The Great “Friends” Rewatch: How Does It Hold Up?

Like many a GenX-er, I watched “Friends” in real time and had multiple discussions as to which Friend we were most like. Also like many folks my age, I rewatched one of the quintessential 1990s sitcoms because my son wanted to see it. So, how does it hold up?

The Early Years

We started the show in February 2022 via HBOMax, watching an episode a night over dinner. My son continued watching after he moved out of the house last July. He completed the show’s run this past February. My wife and I finished that last episode this past weekend. Ten years of “Friends” condensed down to a year and a half.

Having watched the Reunion Show when it first aired in 2021, we know what the six actors look like as middle-aged people. We’ve seen them grow older just like we’ve all watched ourselves get older every morning in the mirror. As a result, it’s incredibly cute and charming to watch those early seasons. They were all so young.

We all were.

Every Thursday night, we’d watch the antics of these six people and usually commiserate with them. Yes, being out on your own could be difficult, but when you have a support system, it can be manageable.

What is also readily apparent is that the cast captured lightening in a bottle. They were so good together, feeding off each other, and developing their characters with each new episode.

During the rewatch, I remembered the big things. That’s the kind of thing that having blocks of episodes on TBS and TNT all the time will do for you. But it was still a little bit magical to be watching the series again in order. Naturally, in our streaming world, season-ending cliffhangers are nothing considering the service just cues up the next episode while the credits are rolling.

Rewatch Observations

With a knowledge of the show ingrained in my mind, a few things stuck out this time.

Ross gets made fun of way too much for being smart. Yeah, the dinosaur jokes can be funny and I laughed at them, but the guy has a PhD. He teaches and, by the end of the series, he has earned tenure. You can’t really compare the careers of the six Friends, but Ross’s career was the most consistent for ten years. That’s a remarkable achievement. I didn’t have a working career like that although I certainly wanted one. Schwimmer’s performance as Ross got better and better over the years. He was always good for a laugh, especially his knack for saying one thing, hearing something else, and then instantly pivoting.

Joey seemed to get dumber as his heart grew three sizes. Look, he was always dim and behind the curve, but after ten years, he just seemed dumber. His “How you doin’?” line remained funny every time he delivered it. Like many of us who’ve changed our attitudes as we get older, Joey softened his libido by the end, and it seemed to occur around the time he fell for Rachel. Yet one obvious thing I noticed on the rewatch: Joey was the only character not moving on in the show. I had forgotten that he didn’t get the Hollywood gig until his own show. So, by the end, he was left behind.

A lot of the Phoebe stuff I had forgotten, including her wedding. Oh, I remembered Paul Rudd was the one, but the ins and outs of Phoebe’s development was lost to time. On the rewatch, I rather enjoyed her near complete openness of who she was and what she wanted. And she stayed mostly weird, which I thought at the time—and especially now on the rewatch—thoroughly refreshing. She didn’t try to conform.

In some ways, Monica was in a rush to grow up and get that fancy house with the husband and children she ultimately got. Her hyper-organization was a punchline most of the time—and she would have been annoying to be around when she was like that—but she had a vision of her life and knew how she wanted it to go. That’s why I think the Richard sub-plot resonated so much. He was the answer to her dreams even if he was older. Which was why when she and Chandler hooked up, it seemed odd. Sure, I knew why he wanted her, but why did she fall in love with him and then stay? There were moments when she’d profess her love to him, but she wouldn’t always show it. But when she proposed…that was wonderful.

Speaking of Chandler, it is difficult not to factor in what I learned when I listened to Matthew Perry’s autobiography and the struggles he endured. I was never a tabloid reader back in the day so I truly didn’t know all the details of his struggles, but his weight fluctuations were certainly obvious. In my group of friends back in the 90s, I was the Chandler so I always gravitated to him anyway, especially his tendency to motor-mouth his way through awkward situations. His jokes nearly always landed for me (and that’s now knowing how much pressure Perry was under to land all those jokes). He was my favorite back in the day and he ended up being my favorite on the rewatch. One more thing about Perry: when Chandler had those soft moments, when he wasn’t being his sarcastic self, and especially with Monica (like when he told her they got the house or when he lobbied the birth mother to choose him and Monica as parents), he knocked it out of the park. I really appreciated what he brought to the character.

And then there’s Rachael. Jennifer Aniston is really good at bringing this character to life so this is not a slight against her but Rachel grew increasingly annoying and self-centered as the years wore on. It became irritating to watch and more and more difficult not to roll my eyes. In fact, it was her storylines that kept my wife and I from watching every night, opting for other TV shows. Of course, I always remember one of her last lines in the show—“I got off the plane.”—and was grinning from ear to ear when I watched it again.

That Last Episode and How It’s Changed

Endings always hit me hard, but I reflected on when the first time I saw the finale in 2004 vs again in 2023. Now, I’m a middle-aged husband, father, and established corporate worker, with our son now living on his own vs the thirtysomething guy I was back in 2004 with a young boy living at home and early in my career. Actually, in an interesting bit of projection, I now see Friends through the prism of my son as he starts his life away from home, finding and nurturing his own set of friends. It is a rite of passage we all go through and now it’s his turn.

The characters (as shown in a late episode when Chandler and Ross went to their Class of 1991 reunion) are exactly my age and the rewatch also unlocked some memories from when I was watching in the 1990s. I started to recall some of aspects of my life as a twentysomething who was going to graduate school (for a career I didn’t follow) and living on my own.

When it came to dreams of my future as I imagined them in the 1990s, I am most like Monica: I wanted the corporate job, the wife, the kid, the house, the dog, the daily newspaper, and all of that. I got it. Well, minus the newspaper. When it comes to me being unique and keeping my weird self alive, I am still a Phoebe. Even if I don’t teach history, I still earned that degree, like Ross, and am known as the history guy to pretty much everyone. I joke constantly and while they’re not as sarcastic as Chandler, they’re funny enough. And, lastly, unlike Rachel—who got off her plane—I got on a plane, twenty-five years ago today, with a group of people I didn’t know to go on a mission trip to Guatemala. Among the group was a lady I’d meet, fall in love with, and marry.

The Rewatch Verdict

I’ll always watch “Friends” in reruns. I’m so glad I watched the show again, especially with my wife and son. It remains one of my favorite shows.

Like nearly every TV show, “Friends” is a time machine. It is one of the quintessential shows of the 1990s. It will always be there to help Gen-Xers like me remember what it was like to sit in front of a TV every Thursday night for a decade and see a version of yourself on screen. But it’s popularity has extended to the next generation as well. That’s a testament to how special this show remains. I suspect it’ll remain evergreen for a long time.

As for the six friends, even though we know what the actors look like now, they’ll always be frozen in their own special amber. One of the best things that’s happen is that there was never a reunion movie. (The Reunion Special is different.) We don’t need to see that. For one thing, it robs the specialiness of the original program. But it also means that those stories we’ve all written about what happened to those six Friends remains special as well. Because those stories are ours.

Epilogue: A Word about Dreams

Speaking of the dreams of our youths, seen through the prism of the middle-aged guy I am, a recurring theme has coursed through me often in these past few years. It pops its head up in strange ways, most recently in season two of “The Bear.”

When it comes to your dreams, it’s never too late.

Sure, if you want to climb Mr. Everest by age thirty or move to Nashville and became a recording star by age thirty-five, it is too late. But for those dreams of yours that your younger self dreamed, especially those creative dreams—want to be a writer, musician, painter, gardener, whatever—it is never too late to start.

So start.