Friends Review

The show is a machine for comfort and it is extremely good at being one. Crane and Kauffman found the six-hander rhythm that most modern sitcoms still borrow: no single lead, every pairing viable, a coffee house and two apartments so the geography never needs explaining. The performances hold up better than the writing does. Lisa Kudrow plays Phoebe as genuinely strange rather than quirky, Matthew Perry's stress-the-wrong-word delivery invented a style other comedies are still copying, and Courteney Cox does the unglamorous work of being the straight line everyone else bounces off.

The plotting is pure sitcom arithmetic, with Ross and Rachel recycled for ten years well past the point of belief. It is shot flat under three-camera lights with a laugh track that tells you when to arrive. What ages worst is the worldview: a Manhattan without rent anxiety, and a persistent, sometimes mean seam of jokes about bodies and sexuality. Reliable, warm, hugely influential, and unmistakably a product of its decade.