The year is 1994 and the date is September 22nd. "Friends" debuts. Is this worthy of a blog text? How dare you ask that question? OF COURSE, IT IS!
Let me explain.
Up until this series was produced, no one had ever seen anything like this. Sure, there were
TV series which were quite popular, like Cheers or Fame, but this was different – a group of friends, young adults (6, to be precise) living together in New York (ok, the girls lived across the hall from the boys, but still, I mean, they were always together), trying to be happy, overcoming the obstacles typical of their age and amusing us immensely. There have been many sitcoms till today, but how many actors and actresses remain as famous as Jennifer Anniston, Courteney Cox or Matthew Perry? Right, very few.
Back to the show – it featured a group of unknown actors – although it wouldn’t take long
for this to change - and for 10 seasons it would be the most incredible hit. To prove this, all the cast—Jennifer Aniston, Courteney Cox, Lisa Kudrow, Matt LeBlanc, Matthew Perry and David Schwimmer— achieved varying degrees of stardom and success in Hollywood.
The most famous of all the members of this “family” was, without a doubt, Jennifer Aniston.
She played Rachel Green, a fashion-loving girl, who she was a mere waitress at Central Perk, a coffee shop in New York, when the show began (by the way, what a clever and funny name, imho, a word game with Central Park!). That coffee shop was used by these six friends as a gathering spot. Rachel became incredibly famous and her hairstyle actually got its own name – the Rachel! In truth, her sense of fashion was copied by women around the globe (it still is, 30 years later, Jennifer Anniston is still a fashion reference). She would end up becoming a tabloid-media favourite after she started a relationship with the actor Brad Pitt.
As to Courteney Cox, when the show debuted, she was already a famous actress, the most
well-known of the gang. She played Monica Geller, a super-organized chef who seemed to show some evidence of OCD She had previously acted in the popular sitcom Family Ties and she had also co-starred in 1994’s hit comedy Ace Ventura, Pet Detective (1994) with Jim Carey.
The third female Friends cast member, Lisa Kudrow, portrayed Phoebe Buffay, a musician,
masseuse, funny girl with a sort of an out-of-this-wordly nature. She is one of the funniest and craziest characters of the series. She has a simple approach to life and with her naivety, she sometimes can see the obvious when everyone else fails to do so.
As to the male Friends, the most famous and the funniest, in my view, is Matt LeBlanc, who plays the role of Joey Tribbiani, a handsome but not
very smart actor, who actually became successful as the young and handsome Dr. Drake Ramoray, on the soap opera Days of Our Lives. He was always trying to achieve success and he believed he had “the move” with the ladies, although most of his relationships failed.
David Schwimmer, or Ross Geller, was a sensitive paleontologist and Monica’s older. He
had been married, but his ex-wife had revealed to him that she was gay and wanted to live with another women, so he is single when the series starts, even though he and his ex have a son. One of the main storylines on Friends was Ross’s troubled relationship with Rachel. They were together,then broke up, then made up, then separated…. Maaaaany times.
Finally, the last “friend” was Matthew Perry, who played the businessman Chandler Bing, the
one with a particular, but smart, sense of humour. He would end up falling in love with Monica and the two eventually got married.
The saddest of days was May 6 and the year was 2004: over 50 million viewers tuned in to
the final episode of Friends, making it one of the most-watched TV finales in history. All over the world, people guaranteed that they would be dearly missed. Even nowadays, lots of teens and young adults worldwide are watching the series… and loving it. Timeless indeed.
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