Review

Culture

Film & TV

Friendship

14 March 2023

7 min read

I’ll be there for you

Friends is about being friends. Not family. But also family. Sitcom writer James Cary unpicks what makes the show tick.

James Cary

James Cary is a writer of situation comedy for BBC TV (Miranda, Bluestone 42) and Radio (Think the Unthinkable, Hut 33).

Image of the apartment block from the famous sitcom Friends

The last episode of Friends was aired in the UK on Channel 4 on 28th May 2004. You may have been one of the 8.6 million people who watched the hour-long farewell special.

It marked the end of an era which began when the first episode had aired on NBC on 22nd September 1994. The Berlin Wall had come down, the Cold War had thawed out and Francis Fukuyama had recently published The End of History and the Last Man. The Twin Towers of the World Trade Centre Life were still standing. Life was good. Eat, sip coffee in Central Perk and be merry. One day, sociologists may study the effect Friends had on the popularity of Starbucks.

For a whole decade, we became intimately involved in the lives of these six much-loved sitcom characters – and Gunther. No-one cared about Gunther. He was in love with Rachel. Big deal. Who wasn’t? ‘The Rachel’ became the name of an internationally known haircut. Jennifer Aniston became world famous, eclipsing movie stars who queued up to be in Friends. We’re talking about A-List movie stars who didn’t do television. This was the 90s. Movie stars were above the everyday, story-of-the-week, dreary medium of television, especially corny, studio sitcoms.

Everyone wanted in on Friends. So Central Perk was graced with the presence of Brad Pitt, Julia Roberts, Bruce Willis, Reese Witherspoon, Tom Selleck, Elle MacPherson, Gary Oldman, Robin Williams, Billy Crystal, Alec Baldwin, Susan Sarandon, Helen Hunt, Danny Devito. They were all great. But we didn’t love them. We loved Chandler, Monica, Phoebe, Joey, Ross and Rachel. They were, well, our friends.

'It’s like your favourite biscuit, burger or takeaway. You know what you’re getting. You love it. It’s the same every time.'

Reliably funny

Why? How? What was the appeal? Let’s just acknowledge one key reason: it was really funny. It’s reliably funny. I can still remember the thrill of excitement on a Friday. The whole evening was planned around watching Friends because I knew it would not disappoint. And that’s what the audience is looking for. It’s like your favourite biscuit, burger or takeaway. You know what you’re getting. You love it. It’s the same every time. An episode of a sitcom is meant to be that kind of snack. It’s familiar and comforting. I should know this. I’m a sitcom writer.

I remember Friday 28th May 2004 extremely well. On BBC1, my episode of My Family was being aired. The guest star wasn’t Sean Penn or Ben Stiller. It was a brilliant but not-yet-very-famous Peter Capaldi. Ironically, he was playing someone who was as famous as some like Colin Firth. On My Family, we had to manufacture glamour. Friends just had it. It had so much, it didn’t know what to do with it.

My episode of My Family still pulled in 4.48 million viewers. That seems like a lot now, but the safe, mainstream British family sitcom was no match for the achingly cool residents of Manhattan swapping gags over their lattes.

'But our hearts yearn for that lifestyle. It’s a metropolitan Neverland. We know it’s not real.'

Aspirational

Friends is achingly cool. That’s ‘aspirational’ in marketingese which, in plain English, means ‘unrealistic’. There is no way those characters could afford to live in those flats in Manhattan. Monica’s place is neatly explained away through some aging relative, but Chandler’s flat across the hall cannot possibly be within his reach, especially as his flatmate is an actor. But no-one cares. We know people aren’t that funny. We know that life isn’t so neat. We know that you just never get a seat on the sofa in that coffee shop. But our hearts yearn for that lifestyle. It’s a metropolitan Neverland. We know it’s not real. We get it. It’s a sitcom.

But times – and hairstyles – are different now. Plenty of sitcoms come, do well, and go, but aren’t watched two decades later (see The Brittas Empire, Brushstrokes and Goodnight, Sweetheart). Friends is still huge. It’s worth so much money that if I quoted some numbers at you about syndication deals, they would be meaninglessly large. You might as well say that the rights to 236 episode of Friends have proven to be worth at least one brand-new state-of-the-art aircraft carrier with a ten year service contract.

That’s because, despite exciting new shows like Stranger Things, Andor or The White Lotus, people are still watching Friends, including teens and twenty-somethings who feel this is ‘their’ show. Even though it was my show.

I was there for them

In the late 1990s, I was in my 20s, unmarried and living in London. I felt like this was a show aimed squarely at people like me. And indeed it was. This is what Friends is really about: that stage in your life when the most important people are your friends. Your friends are your ersatz family. Many times over, the opening theme song has The Rembrants singing the refrain “I’ll be there for you”.

