Nineties Nostalgia and the post Friends sitcom

When I was walking back from Uni the other day, after staying too late and getting too little done, i began reminiscing of the nineties. As a child of the nineties there's a lot I damn well miss. As much as i really didn't like them, I miss the Spice Girls. Compared to Nicki Minaj and Justin Beiber, they're damn well likeable. People used phones as phones and there wasn't one attached to every ear, palm and God know where else. The lights seemed rosier, the streets seemed cheerier and the Coca Cola Christmas adverts were loveable  awesome and told you it when was Christmas. It was a bloody good time to be alive.

In amongst this haze of wallowing nostalgia I began to recollect  something that was definitive of nineties popculture - Friends. Now for those of you who have lived under a rock, under the sea, under six miles of ice for the last twenty years and just literally managed to get out, Congratulations. Welcome to the world. Here's a smidge of knowledge you may have missed during your incarceration by the cod people of Nanunaktu. Friends was a sitcom that took place in New York about a group of six twenty somethings and their navigation through life and relationships. It lasted for ten seasons and recently celebrated the nine year anniversary of its finale.

Now fans have been pleading for a Friends reunion/movie much like Sex and The City and the supposedly upcoming Entourage movie for a wee while, but it's been remarked upon time and time again that It's not going to happen. Moving past the fact that it's ended and people should let it rest in peace, I began wondering one of the cheesy and obvious things that people tend to wonder when things are over. What's the new one? What's the latest version? What's the replacement? What could be considered as the latest Friends?

You could even include
Friends spoof Chums
to the mix

Well, several shows can be considered. Since Friends began coming to a close, and even before that, there's been an onslaught of shows hoping to capture the same success that Friends achieved. Cases have been made for Big Bang Theory, New Girl and Happy Endings and all have valid points. Big Bang is filmed in front of a live audience and the main characters do live across the hall from each other. New Girl does have the 'will they won't they' kinda is kinda isn't romance. While Happy Endings has the close knit friends in a big city that all kicks off when a bride runs out of her wedding.

But that doesn't stop the similarity for other shows. How I Met Your Mother has the same close knit group and even city that Friends had making it all the more a candidate (as well as having one or two brides running from their weddings). Then again an argument could be made for Community, a show about a makeshift family with a setting they share that acts as their 'home'. Even shows like Modern Family could be thrown into the arena as well, emulating similare themes to later Friends seasons like gay parents and remarriage. Arguments could be made every which way from Sunday for the place of the new Friends, but maybe that's approaching it the wrong way.

Yep. Not so secret.

With a nine year legacy, a ten year tenure (try saying that ten times fast) and a legion of fans still hoping for a comeback, Friends clearly made a hell of an impact. I mean the finale got 52.5 million viewers! It's resonated with audiences young and old and left a mark. To this day you can't use "How you doing?" as a pick up line without seeming like a copycat. You can't bump your fists together as a sign of secret profanity, because it's not so secret and you can't say that no one told you life was going to be this way without clapping afterwards. Looking at the shows that it could be compared to, Friends seems to have acted more like a meme, and no not like Condescending Wonka. More like,

An element of a culture or behavior that may be passed from one individual to another by nongenetic means, esp. imitation.

It's become a sort of standard or template for other shows to match, and with so many similarities out there, it's almost inextricable from other shows to actually compare them. Shows have come to behave so much more like it, with will they-won't they romances (New Girl and How I met Your Mother), self referential humour (Community) or an urbanistic setting and focal hangout (Happy Endings). Friends has left a hell of a legacy. Having made such an impact and defining an era, you can't just compare other sitcoms with Friends willy nilly. You have to ask, what's done the same thing for this era as Friends did for the nineties? And that's a whole different answer entirely.

What do you think? You can Comment here or Tweet any views to @yjinkscrawler. Any previous readers may recognise I was talking about getting a Tweet portal and, et voila, I have. So be sure to hit me up there.

Have a little nugget of nineties nostalgia as well.