F.R.I.E.N.D.S was more than a successful TV serial, it was a cultural phenomenon. I think it had such a big impact, beyond what one would expect of any well-written, well performed sitcom, because it filled in a gap in popular culture. It was the first extensive exploration of a life stage that people like us now routinely live through, but which falls outside our traditional frameworks of life stages.
Ross, Chandler, Rachel, Monica, Phoebe and Joey have finished with formal
education, have started careers, but haven't yet married or started families.
This time in life falls somewhere between youth and adulthood, somewhere
between brahmacharya and grihastashram in the Hindu tradition. This life-stage
is growing: people live longer, young men no longer get drafted into armies, more women
are becoming professionals, careers demand ever longer apprenticeships. This is
clearly a formative stage in life, at least as formative as the university
years. This is the time in life when most of my peers found their professions
and life-partners, and solidified their identities. While the angst of both
youth and middle age have been mined extensively in popular culture - think Rebel
Without A Cause and American Beauty - the angst of this life stage remains
relatively unexplored. F.R.I.E.N.D.S captured the public imagination so
powerfully because it was good, but also because it was the first show to extensively
explore this life-space (the closest benchmark I can think of are one-dimensional
rom-coms).
However, for all that, even F.R.I.E.N.D.S didn't explore one huge
aspect of this life stage: work. In my experience, this is the life stage when work consumes more psychic energy than anything else. This is the time when the soaring expectations of
youth are still very much alive, when the frustrations of the real world are an
everyday reality, and when the tension between those two haven't yet found a
happy equilibrium.
In real life, a young scientist like Ross probably spends a vast chunk of
his energy obsessing about whether his research paper will get published, about
where he will get his next grant from, and about how he can get on to this high
profile consortium that might lead to a couple of Nobel Prizes. He would spend most of his social time with other research scientists. They would
share, and therefore amplify, each other's career anxieties, and gossip endlessly
about other research scientists. A young business executive like Chandler would
obsess about departmental politics, about the hopeless incompetence of his
colleagues, and about whether he should go work on Wall Street and get seriously
rich. A few blocks away, journalist Carrie Bradshaw might obsess about whether freelance
writing about her friend's love lives will ever win her the Pulitzer Prize, and
if she should become a real journalist who risks losing an eye reporting from a
war-zone.
In F.R.I.E.N.D.S, work forms the backdrop to the characters' lives.
In reality, work would be in the foreground. I accepted that easily, assuming that
other people's work-lives are intrinsically boring. It turns out, that
assumption was wrong.
I just read this outstanding book called Then We Came To The End,
by Joshua Ferris, which takes the work-lives of people like us as its raw material, and turns it into a thoroughly entertaining novel. It is set in an advertising agency, in Chicago. This agency is
a big little world. It includes people of all sorts - married people, blacks, people
with kids, people with cancer, people who die. But "we", the
collective of cool kids from whose viewpoint this story is written, the gang who
are the social and spiritual core of the agency, are squarely in the F.R.I.E.N.D.S
stage in life.
A sample of one character's thoughts:
"good God, was work so meaningless? Was life so meaningless? It reminded him of
when an ad got watered down by a client, and watered down, until everything
interesting about the ad disappeared. Carl still had to write copy for it. The
art director still had to put the drop shadow where the drop shadow belonged
and the logo in its proper place. That was the process known as polishing the turd. Those two poor saps
hosing down the alleyway were just doing the same thing. All over America, in
fact, people were up and out of their beds today in a continuing effort to
polish turds. Sure, for the sake of survival, but more immediately, for the
sake of some sadistic manager or shit-brained client whose small imagination
and numbingly dumb ideas were bleaching the world of all relevancy and hope..."
The novel takes a little dig at itself. There is a writer at the
agency,
 |
| Joshua Ferris |
That is what this book is. It is a small, angry book about us at
work. It has observed us so precisely that the blurb from The Times printed on
the back cover is entirely true. "Very funny, intense and exhilarating...for
the first time in fiction, it has truly captured the way we work". In a way, Joshua Ferris' book completes the