Ross, Monica, Rachel, Joey, Chandler and Phoebe are living in Manhattan away from the families that raised them. And they’ve not started their own families yet. Or at least, they’ve failed to start families. It’s all there in the very first scene of the very first episode. Monica is talking about going on a date. Chandler recalls a dream in which a phone rings and it’s his mum – who never calls. Ross says his wife has finally moved out and is a lesbian. And then Rachel runs in wearing a wedding dress. She’s decided not to get married to Barry after all. Right now, she needs friends.

Rachel:       …you're the only person I knew who lived here in the city.

Monica:       Who wasn't invited to the wedding.

Rachel:        Ooh, I was kinda hoping that wouldn't be an issue...

They are there for each other for the next ten years. And that’s what many of us are looking for at a certain stage of life.

A show as well-written and funny as Friends will always have appeal to a culture containing a significant proportion of ‘anywheres’. That’s the name given to the mobile graduate class by David Goodhart in his brilliantly observant book, Road to Somewhere, published in 2017. The ‘anywheres’ are those who leave the support of extended families at home (like the ones you’d see in The Royle Family) to study at university in a city in another part of the country, and then move to another city for employment. People in that situation need friends. Streaming episode after episode of Friends might give you that feeling, along with lots of beautiful people and some really good jokes.

Friends are Family

Some argue, however, that families are so fundamental to our society, that many sitcoms are essentially families when it comes down to it. This idea was broached by Mitch Hurwitz on Julie Klausner's podcast How Was Your Week. The creator of the sublime Arrested Development, Hurwitz said, "At one point I remember learning that there was this classic archetype of matriarch, patriarch, craftsman, and clown."[1] It’s not much of leap to map this onto a nuclear family of a mum, dad, older sibling and younger sibling.

In a British context you might explain the classic Porridge this way. Fletcher is the big brother to Godber, the naïve, goofy younger brother. The patriarch is the strict disciplinarian, Mr Mackay, whereas the gentler prison warden, Mr Barraclough, is the mother.

Friends contains all kinds of familial relationships, beyond Ross and Monica being brother and sister. Monica is like a big sister to Rachel, who needs to grow out of her sense of entitlement. Chandler is like a big brother to wayward Lothario Joey. Phoebe is like a strange, wise-but-crazy mother to them all. Ross is often the responsible, sensible dad telling everyone to calm down.

We shouldn’t be surprised to see these familial relationships around us. In Christianity, God is familial within himself, being Father and Son. He made the first man to be married to the first woman. Genesis, the foundational book of the Bible, is the original family saga, with siblings who fight and cheat – and kill. The stories create all kinds of patterns that aren’t just recognisable in sitcoms like Friends but in our own complicated lives and fractured families.

'We aren’t comrades, amigos or fellow worshippers. We are brothers and sisters. We are responsible for each other.'

In the New Testament, we read how Jesus walked among us, called his followers brothers and sisters. Christians still do that today. In the church, we aren’t comrades, amigos or fellow worshippers. We are brothers and sisters. We are responsible for each other. So when churches go wrong, it’s so painful and damaging because the relationships run much deeper much faster.

Even so, if you’re in a city, and looking for family support, you could do a lot worse than step into a church. Anyone who goes to church will tell you that it’s the oddest bunch of people replete with dated hairstyles from the 1990s with plenty of, frankly, unbelievable characters. It’s the Church’s best kept secret: community. A whole network of people who are there for you. After all we belong at home with family. That’s where Friends ended up in “The Last One", also known as "The One Where They Say Goodbye". Monica and Chandler are setting up home for the twins. Finally, Ross and Rachel are together and will surely be husband and wife. And Joey gets a spin-off. After all, it is show-business.

Review

Culture

Faith

Music

11 September 2023

5 min read

Faith in Beethoven

Why did Beethoven, the hero of humanism, write music for a mass? Musicologist Daniel Chua explores the maestro’s faith.

Daniel KL Chua

Daniel KL Chua is a musicologist and Professor and Chair of music at the University of Hong Kong. He writes on music, particularly Beethoven, and the intersection between music, philosophy and theology.

Agrand statue of Beethoven as a classical hero seats him on a throne on a dias.

Max Klinger’s Beethoven monument.

Bach’s theological credentials are impeccable, as Jeremy Begbie wrote about previously for Seen & Unseen. But Beethoven’s? Not really. In fact, not at all. Most scholars on Beethoven see him as a secularizing force. If Bach represent the summit of theological expression in western music history, then Beethoven is the poster boy of the Enlightenment progress. He spells the end of sacred music. In the narrative of music history, Beethoven is the catalyst for a new secular epoch. After Beethoven, music is no longer about God but humanity; sacred music drops out from the historical narrative as something irrelevant or even regressive to the progress of modernity.

