Friday, May 6, 2011

The Friends Television Show: What Is It?

By Elinor Hsieh


Airing between September 22nd 1994, and May 6th 2004, the Friends TV show became a cult classic. When the show was at it's peak during the ten years it aired on TV, it attracted more than fifty million viewers. By this time ten complete seasons had been edited, and the show had screened two-hundred and thirty-six episodes.

At the time of the last episode, Friends had amassed so many viewers that it was recorded as the episode that attracted the most attention in more than a decade, catapulting the show to the status of fourth most watched finale in television history. When the show finally came to a close, it remained ranked in the top ten television shows for a full week, and it is still considered to be one of the top television sitcoms in history.

So what is the Friends TV show? Well it was based around a small group of close friends living in Manhattan. Each episode was filmed at the Warner Brothers Studio, in front of an appreciative live audience. During its time on air, the show was nominated for an unprecedented sixty-three Primetime Emmy Awards. As with a lot of very successful shows, a spin-off was created, called "Joey".

If you were not fortunate enough to have seen the show as a sitcom, it used to air every Thursday. It was one of those shows that for half an hour, and sometimes an hour each week, people would laugh, cry and the share the episode at work the next day.

As with any show with this much appeal, of the six main characters that played their respective roles, there would always be reasons to love and hate them. The two girls, Monica Geller, and Rachel Green were the best of friends. Courtney Cox and Jennifer Aniston were the two actors who played these parts. Monica was known as the Mother hen to the whole group of friends, and Rachel was a fashion enthusiast. The third of the girls in the show was Phoebe Buffay who was played by Lisa Kudrow. She was not only a masseuse, but a very eccentric self taught musician.

David Schwimmer played the part of Ross Geller, Monica's loving and protective brother. He worked as a palaeontologist at a local museum. Matt Le Blanc played the fifth character as Joey, a self professed womanizer, with loads of charm. Our last character, Chandler Bing, marries Monica in the seventh series, played by Matthew Perry.

Even today, seven years later, the show is still watched around the world as reruns, and it is also available on DVD, so those who were hooked by the show can watch all of their favorite moments whenever they want to. This show created a very large cultural impact. As an example of this, the Central Perk Coffee House has in fact inspired so many other coffee houses around the world.




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