‘Friends’ Season 1 Is Still a Perfect Season of TV, 25 Years Later

Today is the 25th anniversary of Friends, and wow is there a lot going on. There’s a pop-up tourist attraction in New York City, movie theaters are showing select episodes on the big screen, the London Metropolitan Orchestra recorded a version of the theme in Abbey Road Studios, and Meghan Trainor will even drop her own cover while the Empire State Building lights up in the logo’s blue, yellow, and red. I’m not kidding. That’s a thing that’s happening. All that coupled with the fact that the kids these days are obsessed with the show and fans are fretting over a pivot to HBO Max when the show leaves Netflix next year makes it seem like Friends is more popular than ever—even more popular than it was back in the ’90s when over 25 million people would tune in every Thursday night to watch Ross scream at his pants, his sandwich, a tanning booth, etc. I love Friends, too, but I have to admit that all this adoration feels a bit like the Peanuts kids losing sight of the true meaning of Christmas so they can cut a rug in the school auditorium.

That’s why I’m here to be the Linus. We’re all talking about Friends, but no one is actually talking about Friends—specifically Friends as it existed 25 years ago. I’m talking about the show before Paul Rudd, before Monica’s Barbados hair, before Rachel had a career, before Chandler hated dogs, before Ross’ second and third divorce. I’m talking about the show before it became the show that everyone, from your best friends to your worst enemies, could quote. I’m talking about the show that was a legitimate game-changer, a show led by six bolts of lightning all striking in the same place at the same time. Friends is so overwhelmingly popular that people either focus on the big jokes (Monica and Ross’ dance routine) or drag the show to hell because of those lowest-common-denominator gags and the show’s straight-up bad streak of homophobia and body-shaming. To paraphrase Charlie Brown: “Isn’t there anyone who knows what Friends is all about?” I can. Could I be any more Linus?

Friends‘ legacy, as far as I’m concerned, could begin and end with Season 1. I’m not saying it should; many, many, many of the show’s best episodes aired in Season 2 (“The One with the Prom Video”), Season 3 (“The One Where No One’s Ready”), Season 4 (the series’ best ep, “The One with the Embryos”), or Season 5 (“The One Where Everybody Finds Out”). But in the pantheon of sitcom history, Friends sits up there with The Mary Tyler Moore Show, Cheers, and The Golden Girls as a sitcom that had a truly legendary first season. Seinfeld can’t say that. The Office can’t say that. Parks and Recreation can’t say that. Friends can because of episodes like “The One with the Blackout,” “The One Where Underdog Gets Away,” “The One with All the Poker,” “The One with the Birth,” “The One Where Rachel Finds Out,” and a lot more—including the pilot.

Let’s talk about that pilot and dispel the one baseless diss I see repeated by haters way too often: Friends is not a Seinfeld ripoff. I’ll go further and say that Friends‘ premise was actually revolutionary, so revolutionary that no one post-1994 recognizes it because we are viewing an entertainment landscape that the show helped create (How I Met Your Mother, Happy Endings, New Girl, etc.). The revolutionary difference between these two NYC-based hang out sitcoms: Seinfeld was about adults, and Friends was about twenty-somethings.

Doesn’t sound revolutionary, does it? It was. It was because prior to Friends, sitcoms fell into one of two categories: they either starred a family or co-workers. Done. That was it. Cheers and Seinfeld upended that first, sure, but they didn’t go as far as Friends did—because Friends didn’t star adults. The Cheers and Seinfeld casts were functioning adults. They juggled kids, spouses, careers (except Kramer, but Kramer was 40). They weren’t cool in the way that everyone in their early-to-mid-20s hopes they’re cool.

But baked into Friends‘ premise, cooked up by co-creators Marta Kauffman and David Crane, was the idea that this sextet didn’t have it all together. Chandler had a job he hated, Joey was a struggling actor, Ross had a career but a failed marriage, Monica had a career but a fractured relationship with her mother, Rachel had no career and a failed engagement, and Phoebe… was Phoebe. They were young adults figuring it out, an untapped source of material. Think about it: Friends essentially stars characters that are just older than the teen characters that get written out of the family sitcom. This hadn’t been done before.

And NBC was terrified.

That’s why Season 1 is filled with so many Adults, from visiting parents (you meet the Gellers as well as Joey’s parents and Chandler’s mom) to Mr. Heckles and Rachel’s boss (played by Max Wright, the exact guy you hire to play put upon parental figure). None of those recurring characters would ever become regulars, because that wasn’t what the show was about. There was no Wilson or Mike Brady for the friends to turn to. They had themselves. And that’s right there in the pilot, when the other five crowd around Monica’s kitchen table to cheer Rachel on while she cuts up her credit cards.

Friends Season 1 was one of the first, if not the first, sitcom to show what that time in your life is like—and it starts off with a perfect pilot. Pilots are rough. They’re full of exposition, actors feeling out their parts, and are rarely indicative of what the show would be. Like, Seinfeld’s pilot didn’t have Elaine and The Golden Girls did have Coco. Huh, right? And then there’s Friends, a show that miraculously knew exactly what show it was from the first scene. That scene? The friends hanging out at Central Perk, talking about dates, dreams, random stuff. To quote George Costanza, “There’s a show, that’s a show.”

