Cate Young | Vox

“Friends” and the illusion of perfect adult friendships

2021-05-27T12:00:31-04:00

Friends stars David Schwimmer, Courteney Cox, Jennifer Aniston, Matthew Perry, Matt LeBlanc, and Lisa Kudrow pictured in an episode from 2001. HBO Max will air a reunion special — 17 years after the show came to an end — on May 27. | Warner Bros. Television via Getty Images

The friendships of Friends are something of a marvel. Six vastly different people in their young adulthood with disparate wants, goals, professions, and relationships all closely orbit one another (and a single coffee shop). Whenever they need each other, there’s always someone available to help or comfort them. Whether it’s Monica letting Rachel move into her apartment at the series’ beginning, or Phoebe rushing Ross to the airport to try to win Rachel back at the series’ end, the tightly knit bonds of their lives are so interwoven that they experience all of their milestone moments together.

Monica, Rachel, Chandler, Ross, Phoebe, and Joey live together (sometimes literally) and love each other — and eventually find their happily-ever-afters with each other, too. But the cruel lie of Friends, which comes to HBO Max for a reunion special on May 27, and so many shows like it is that in real life, friendships often don’t operate like that at all.

Television and movies have long given us unrealistic expectations for romantic relationships. There are rarely any perfectly timed meet-cutes or mad dashes to the airport, and the chances of an ironic misunderstanding that lead you to the love of your life are slim to none. But less attention has been devoted to how television and movies shape our perception of friendships, too, in ways that don’t always reflect reality.

Modern adult friendships aren’t just challenging to create and maintain — some evidence suggests they are also in decline. Twenty-two percent of millennials in a 2019 YouGov poll said they had “no friends,” compared to 16 percent of Gen Xers and 9 percent of baby boomers. The reasons can be pinned on a variety of factors: Americans today lead increasingly busy lives, and as members of our friend groups grow into their careers and relationships, incomes and schedules start to vary. People move away for new jobs or to be closer to family. Distance and time become barriers in a way they weren’t when everyone was young, single, and devoted to their found families.

But you’d never know that from watching television. From Friends to Living Single to Grey’s Anatomy to New Girl, TV reinforces the fantasy that true friendships are and should be deeply close but require no real effort to maintain. It’s a stark difference from the way we know friendships operate in our own lives — as meaningful but sometimes fleeting relationships that can eventually dissolve because we have no language, script, or social expectation for how to seriously integrate friendships into our adult lives.

When Grey’s Anatomy’s Cristina Yang (Sandra Oh) anointed Meredith Grey (Ellen Pompeo) her “person,” she originally meant it literally — she’d put Meredith’s name down as her emergency contact for a planned abortion procedure. Still in its early seasons, the show had found a way to signify the depth of their budding platonic romance. Cristina didn’t need to say much; Meredith understood her intuitively and didn’t need to crack her friend wide open in order to support her. The scene was the basis of their decade-long relationship and the seed that planted a whole new lexicon for talking about female friendship. It was as swoon-worthy as any declaration of love because it was a declaration of love — just not the one we’d been conditioned to expect.

But Meredith and Cristina’s relationship was one crafted in a writers’ room. Real friendships are rife with conflict, separations, jealousies, and reconciliations. They are relationships like any other, stretching through their growing pains and sometimes snapping from the stress of ongoing tension. But none of that ever seems to make it to a television screen. As a result, we’re left idealizing relationships that wouldn’t happen outside the context of scripted television.

TV friendships, for example, rarely depict friendships that survive big life changes. In that world, jobs, families, and children are always given more value than the friendships its characters have been building for years. Have you ever noticed how many TV shows about friendship end with everyone leaving a central, grounding location? The Friends finale had the gang say goodbye to Monica’s (Courteney Cox) purple apartment, New Girl ended with a farewell to the loft, and Broad City saw Abbi (Abbi Jacobson) leave New York in favor of Colorado. Even workplace comedies such as The Office and Parks and Recreation end with their characters moving on from the jobs that brought them all together in the first place. In every one of these shows, the story ends as the characters move on not just with their lives but also with the very narrative premise that binds them.

TV reinforces the fantasy that true friendships are and should be deeply close but require no real effort to maintain.

