she doesn't necessarily expect Friends to remain watchable 10 or 20 years from now, like legendary comedies such as I Love Lucy.
But as a show that summed up America at the end of the 20th century, another may not come as close.
"I sometimes think of sitcoms as family albums you can look back on, because so many of us see ourselves in them," she said. "What you get is a picture of American family or American youth as the media presented it to us then. It's an amazing form of cultural history."
