Friends: The Reunion – 5 Biggest Takeaways From the HBO Max Special
Friends: The Reunion on HBO Max brings together the combined global star power of Jennifer Aniston, David Schwimmer, Courtney Cox, Matthew Perry, Lisa Kudrow, and Matt LeBlanc, who — according to the special’s opening titles — have only been together in the same room one other time since the show ended in 2004.
17 years on, the cast members still keep in touch and the show’s allure has hardly faded. For every joke that hasn’t aged well, there are ten reaction shots that feel timelessly funny, and the series remains a major fixture of the streaming era, picking up new fans who are as dedicated as the old ones. The reunion episode begins with the six leads trickling into a soundstage one by one where the original sets have been rebuilt, from Rachel and Monica’s spacious purple apartment to Joey and Chandler’s man-cave across the hall. It’s one of the episode’s many trips down memory lane, offering a journey back to a time before TV was on-demand and omnipresent. Viewers only had a narrow window each week (or each day, during eventual re-runs) to spend time with these characters, so the experience felt all the more valuable as it was happening.
The special is largely unstructured, veering between scripted sketches, candid chats, and interview segments in front of an audience, hosted by a thankfully sparse James Corden and staged in front of the iconic fountain from the show’s opening credits. It’s not unlike going through a YouTube playlist of late-night interviews and famous scenes, only now they’re accompanied by little tidbits of context that weren’t previously public. Nothing in the episode is particularly mind-blowing — one reveal, however, is rather sweet — but the pomp and circumstance of the whole affair feels like a deserved victory lap for a pop-culture landmark the likes of which television may never see again.
Here are five things that stand out about Friends: The Reunion, and what they have to say about the special, and the show as a whole.
Friends was no doubt a domestic success with the 2004 series finale bringing in 52 million viewers, but its impact across the globe is practically unparalleled. It influenced everything from fashion to spoken language; “The Rachel” was an unavoidable ’90s hairdo in many countries, while rapper RM, of Korean boyband BTS (who appear in the special), was one of many people who learned English by watching the show. The episode makes passing mention of these two things, interspersed with brief interviews from long-time Friends fans in Russia, Japan, South Africa, France, Ghana, India, Germany, Mexico, and Slovakia. Even Nobel laureate Malala Yousafzai shows up to discuss her favorite episode.
And yet, despite these wide-ranging testimonials, the special still doesn’t manage to capture the full scope of the show’s cultural ripple effects. Take Central Perk Café with its enormous couch, where the characters hang out and chat; while real-life New York would soon become more of a grab-and-go coffee culture with a Starbucks on every corner, the series would go on to influence the way coffee franchises themselves would manifest in many parts of the world. For instance, at the turn of the century, India’s largely tea-drinking status quo was rivaled by a youth culture whose de-facto hangout was lounging at cozy cafes for hours on end; most Indian Starbucks and other name brand coffee chains are replete with comfy couches (a Friends-like environment is often expected). Not many shows can lay claim to directly influencing urban infrastructure, but there are now Central Perk replica locations everywhere from England to Egypt to Singapore.
While the special doesn’t fully reflect the scale of Friends’ massive impact, what it does manage to do is focus on the actors, characters, and creators who made the series such a global phenomenon to begin with.
The Show’s Humble Origins
It’s hard to imagine a time before the six leads were household names. But solo interviews with the show’s creators, David Crane and Marta Kaufman, offer a nice behind-the-scenes look at the casting process for each character, and glimpses at what might have been. Perry and Aniston were cast while they were regulars on other sitcoms, for example, while Schwimmer had quit television altogether prior to being sought out. The series was strikingly close to being different by a whole fifty percent.
Perhaps other people would have filled each role adequately, but in watching the actors simply sit and talk, it becomes apparent how similar they are to their respective characters. So much of what Friends became was a product of their real personalities, so the special plays almost like a real episode chronicling the post-finale lives of Rachel, Ross, Monica, Chandler, Phoebe, and Joey. Even the way the episode begins, with each actor entering one by one, feels like it should be accompanied by the cheers of a studio audience.
