Review
Culture
Film & TV
Friendship
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 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.

Essay
Culture
Weirdness
9 min read

The secret world of spiritual experiences

Amid prevailing cultural suspicions towards religion, exploring spiritual experiences reveals their profound significance to individuals and civilizations. Dan Kim calls for an open-minded investigation into the nature of reality.

Daniel is an advertising strategist turned vicar-in-training.

Spiritual Experiences in London
Image generated by Dan Kim using Midjourney

In the spring of 1945, Psychologist Genevieve Foster, a chartered member of the New York Analytical Psychology Club, awoke from a nap and experienced a visionary experience where she saw a luminous figure of a human. This shining person flooded the entire room with dazzling light. There were no words or names between Foster and this figure except the experience of “an interchange, a flood, flowing both ways, of love”.  

She had no idea what was happening to her.  

She was a psychologist, and fully committed to the scientific method. Religious experiences were easily explained away as hallucinations or weird brain hiccups. But she couldn’t shake the feeling that this was real! This vision lasted for five days. Five days. Afterwards, she tried to talk to her husband and one colleague about the experience. Both became very alarmed and dissuaded her from talking about it any further or even entertaining the possibility that this experience could have been real.  

It was only in 1985 that she began to speak publicly about it. She had kept what she describes as, “the most important thing that has ever happened to me”, a shameful secret for 40 years.  

These experiences are often the most important moments of a person’s life and can even form the foundations of entire cultures and civilisations. 

When it comes to unexplainable spiritual experiences, we are advised by sensible Western society to sweep them under the rug immediately and never talk about them. Except maybe at the pub after a pint or ten. The modern world has been taking part in the most elaborate mass self-censorship campaign to date.  

In the 1990s, a Swedish study interviewed 50 people who had lost spouses in the previous year. They were asked whether they had experienced any form of contact with their dead partner. Only one person, a spiritualist, enthusiastically admitted she had. However, when the interviewer informed them that this experience was a common part of the grieving process, that one became 25. That’s an astronomical leap from two per cent to 50 per cent of respondents as soon as they were given permission to speak out. Clearly, they were so fearful of being thrown into the loony bin. Dale Allison points out this widespread self-censorship in his 2022 book Encountering Mystery: Religious Experiences in a Secular Age where he notes that this phenomenon means that these experiences go under-reported, under-researched, and under-understood by most people in the West today.  

Spiritual experiences are a universal part of human life, taking various forms such as ecstatic bliss, out-of-body visions, awe-inspiring mystical unity, death-bed visions, near-death experiences, intense feelings of love, and encounters with sublime beauty. Indeed, they are often described as religious experiences. These encounters are often pivotal moments in a person's life, sometimes laying the foundation for entire cultures and civilizations. Historical accounts, including Moses’ encounter with the Burning Bush, Siddhartha Gautama's transcendent enlightenment, and Paul's Damascus Road vision, testify to the profound significance of these experiences as sources of spiritual knowledge and meaning. This is just as true today. I’m reminded of the famous atheist A.J. Ayer who “saw a divine being” during a near-death experience after which he said:  

“I am afraid I’m going to have to revise all my various books and opinions”.  

I certainly don’t think Ayer was the gullible type. 

You’d be better off being a conspiracy theorist than a sincere modern mystic. 

Yet, despite their profound importance, there has been a concerted cultural campaign to stigmatise, dismiss and reduce these experiences to purely internal, psychological events. Any claim that these experiences might, in any way, be real has been ridiculed and consigned to Glastonbury-like New Age festivals and niche subcultures that use words like ‘astral projection’. You’d be better off being a conspiracy theorist than a sincere modern mystic.  

We’ve created the societal conditions where the most important events of people’s lives are hidden like dirty little secrets by insisting on a tame, clinically sanitised, spiritually inert universe.  

However, it seems as though in the 21st Century, the tide is turning. Allison notes a remarkable statistic from Pew Research America. In 1962, only 22 per cent of pollsters said that they had had what they would describe as a religious experience. In 2009, that number was up to 49 per cent. Now, I really don’t think this is because there’s been an increase in divine intervention. That would be weird! Instead, the statistic is cultural evidence that shows that the zeitgeist is changing and is denting the widespread self-censorship. 

It is only relatively recently that we’ve started to catalogue and analyse religious experiences from around the world. The most extensive archive, The Alister Hardy Religious Experience Research Centre, was only founded in 1969 and has, to date, collected 6,000 first-hand spiritual experiences which is ever-increasing. We’ve only just begun to tap into this rich data let alone archive even a fraction of these experiences.  

How reliable are these first-hand accounts, you might ask? Couldn’t you take each individual case and find materialist explanations for every one of them? Perhaps, but as William James wrote over 100 years ago, “Weak sticks make strong bundles”. It appears people of all ages, cultures, and creeds experience an ‘unseen realm’ and sincerely believe them to be genuine and true. These experiences have a material impact on their lives and even on whole civilisations. So, we should at the very least be careful in suggesting that humans have been experiencing mass corporate delusions from the dawn of time itself. In fact, that would be a pretty bleak conclusion with even bleaker implications. As Allison puts it, if all spiritual experiences turn out to be purely psychological illusions:  

“We would be forced to conclude that a widespread, cross-cultural human experience, one that commonly moves people to use the word ‘God’ and regularly prods them to become more loving and less selfish, an experience that far more often than not feels wholly real and indeed self-authenticating, and experience than even children of two or three years old have reported is, at bottom, illusory.” 