But it is not just any Beethoven who wields this secularising power. It is a very particular Beethoven, more myth than man. This is Beethoven as Promethean hero. He overcomes his deafness by defiance, grabbing fate by the throat as it knocks loudly in the opening bars of the Fifth symphony - da-da-da-daaaa! - and triumphing over its C-minor threat in a glorious blaze of C major in the finale. The symphony is a musical model of human self-determination. It projects Beethoven as a revolutionary artist living in revolutionary times, channelling the anticlerical and antimonarchist fervour of the French Revolution in musical form. His story is one of freedom and autonomy; and his music is made in his image, free from servitude to church and court, and free to be itself.

This Promethean image precludes Beethoven from being a sacred composer. It is not that he isn’t a sacred composer; rather, he can’t be one in this historical narrative. In fact, Beethoven stands as a rival to the sacred, because by the beginning of the 20th Century, artists such as Max Klinger were building shrines to the composer: Beethoven is the high priest of an art religion.

The Beethoven monument

A statue of a seat hero, Beethoven, sits on a raised dais in a purpsoe built rom

Max Klinger’s Beethoven monument.

The Vienna Secession’s fourteenth exhibition in 1902 was a shrine dedicated to Beethoven with Max Klinger ‘s monument as the altar.

But there is a problem. Beethoven wrote sacred music. Not much, admittedly, but enough, including what he declared to be his ‘greatest work’ – the Missa Solemnis. So in order to uphold a more secular Beethoven, scholars have had to explain away his sacred music as inconsequential and his religious beliefs as unorthodox or non-existent. They tie themselves up in knots trying to solve the problem, especially with regard to Beethoven’s magnum opus. Although there is nothing theologically unorthodox in the Missa Solemnis, somehow the mass has to be theologically unorthodox for these commentators: at best it is a mass for deist, but it is mostly a mass about humanity. The liturgical bits can be dismissed, they claim, as something that stifles what is truly Beethovenian; instead, to grasp its meaning, you have to listen to the mass as if it where a symphony resonant with tones of human freedom and autonomy. It is almost as if Beethoven wrote the mass against his will. In one recent biography, the chapter on the Missa Solemnis opens with the incredulous question: “Why did Beethoven write a mass?”

Why not? The problem is not Beethoven’s (obviously) but the biographer’s belief in a history that sits uncomfortably with the composer. Yes, Beethoven was a revolutionary in the times of revolution. Yes, he was born in the Age of Enlightenment, and even declared ‘freedom and progress’ as the main purpose of art. But that does not make him French; he did not step foot in France, and despite the Napoleonic aftermath of the French Revolution, what Enlightenment meant in Bonn where Beethoven was born and in Vienna where he died, could not be anticlerical or antimonarchist because these cities were under the rule of Enlightened despots who by definition had both kingly and ecclesiastic functions. In other words, Beethoven was a child of a religious Enlightenment. This means that his innovative and radical works were not composed against the sacred but were inspired by it. This is not to say that there is no truth in a Promethean view of Beethoven or that there is no conflict in his music during this tumultuous period in Europe, but it does imply that Beethoven upheld sacred music. In fact, he leads it in a new direction. And, if we have ears to hear, then the Missa Solemnis can open up a new sound world full of theological resonance.

While working on the Missa, Beethoven wrote out the Latin text of the mass on a piece of paper and added a German translation next to each line. As a teenager, Beethoven regularly played the organ for mass in the court at Bonn; he knew the Catholic liturgy from memory. So why would he write out the text and its translation? Because he wanted to explore the meaning of each word more fully, looking up a German dictionary for definitions and synonyms that would enlarge his understanding of the text. And if the expression mark in the score of the Missa (‘with devotion’) and his collection of devotional literature in his library is anything to go by, this process was an act of meditation for the composer. This was no routine setting of the mass. In fact, if you listen carefully, not only did Beethoven look up individual words to amplify their meaning, it seems that he also looked up the biblical reference to set their meaning in context.

Listen to the Sanctus: you will hear echoes of the biblical book of Isaiah, chapter six. Beethoven conjures up a temple trembling at its foundations as the angels sing ‘Holy, holy, holy’. Similarly, in the Benedictus, you will hear echoes of the Palm Sunday procession from the gospels. The music is a match in the form of a pastoral; it depicts Jesus arriving as a king but in the form a humble shepherd riding a donkey, as the crowds chant “Blessed is he who comes in the name of the Lord.” There is no sense of Promethean triumph here, but the sound of meekness and majesty.

We don’t need to tie ourselves up in knots to understand Beethoven or the Missa solemnis as secular. May be, to use the composer’s own words, Beethoven was just an ordinary Catholic writing extraordinary music to ‘instil religious affections’ in the congregants. This view would be a more faithful account of the composer’s life, but it would also radically change the way we understand Beethoven and the subsequent ‘progress’ of music history in our textbooks. And this, perhaps, points to the most critical function of sacred music: to reveal the hearts of its hearers. The Missa solemnis, as Beethoven's greatest work, is a capstone which many have rejected as the cornerstone of his oeuvre. Try not to trip up on it.