'Friends' is the most enduring, influential portrait of Generation X that American pop culture has ever produced. Yet that label, weirdly, never gets placed on it. chaneyj writes
Only a Gen X–er would own and keep this T-shirt. Photo: Netflix When Friends debuted on NBC in 1994, members of the media often described it as a Generation X show. A New York Times story published that September, just weeks before Friends aired for the first time, called it “a new Generation X sitcom.” People magazine’s TV critic suggested that the characters spoke like “they’re in some Gen X Neil Simon play.
It wasn’t just a case of baby boomers trying to keep the Xers down, though. In the same Register article, even the stars of the show, most of whom were Xers themselves, said they didn’t care for the descriptor. Matt LeBlanc: “I don’t like it as a label. I’ve heard it used as ‘lazy,’ ‘unfocused,’ ‘drifty.’ But we’re one of the first generations to really care about the environment.” Jennifer Aniston: “It’s almost an insulting comment. It has nothing to do with this show.
The other potential pitfall of framing Friends as a Gen X show back in 1994 was the possibility that doing so might alienate viewers. This may be hard for younger Friends fans to wrap their minds around in the Peak TV era, but in the 1990s, broadcast-television shows still had the potential for truly mass appeal. Networks wanted to attract the widest audience possible, so beating the drum too loudly about a show’s belonging to a specific age group wasn’t seen as a smart move.
The family backgrounds of several characters on Friends also reflected the Xer experience. Phoebe and Chandler were children of broken homes, and Rachel witnessed the dissolution of her parents’ marriage as an adult, after leaving her own fiancé at the altar. Like real-life members of the so-called Divorce Generation, they formed familial bonds with their friends, perhaps because they didn’t feel like they had parents or relatives who could provide a similarly stable support system.
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