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...Friends episode "The One Where No One Proposes"--in which Rachel Green has had Ross Geller's baby after a one-night stand--Ross's father gazes at the tiny girl in the hospital. "My first grandchild," he purrs. "What about Ben?" asks Ross, referring to his son by his lesbian ex-wife, born in the first season. "Well, of course Ben," Mr. Geller covers up. "I meant my first granddaughter...
...would forget his own grandson? Sure. But the gag works, because many of us also forgot Ben existed, even though he figured heavily in the sitcom's first two seasons. Jokes on Friends often involve characters' reminding us of basic details about their lives (say, that Monica and Ross are brother and sister) or forgetting details about one another (in Season 7, Chandler gets glasses, and everyone, including his fiance Monica, believes he has always had them). Friends is like that: content to be funny and forgettable. Even the episode titles--"The One Where ..."--suggest that even if the titles...
...stuck with one theme. Being part of Gen X may not mean you had a goatee or were in a grunge band; it did, however, mean there was a good chance that your family was screwed up and that you feared it had damaged you. Only Ross and Monica have a (relatively) happy set of parents. Phoebe's mom (not, we later learn, her biological mother) committed suicide, and her dad ran out. When Chandler was 9, his parents announced their divorce at Thanksgiving--Dad, it turned out, was a cross-dresser, played by Kathleen Turner. Joey discovered his father...
...episodes"--with alternative families. Like all romantic comedies, Friends tends to end its seasons with weddings or births. And yet none of the Friends has had a baby the "normal" way--in the Bushian sense--through procreative sex between a legally sanctioned husband and wife. Chandler and Monica adopt. Ross has kids by his lesbian ex-wife and his unwed ex-girlfriend. Phoebe carries her half brother and his wife's triplets (one of the funniest, sweetest and creepiest situations ever--"My sister's gonna have my baby!" he whoops). As paleontologist Ross might put it, Friends...
...that there is no normal anymore and that Americans--at least the plurality needed to make a sitcom No. 1--accept that. (To the show's discredit, it used a cast almost entirely of white-bread heteros to guide us through all that otherness.) In January 1996, when Ross's ex-wife married her lesbian lover, the episode raised scant controversy, and most of that because Candace Gingrich--the lesbian sister of Newt, then Speaker of the House--presided over the ceremony. "This is just another zooey episode of the justifiably popular Friends," yawned USA Today. Sure, sitcoms like Roseanne...