Review: Friends: The Reunion Is a Poignant, Eminently Watchable Missed Opportunity

The special is most compelling when the cast is allowed to just revel in their surroundings and reminisce like old friends.

Friends: The Reunion
Photo: HBO Max

On January 1, 2020, at the stroke of midnight, Friends was unceremoniously removed from Netflix after five years. The NBC sitcom, which was one of the streamer’s most popular properties, would soon serve as the flagship for WarnerMedia’s fledgling subscription service, HBO Max, accompanied by a much-hyped reunion special featuring the original cast. Of course, the global Covid-19 outbreak temporarily scuttled plans for the special, and, in the early months of the pandemic, fans quarantining at home were briefly left with no official platform on which to find comfort in old Friends the way many had on terrestrial TV in the wake of 9/11, which pushed the show back to the top of the Nielsen ratings at the time.

In a way, though, Friends: The Reunion is arriving right on time, a year to the day from HBO Max’s original launch, and just as parts of the world, including the U.S., are getting back to normal(-ish). Social media is awash with heart-tugging, some might say manipulative, videos of families and friends reuniting for the first time since before the pandemic, and despite the special’s mawkishness, this context adds a new layer of poignancy to the cast’s weepy reactions to seeing the old sets, clips from the show, and, of course, each other.

Part of what made Friends such a beloved sitcom was its writers’ ability to pivot effortlessly between comedy and drama, between physical humor and emotional pathos, and the cast’s uncanny skill to meet—and exceed—that bar. Jennifer Aniston, Courteney Cox, Lisa Kudrow, Matt LeBlanc, Matthew Perry, and David Schwimmer are so good, in fact, that even watching them, in Friends: The Reunion, simply sit around a table and read dialogue from the script of the season-five episode “The One Where Everybody Finds Out,” in which Phoebe learns of Chandler and Monica’s clandestine love affair, is sidesplittingly funny. Likewise, a table read of a scene from season two, in which Ross and Rachel kiss for the first time, is so heartbreakingly executed by Schwimmer and Aniston that cuts back and forth to footage from the original 1995 episode seem totally unnecessary.

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Which is why Friends: The Reunion—which clocks in at a lengthy one hour and 44 minutes, during which we’re subjected to Friends’s insipid theme song no less than five times, including once in orchestral form—feels like a missed opportunity to see these characters we’ve grown to know so well over the past quarter of a century truly come back to life. The closest we get is a bit in which the actors recreate the infamous trivia game from season four where Rachel and Monica lose their apartment to Joey and Chandler, err, Miss Chanandler Bong. Staging a largely unscripted reunion was certainly lower risk than a new series or one-off, and the special is most compelling when the cast is allowed to just revel in their surroundings, sitting together on the Central Perk set, or in Monica and Rachel’s still-mind-bogglingly mammoth West Village apartment, and reminisce like old friends.

But we also lamentably get a series of inexplicable celebrity appearances from the likes of Lady Gaga, who predictably bellows her way through a rendition of Phoebe’s iconic “Smelly Cat,” and David Beckham, who at least has the good taste to use his screen time to stan for the show’s best episode, “The One Where No One’s Ready.” One particularly egregious segment, featuring fans around the world (including Pakistani activist Malala Yousafzai) professing their love for Friends, falls flat in its attempt to anoint the show as having more cultural import than it probably deserves. Sometimes a great sitcom is just a great sitcom.

Score: 
 Cast: Jennifer Aniston, Courteney Cox, Lisa Kudrow, Matt LeBlanc, Matthew Perry, David Schwimmer  Network: HBO Max

Sal Cinquemani

Sal Cinquemani is the co-founder and co-editor of Slant Magazine. His writing has appeared in Rolling Stone, Billboard, The Village Voice, and others. He is also an award-winning screenwriter/director and festival programmer.

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