And as an audience, we want closure when stories end. We spend years with characters and invest in their lives. It makes sense that our journey ends as they exit the phase of life in which we met them. But over time, this accumulation of choices has trained us to associate friendships with the spaces where they initially thrive. And we don’t have great models for how friendships should endure when they exist outside the realm of convenient proximity, despite the fact that in the real world, people’s locations and jobs are constantly changing: The average American adult moves 11.7 times and changes jobs around 12 times in their lifetimes. Millennials in particular are lonelier than they’ve ever been and have less time than ever to cultivate the kinds of deep, meaningful friendships we see depicted on television.

But the characters on these shows not only live and work together, they also date and marry each other and go through many major life events by one another’s sides. They often have no significant relationships outside of the designated group, and when they do, those people are either presented as a threat to the established collective or are eventually subsumed by it.

Workplace comedies are especially guilty of this. For shows such as The Office and The Mindy Project, professional and private boundaries quickly blur. In both Parks and Rec and Brooklyn Nine-Nine, the main characters get married in the workplace itself because all of the people important to them are already there.

In contrast, for dramas like Scandal, How To Get Away With Murder, and Being Mary Jane, the chief complaint becomes that the main characters have no friends at all, only colleagues they try to keep at arm’s length. Frustrating as that is — especially given that this narrative loneliness seems confined to Black female characters — in a way it’s almost a truer, more honest depiction of how friendships tend to operate in our modern, hyperconnected lives.

But for all of these shows, characters tend to begin or end at the point at which they are attached to the group. No one ever has a college friend who’s in town for the weekend or a family emergency that takes them back home for a week or two. In every way that matters, these characters are one another’s entire worlds. They rely on one another in times of crisis and triumph. They are each other’s support systems. And they value each other above all others.

The way television depicts friendship has progressed in some ways. Female friendships especially have shifted in the last decade in largely positive ways. We’ve come a long way from the sexist presumptions of catfighting in films such as Mean Girls to the wonderful, supportive vibrance evident in movies like Someone Great and Bridesmaids. And while the new visibility of friendship in media is a refreshing change from its usual focus on heterosexual romantic relationships, pop culture has sometimes swung too far in the other direction: Now, intensely romantic but platonic friendships must fulfill all the emotional needs that should rightfully be spread across multiple relationships.

Broad City is a classic example of a sincerely loving friendship that borders on toxic codependency. In the show’s final season, when Abbi announces her intention to move out of New York for good, Ilana (Ilana Glazer) has a full-blown meltdown. The show presents her tantrum as a testament to the depth of the women’s friendship — and it is. But it’s also a sign that the women cannot function without each other. As envious as their friendship is, it’s also all-consuming. Their very identities are challenged at the prospect of its potential dissolution or separation. But the show also makes clear that in their quest to be each other’s everything, they’ve neglected to become whole people of their own.

But perhaps more insidious than the portrayal of a too-close friendship is the lack of work their relationship seems to require. Disagreements and miscommunications between them are quickly resolved within the span of an episode or two, and very little time is allotted to working through the disloyalties, real or imagined, that have infected their friendship. Conflict resolution is unnecessary when your love for each other supersedes all.

Slowly but surely, television is catching up to this glaring emotional disparity. Shows such as Insecure are finally taking a hard look at what happens when a friend group fractures, and how deeply wounding it can be to fall out with the person who used to know you best. Issa and Molly’s “breakup” in Insecure’s most recent season resonated with audiences because it acknowledged that friendships — like all relationships — are work. It takes time and dedication to maintain them. The fallout felt real and hurtful, in part because there have been so few honest, realistic cultural scripts in media for how friendships should end.

The upcoming Friends reunion won’t undo the story choices that came before. The trailer suggests it will be rooted more in nostalgia than in advancing the storylines of what 17 years could (and likely would) do to a close group of friends. This reunion special, like so many others before it, will likely exist as a form of fan service: Perhaps what viewers really want, if we’re being honest, is for the friendship dynamics of our favorite TV characters to never really change or evolve as they do in our real lives. We want them to stay frozen in that inexplicably spacious purple apartment in ’90s New York City.

If only our own friendships could be so pat.

Cate Young is an award-winning writer and culture critic. Her work has appeared in Vulture, Glamour, Jezebel, NPR Music, and The Cut. She currently works as an audio producer in Los Angeles.