The special doesn’t get into what these people’s lives were actually like before the show — a few familiar tidbits are off-handedly mentioned, like LeBlanc being down to his last $11 when he auditioned — so anyone hoping for a peek into each actor’s history might find themselves disappointed. It’s more of a variety show than an in-depth profile, but in-between its scripted moments and copious celebrity cameos, the reunion also manages to capture candid moments between the cast.
Unscripted Friendships
The special has no shortage of planned celebrity appearances, from familiar guest stars like Reese Witherspoon and Tom Selleck, to Kudrow’s “Smelly Cat” duet with Lady Gaga, to a Friends-themed fashion show featuring Justin Bieber, Cindy Crawford, and Cara Delevingne. These bits are broad, silly, and mostly inoffensive, but they pale in comparison to the more free-wheeling segments where the cast members catch up and trade old stories.
Of course, any scene with mic’d actors and rolling cameras runs the risk of feeling inauthentic, but it doesn’t seem like there’s much staging involved when the cast simply sits around on a couch backstage. In fact, there are times where the camera isn’t even able to fully capture everyone’s face when they tell their anecdotes — which, if nothing else, makes it seem like we’re peering in on spontaneous, private moments.
The cast’s pre-Friends lives may go unexplored, but what remains a key focus across the interviews and backstage chatter is the way things changed after the show took off. Their close friendships were forged by the seismic shifts in their personal lives, which only their fellow castmates understood. While each actor resembles their character in some fundamental way, their real-life group dynamics feel just as casual and familiar.
Gags and Re-enactments
The part of the special that works best is not only structured, but structured around one of the show’s most beloved episodes, “The One with the Embryos,” in which a harmless personal trivia game escalates to maddening heights. The reunion places the cast in a similar scenario, wherein David Schwimmer hosts a quiz show and the other five pick categories from which to answer. The questions range from famous lines to notable guests, who eventually make appearances. And while each guest leaves as quickly as they arrive (the special doesn’t stay on any one subject or concept for long), the result is breezy enough.
Friends: The Reunion is quite nakedly a nostalgia trip, and what better way to traipse down that path than by having the actors read and re-enact a few memorable scenes? They seem happy enough to do so, and they also genuinely enjoy each other’s company, so the special’s retro table reads feel more like fun and games than regurgitating old jokes.
Friends die-hards are more than familiar with the most famous lines and gags, and seeing the cast indulge in that same enjoyment is a treat. Nothing novel comes of it — except for behind-the-scenes footage of Matt LeBlanc injuring himself on set — but the mere act of re-watching the show’s bloopers for the umpteenth time starts to feel wistful, since this time around, the actors themselves are watching and laughing along too.
The Real Ross and Rachel
There is, however, one revelation that comes as a nice surprise, since it hasn’t been discussed publicly before. During an unscripted moment, Jennifer Aniston and David Schwimmer confess to having had mutual romantic feelings for one another during the initial seasons, though they never acted on it, since at least one of them was always in a relationship with someone else.
The show’s will-they, won’t-they romances were always a key draw — the creators even cite the sustained live audience reaction to Chandler and Monica’s hookup as a reason they pursued that story — but at the center of most of its catchphrases and pop culture references is, and perhaps always will be, the tumultuous ten-year courtship of Ross and Rachel. The idea that there was real chemistry behind the on-screen romance (paired with the fact that this reveal isn’t some salacious whisper, but an acknowledgment of mutual respect) is perhaps the special’s most meaningful look back at the production. The episode then plays Ross and Rachel’s first kiss in full, with both characters struggling to express their true feelings in season 2, and the added behind-the-scenes knowledge helps pierce the veil, making the scene even more impactful than before.
Ultimately, this blurring of fiction and reality makes Friends: The Reunion worthwhile. It’s by no means an incisive retrospective on that moment in time — certainly not for anyone except the performers — but seeing each actor in their element is the closest thing to actually reviving the characters (the short-lived Joey spin-off notwithstanding, which no one mentions!) For viewers taken in by the characters over the years, the special really does feel, at times, like a fictional reunion episode or a seventeen-years-later movie that will never happen — and perhaps should never happen, according to the cast themselves, given the comforting closure of the series finale.
