The enduring appeal of Friends

I would love to have been there at the original pitch meeting for Friends, ‘So yeah, it’s about a bunch of friends.’ Pitching The Office must have been similarly brusque, ‘It’s about some office workers working in an office.’ And The Simpsons? ‘Oh yeah, that’s the one about a family called… the Simpsons’.

Like all great comedies, the premise for Friends is so simple it sounds almost facile. But embedded within the simplicity of the idea is the entirety of human experience; the joys, the sadnesses, the heartache and the tragedy; it’s all there in Ross’s remarkable range of expressions that ran from deep melancholy to boyish wonder.

The nerdy Ross, played by David Schwimmer, along with his best buds Chandler, Rachel, Phoebe, Monica and Joey are back on our screens for the first time in seventeen years in a one off reunion imaginatively titled Friends: The Reunion (or as some are calling it, ‘the one where they get back together’).