Claws is a love letter to the proud, strip mall–fabulous American woman

2019-08-02T08:43:28-04:00

The cast of TNT’s Claws, from left, Judy Reyes, Karrueche Tran, Niecy Nash, Carrie Preston, and Jenn Lyon. | Courtesy of Turner

If there’s one scene in TNT’s strip mall–fabulous dramedy Claws that explains the show’s raison d’être, it’s in the season three episode “Fly Like an Eagle.” After the sartorially adventurous Florida nail salon owner Desna Sims (Niecy Nash) and her Southern belle second-in-command Jennifer Husser (Jenn Lyon) confront a crooked governor about his money laundering scheme, he muses, “I thought you was a Robin Hood with press-on nails.”

They raise their hands and unsheath their talons, wiggling their fingers to reveal their expertly manicured nails. Jewel-encrusted behemoths, the nails are meticulously designed and impractical for all but the most delicate work. “Don’t get it twisted,” Desna replies. “We full gangsta.” “With full sets,” Jennifer adds.

Claws, whose third season concludes August 11, has always been about race, class, culture, and crime. Set largely in Palmetto, Florida, Claws follows the rivalries, friendships, and tensions between a vaguely legal pill mill run by a Dixie Mafia drug kingpin and the woman-led, hole-in-the-wall nail salon that reluctantly launders his ill-gotten gains.

The women have gotten progressively deeper into the criminal underworld, getting the better of the various men who have used and abused them, eventually landing at the very top of the local criminal food chain. And they have done it with full sets.

Claws is the latest in a long line of shows and films that upend reductive stereotypes about fashion by using it as a tool to illuminate the many ways women relate to the world. Like Sex and the City, The Devil Wears Prada, and Gossip Girl, Claws understands that fashion is more than clothing; it’s utility, iconography, and camp all rolled into one.

Claws. | Courtesy of Turner Broadcasting, Inc." data-portal-copyright="Courtesy of Turner Broadcasting, Inc." />

Through its flamboyant and ornate costumes, the show has created a distinct aesthetic recognizable as rooted in the real world and yet still all its own. The “Florida noir” setting is a Southern gothic for women who aren’t rich, white, and moneyed. Instead, they are tacky and loud, embracing the Florida heat by reflecting it in their clothing, most of which features bold prints, bright colors, and lots and lots of animal print.

“I try to bring that out in the color palette. In Florida, everybody is in brighter colors and Hawaiian shirts,” says Dolores Ybarra, the show’s costume designer. “You’ve got all these different types of people [in the show], but whether it’s florals or linens, I try to make sure the characters are dressed for the setting.”

The visual language of Claws can be hard to explain without using words like “gaudy” or “ostentatious” or “cosquelle” (a Trinidadian Creole word meaning outlandish or garish), but it’s a highly specific look that is instantly familiar to the women who grew up knowing that nothing beats a hoop earring you can put your fist through. The show’s characters embrace a maximalist approach born of new money: No rhinestone is too big, no jumpsuit too tight, and no shorts ever quite short enough.

Since the show has been on the air, the women of Claws have graduated from laundering money through their nail salon to becoming enmeshed in political intrigue involving a casino, private prisons, and international cartels. They’ve hit the big time, and their clothing has adjusted to match. But even though money can buy you labels, it can’t buy you taste. For these women, more is more is more. Before they leave the house, they look in the mirror and add two accessories.

“Their style now is still true to who they are and where they came from,” says Ybarra. “They’ve started making money but they don’t know how to spend it. Jenn [Husser], for example, can be walking around with a great bag, but she doesn’t know how to pull it together with a look. Money can’t buy style.”

Claws elevates “a highly specific look that is instantly familiar to the women who grew up knowing that nothing beats a hoop earring you can put your fist through.” | Courtesy of Turner Broadcasting, Inc." data-portal-copyright="Courtesy of Turner Broadcasting, Inc." />

It’s not a coincidence that how we perceive women who wear acrylic nails or loud, bold colors is intertwined with race and class. The audaciousness of Claws’ fashion invokes thoughts of frivolity and excess that exist in contrast to cultural expectations of what women of color are worth. Like the sentiments that drove the zoot suit riots of 1943, black and brown women are not allowed to indulge in overabundance. Any minor decadence must be stripped to retain respectability. The women who fail at this innovate styles out of a combination of innovation and poverty. Sometimes, these looks are stolen and replicated in fashion magazines.

