Friends, that show based on a white person’s idea of New York City about six white twenty-something friends who were each just the right amount of neurotic and pretty, is turning 25 this month. Fans are excited, but New York City is evidently super excited, because the moment has provided an opportunity to present the Friends 25th Anniversary Pop-Up, a month-long, ticketed experience that will offer a chance to “immerse yourself in your favorite show like never before, complete with set re-creations, photo ops and of course, Central Perk!”
The President is a white supremacist, and white nationalist domestic terrorism is at an all-time high in America, but sure, let’s totally celebrate one of the whitest shows in the history of white America with an extended interactive experience that allows you to pretend that one of the country’s most diverse cities in America is actually all white, and also get a photo op with … a recreated set of the fictional coffee shop with a couch that was only ever available for said six friends to sit? Thumbs up emoji.
To be fair, the pop-up event is happening in SoHo, the neighborhood in New York that, after the Upper East Side, probably most closely reflects the city where Ross, Rachel, Phoebe, Monica, Joey and Chandler lived. It also happens to be the neighborhood near where I work, and even though it’s mostly European tourists who are ambling along SoHo’s famed cobblestone streets when I come up from the subway in the mornings, I’m still relatively aghast at how the only black and brown people seem to be the folks selling coffee and danishes from the confines of their little portable coffee carts. But I digress.
Like a bajillion other people, I watched the show off and on throughout its 10-season run, and I even liked some of the episodes, appreciated the chemistry of the cast, thought the writing was strong, and found moments of its comedic timing to be absolutely impeccable. And like at least many of the black folks I know, especially those of us who actually live in New York, I struggled with how to enjoy a show in which my experience as a black twenty-something New Yorker was pretty much erased entirely. As an ensemble cast of semi-ambitious young white people trying to make it in New York City, Rachel and Ross and Phoebe and Joey and Monica and Chandler were ultimately able to live in delusion and thrive in ways that black and brown people never could or can. In doing so, they also perpetuated a racist myth that doubles as a white intellectual fantasy.
This is not a new phenomenon, of course, nor is it one that has stopped happening. The list of popular TV shows that take place in New York City and feature all white casts is long. From Mad About You (which is about to get a reboot) to Seinfeld, Sex and the City, and Girls, the latter of which took place in gentrifying parts of Brooklyn of all places, there are swaths of white show creators who clearly feel a sense of entitlement about how to accurately depict a city that is over 65 percent black and brown.
But white show creators are going to white show create. What I find egregious and, frankly, tone deaf, is that the city of New York, the real one, not the one depicted on television, is going in so hard to celebrate this show that essentially stripped it of its nuance, especially given the current political climate. Those of us who write and talk about race for a living, and not just in New York, but all over the country, have been screaming outright in critical theory, journalism, cultural criticism, live events, political commentary, on social media — really all manner of conveying information — that white supremacy does not only come about from violence and ideologues. Rather, centering and celebrating whiteness in a medium as palatable as TV can also do the trick.
If people think I’m making too big a deal out of this, consider where the jollification of another predominantly white show based in New York landed us. While The Apprentice did include a smattering of black and brown people over the course of its 15 seasons, most notably Omarosa Manigault, as The New Yorker writer Emily Nussbaum writes in her 2017 piece The TV That Created Donald Trump, the show presented itself as "a stirring advertisement for Wall Street as a meritocracy" that helped get Trump elected. If as Nussbaum notes, we think about The Apprentice as the show that created Donald Trump, then what exactly did Friends create in our culture? The Friends cast gave viewers permission to be a kind of quirky, weird-funny, but which was always far from subversive. It totally reinforced heterosexual norms, and was also blatantly sexist. It gave us a model of white insularity that persists on television and movies to this day. It was must-see TV, as NBC said, or as New York Times cultural critic Wesley Morris recently wrote, "excellent Easy TV" which was "proof of a golden age of something."
But 25 years later, we know exactly what that something is, and very little of it feels easy anymore.
Rebecca Carroll is a cultural critic and Editor of Special Projects at WNYC, where she develops, produces and hosts a broad array of multi-platform content, including podcasts, live events and on-air broadcasts. Rebecca is also the author of several interview-based books about race and blackness in America, including the award-winning Sugar in the Raw, and her personal essays, cultural commentary and opinion pieces have been published widely. Her memoir, Surviving the White Gaze, is due out from Simon & Schuster in 2020.
