10 January

They could re-make Friends for the 21st Century, I'm sure it would do as well again. It's probably not a coincidence that at about the time Friends was originally popular, young people started to move away from more serious, 'settled-down' types of relationships, in work and life, and moved towards friendship as a model. (In work, it was a shift away from the idea of a vocation, towards a constant surfing between jobs as the whim takes you.) Not because the TV show caused this - it more reflected a real shift underway. There are many people who went on gap years after high school at around that time, and are still on them. In the show the Friends end up moving on, to those more settled lives, mostly. But that's not what everybody does now, there are plenty who use friendship as a model for all of life. I don't think that's healthy, it reflects a fear of commitment, to adult life and its problems. Friendship is a quite empty thing in many ways, it can't replace more settled and serious relationships. You don't learn all life needs to teach you if you stop at the friendship stage.