What makes the irreverent, pop-culture-laced material sing, really, are those performances. It’s wild to think of the cosmic coincidences that had to occur for those six actors to get on this show in those roles, because they are all perfect from episode one—and they only get better. There aren’t a lot of big, memorable set pieces in Season 1, not like “pivot” or Rachel’s beef trifle, which might be why the show Friends started out as gets lost. Because what Friends started out as was—believe it or not!—subtler, wittier, and realer than any show on TV at the time and any multi-cam on TV right now. Instead of big physical comedy moments or shouted punchlines, early Friends relied on the performances, and they were instantly brilliant.

Just look at the showcase of inspired comedic choices! The way David Schwimmer says “anyway,” the way Lisa Kudrow chose to hit “statement” like a sledgehammer, the way Matthew Perry makes the most convoluted quips sound effortless—how were they this good that fast?

But the cast was that good that fast, and Season 1 (and the early seasons) celebrated that chemistry. Unlike in latter seasons when all the conflict came internally (like when the friends decided to ditch Emma’s birthday or bail on Thanksgiving???), they are a unified front from the jump. That’s why the first Thanksgiving episode, “The One Where Underdog Gets Away,” is such a classic; it’s the first time the six friends bicker, and it’s jarring. There’s a natural affection between the six of them, between the guys (Joey tells Ross he loves him and kisses him on the neck!) and the girls. Especially the girls—and can we talk about them for a second?

Monica, Phoebe, and Rachel are, repeatedly and without fail, depicted as fully-formed characters that get half the jokes and—shockingly for 1994—possess so much sexual agency. Monica has sex with a guy on the first date in the pilot! The same can be said of The Golden Girls, but those women were mature and had already done the dance of marriage and kids. Friends, on the other hand, presented young, independent, sexually active women who weren’t ashamed of it and also not shamed for it.

They even avoided the bickering sitcom pitfalls. When Phoebe tells Rachel that her Italian stud muffin BF Paolo made a pass at her, Rachel believes Phoebe instantly. There’s no jealousy, no “you must be mistaken,” just straight-up, “You’re my friend and obviously I believe you over this guy I’m boning.” It’s refreshing.

Not everything about Friends has remained fresh, though, and haters are always quick to point out that the show did a lot of fat-shaming and gay panic jokes that were bad then and worse now. But. That’s not Season 1. This is before Kathleen Turner played Chandler’s father, and before the show conflated being a drag queen with being trans with being gay (ugh), and before Courteney Cox put on the fat suit for the millionth time. I’m definitely not saying Season 1 is perfect by 2019 standards (this stuff shouldn’t have been fine by 1994 standards, either). There’s a gross joke about Joey, actor/model, being a man/woman because he’s wearing makeup. An entire episode is devoted to Chandler not being gay. All of the “villains” are people of size (the antagonistic nurse in Episode 4, the antagonistic laundry lady in Episode 5, the “planet with a purse” that knocks Rachel down in Episode 10). It’s not a good look, but it looks better than the latter half of the run when 90% of Chandler’s “jokes” involved some version of “no homo,” and when the show kept contorting to get Cox back in the suit again (an alternate reality two-parter, really??).

And then there’s Carol (Jane Sibbett) and Susan (Jessica Hecht), whose progressive inclusion gets lost in the discourse about those homophobic latter seasons (which, coincidentally?, mostly didn’t include Carol and Susan). Carol and Susan are great. Not only are they great, they’re characters with dignity and never treated as villains (Phoebe says of Ross’ ex-wife in Episode 2, “She’s so great, I miss her”). Okay, Susan is antagonistic to Ross, but the show isn’t antagonistic to her—and that’s an important distinction. Seriously, the writers gave Susan quite possibly the best joke of the entire season, and Hecht slays it. After Ross (ignorantly) comments, “Sure do have a bunch of books about being a lesbian…”

Carol and Susan were essentially treated as the leads of their own sitcom, a show that I wish we could’ve seen. Yeah, the fact that Ross’ wife left him for a woman was initially a cheeky detail, but instead of letting them be off-screen lesbians, outright adversaries, or inherently mockable, Friends let them be people, a couple with an attraction to each other at a time when being gay on TV was still very much not okay. Their inclusion was important.

Friends lasted a whole lot longer than its first season, and those 24 episodes only comprise 10% of the show’s run. A lot more would happen, a lot more births and a lot more vows and a lot more unconventional pets (okay, Marcel… was Season 1’s big mistake). The show got bigger, louder, and in some ways meaner. I think it became a completely different show as the characters were whittled down to their jokey essences (for example, Monica’s only competitive and a compulsive cleaner in, like, three episodes of Season 1 as opposed to every minute of every episode).But Season 1, this 10% of the show’s output, is reason enough to celebrate Friends and silence critics that dismiss it as a Seinfeld knock-off with homophobic jokes set in stupid huge apartment. Friends was legit TV magic when it appeared fully formed on Thursday night, September 22, 1994. It delivered jokes we’d never heard from a cast we hadn’t seen with characters and attitudes that pushed TV forward a little bit. That’s why Friends mattered, it’s why we’re still talking about Friends today, and it’s why I will always be there for it.

That’s what Friends is all about, Charlie Brown.

Where to watch Friends