This dynamic plays out in humiliating ways for black women in the real world every day. When Serena Williams wore a custom black Nike catsuit to play at the French Open in 2018, French Tennis Federation president Bernard Giudicelli reacted by announcing that the dress code would be changed to prevent her from wearing it again in the future, voicing his disapproval as a desire to “respect the game and the place.” The invocation of respect is incredibly charged, and directly suggested that Williams was sullying the traditions of the game by dressing in a way her competitors did not.

“I think about how black women with naturally curvier figures are policed for wearing clothing that is ‘too provocative’ simply because of how it fits their bodies,” says the author and activist Feminista Jones. “While I don’t think white women escape it, we don’t see as much public chastisement of them as we do with, say, the teacher who went viral for what she was wearing in front of her class.”

The statistics bear this out. A 2017 report from the National Women’s Law Center showed that female students of color are more than five times as likely to be suspended from school as their white counterparts, and a follow-up study in 2018 identified dress code violations, especially for curvier students, as a major culprit.

“When black women embody sexiness, even when they aren’t being intentional about it, there are those who react in negative ways because they see us as a threat of some sort,” Jones says. “When we appear to exhibit it, albeit it ‘innocently,’ people have visceral reactions, which is why the kind of policing that happens with Serena Williams or even Beyoncé happens.”

For Ybarra, being aware of these issues is part of the job, and she’s especially conscious to dress Desna and Jennifer in clothing that hugs their figures, accentuates their curves, and projects the confidence of the characters.

“There are a lot of voluptuous women who aren’t your typical size 2 with no breasts and no curves. These women have curves. And I believe Desna has made them feel confident that a woman who has these curves … can rock this with no looking back,” she said.

Contrast this with the beige neutrality of the Ann Taylor brand and the rich white women the name conjures. The decision to be demure, to rely on colors that do not offend or call attention, is tied up in class-specific ideas of propriety and respectability. What looks demure on Ivanka Trump or Taylor Swift may look “vulgar” on Jennifer Lopez. That’s the way bodies work. But it’s a classist stereotype that only poor brown women wear acrylic nails.

And it would be a mistake to examine the costumes of Claws without ever getting to the titular nails. Culturally, long nails serve multiple functions. As decoration, they give the wearer an additional outlet to express themselves and their creativity, particularly since nail art returned to the height of chic nearly a decade ago. But more generally, these “claws” serve as an indication of luxury. In much the same way that Melania Trump wearing her coats draped over her shoulders acts as a class-specific signal that she never has to raise her arms to do any labor, long nails indicate that the wearer does not need to wash dishes, take out the trash, or deign to do any work that might require her hands. She can afford to wear acrylics that would otherwise be an impractical impediment.

This is rarely literal; most women wearing long acrylic nails are leading normal, everyday lives and tending to day-to-day activities as they always would have. But the nails add an element of opulence that hint at adventurousness, verve, and excitement. What makes Claws stand out is that it situates these nails in their natural habitat: with the black and brown women who made them so popular to begin with.

In an interview with the New York Times, Morgan Dixon, the head of the show’s nail department, said, “People purchase art to put on their walls. Nails are bringing art to everyday people. It’s art you can attain.” Dixon makes sure the nails never match the clothing; they have to stand out against the attention-grabbing outfits because they’re central to the characters’ way of being. As with women in the real world, the characters’ nails are totems they can use to signify their personalities. The nails are camp as high art, and the recognizable aesthetic is anything but accidental.

What makes Claws special is that the fashion is true to life. These women aren’t aspirational in the traditional sense; their clothing is largely accessible to any woman who might choose to seek it out. But that’s the genius of the show’s intentional costume design.

As extravagant as these women’s fashion choices are, they never feel out of place because the characters move through the world as though they belong. While they lean into their new identities as criminal overlords, they also lean into their authentic selves: They reclaim the invocation of “trashy” as a descriptor and turn it around on itself, signposting that they will always be vamps and never give up their big hair and rhinestones.