"Right hand, blue" - the Friends characters play a game of Twister

The tears of goodbye shed in the final episode are not just those of six fictional characters saying goodbye to each other. They are the tears of six friends who realise that a huge part of their lives are changing for good.

The characters, however, were only so recognisable because of their oh-too-familiar situation. The surrogate family presented by Friends seemed to provide a comfort to its target audience, who were going through similar struggles as the six leads: dead-end jobs, tiffs with housemates, finding a partner who isn’t completely maladjusted.

Unlike so many sitcoms before it, which had presented their viewers with the finished ideal of the nuclear family, Friends focused on the mid-20s’ “homebuilding” stage, allowing its audience to share in the anxieties and struggles that come before 2point4 Children or The Brady Bunch. This chimed strongly with a generation leaving weddings and children until later and muddling their way through an unstable job market. And it resonated with a large audience of teenagers, who saw this in their future. “It was an explanation and exploration of what it meant to come of age in the Nineties,” explains Rebecca Ryan, futurist and founder of Next Generation Consulting. We weren’t quite as attractive as they were, but our problems were mostly the same.

Channel 4 had this young, aspirational audience in its sights, so it made sure that our own invite to Central Perk came at 9pm every Friday night. This slot was perfect to reach a young crowd “staying in” for the night – teenagers, couples, young parents. This is not to say that the audience was narrow – far from it. My parents joined me every Friday night on that couch and laughed harder than I did.

Repeat viewing

They say familiarity breeds contempt, but somehow Friends has managed to escape it. Is it because this repetition has been fundamental to its form? We were encouraged to join the gang weekly (while always remaining “outside” the group). But Friends also invested particular importance in its three key sets: the coffee house, with its iconic orange couch and Phoebe’s Smelly Cat performances; the girls’ apartment and the boys’ digs, complete with garden furniture and various species of fowl. While we sat and watched in our own living rooms, we saw these spaces reflected week after week. They started to feel like home too. We started to look for the drawing on the Magna Doodle (which the crew members would take turns to do), or the ever-changing “guest beers” stacked on the boys’ fridge. The attention to detail showed a love in the crafting of the show and rewarded loyal viewers.

The theme tune, too, was everywhere. All theme tunes are designed as a trigger to memory. We’re supposed to hear their faint strains, and drop everything to go and watch. The Rembrandts were asked to record the song written by the show’s musical director after artists such as REM had turned the opportunity down. “We thought, ‘Why not?’” says frontman Danny Wilde, “Nobody will even know it was us, anyway”. The single spent 11 weeks at the top of the US charts, and the band still receives performance royalties every time an episode of Friends is aired (Virgin Media estimates the song earned them £3m). “I’ll be there for you”, it promised, and, of course, Friends always was, not just in its weekly broadcast slot but as the background to our daily lives.

Why 'Friends' was and still is a TV phenomenon