This wouldn’t just affect how we view spiritual experiences but every experience that we have. If our experience of the world is so unreliable, then how are we to trust even our rational minds and the conclusions we come to? How can we trust our vision and our sense of touch? So, the stakes are pretty high about what we make of all this.  

Behind the question of spiritual experiences is the more profound question about the nature of reality itself. Is there a spiritual realm? Do we have souls? Can there be a God or gods? These questions are so critically important that we shouldn’t just take on cultural assumptions wholesale.  

It is only in the last 30 years that we’ve discovered that 95% of our universe is made up of dark matter and dark energy, which are just sci-fi-sounding names given to the totally invisible, unmeasurable, unobservable ‘stuff’ that govern the structure of the universe. If we were to somehow map the entire universe with the most advanced technologies from the smallest atom to the largest galactic superstructures, we would still only have access to 5% of the universe. That’s staggering! Spiritual experiences and dark matter have that in common. While we can’t see dark matter with any of our scientific instruments, we can see their effects on the visible universe like their gravitational impact on the universe, and the expansion of the universe. That’s how we can speculate about its existence.  

In a similar way, spiritual experiences compose a significant chunk of the mystery that is the human experience, and we can see their effects on people and on human cultures. And the crucial question becomes, what causes them? Is it a pure psychological illusion, or is there something real but unobservable causing them? Materialism has never been ‘proved’ but it has been culturally assumed, and in fairness, not without some good reason. Scientific instruments and discoveries have shown that many things that were once considered supernatural or spiritual are in fact explainable by totally natural causes. A healthy scepticism is always welcome, but somewhere along the line, a huge leap was made that said:  

‘Because we can attribute some spiritual events to natural causes, we can assume that all of reality consists of natural causes only’.  

That’s a dogmatic statement, not an evidential one. That’s a bit like insisting that only 5% of the universe really exists because it’s the only 5% we can accurately measure. You might still not be convinced, but my call is simply for open-mindedness. Whether or not there is a spiritual dimension to reality is by no means a closed case. It begs continual investigation and genuine wrestling.  

I could hear the waves of the sea, but it was as if I was one with it; the stars above me seemed to shine with a supernatural brightness. 

When I was 15 years old, I had my first spiritual experience. I was sitting on a beach, late one night, with three friends talking about life, faith, and meaning. (Yes, 15-year-old boys do have moments of sincerity…) At some point, one of them suggested that we try praying to God and see what happens. We were all vaguely Christians. We said some faltering teenage prayers asking God to turn up. At In that moment, I felt an awesome, physical weight on my shoulders. It wasn’t painful or scary, but it was overwhelming. There was a tender warmth and a sense of presence; an infinite love that accompanied the weight. I could hear the waves of the sea, but it was as if I was one with it; the stars above me seemed to shine with a supernatural brightness. Words can’t describe the experience except for “I met God”. What was striking was that we all had this similar experience together.  

That experience lasted maybe two minutes, but those two minutes shifted the trajectory of my life. I am now a Christian with all the bells and whistles like miracles, resurrection, afterlife... And look, I’m not gullible. Maybe I was primed, perhaps it was placebo wish-fulfilment, maybe it was something in the water or just a run-of-the-mill hallucination. Despite this, I am fully and rationally convinced that my experience was real; not just in a subjective in-my-head reality, but a genuine something-outside-the-material-realm-met-me kind of reality. So obviously, this is also a very personal question. The stakes are high. But it’s not just for me but for many, if not most, people in our lives.  

If it turns out that only a fraction of spiritual experiences are real... the universe becomes wilder and infinitely more exciting and untamed than the 20th Century would have us believe 

I can tell you now that I can probably explain away most of the stories I have heard from friends and strangers about spiritual experiences to coincidence, enthusiasm, lack of sleep, and mushrooms.

But not all… and that’s crucial.

Even if 99 per cent of them are total illusions, that one per cent has the potential to change everything. If it turns out that only a fraction of spiritual experiences are real, that they are actually moments when a human being encounters something beyond the material world, everything changes. The universe becomes wilder and infinitely more exciting and untamed than the 20th Century would have us believe. No longer an inert mass of stardust, our world becomes ablaze with spiritual fire. Things that we find most valuable in human existence then start to have the potential to be real. Actually real. Love can be real. Beauty can be real. Our sense of self-worth and infinite dignity can be real. God can also be real which raises complicated emotions.  

Your spiritual experiences don’t make you crazy. They make you human. The question is, what are you going to do about it? You could ignore them and explain them away, continuing with the materialist dogma of today. That’s safe, but you could also risk missing out on the most important experiences and insights of your entire life. I often wonder how different Genevieve Foster’s life may have been had she been able to openly talk about and explore the implications of her experience. Or, you could pay attention to them and see where they lead. They don’t come often, and they don’t last very long but when they come, they are like unexpected gifts that have the potential to change your life forever.