Andrew Bullock on Friends With Better Lives

There’s a new American sitcom on at the moment, called Friends With Better Lives. Now, this is a risky little game from the get go. Anyone who decides to call their new show, about three girls and three guys, anything with ‘Friends’ in the title, has got some giant kahunas.

The trailer for this show, which I caught on Comedy Central a couple of weeks ago, basically saw six pals sat around shooting the breeze about the trials and tribulations of life/love/dating/sex/marriage/work, etc. Now, am I missing something here or has this been done … to death? Nonetheless, one shouldn’t judge a book by its cover, should one? So I watched the pilot.

Has this been done … to death?

Aside from having Dawson from Dawson’s Creek in it, this new sitcom is self-indulgent, smarmy and predictable.

The golden age of American sitcom was, in my opinion, the era of Friends/Frasier/Will & Grace/Ellen. All very, very different, and all covering a variety of topics and comedic group dynamics. How something still gets commissioned about six friends tackling life and its nuances perplexes me. I decided to Wikipedia the show, and skim through the episode summaries of the rest of the series. This did nothing for me but prove that the show is a regurgitation of sitcoms before it, and that it can shamelessly be placed up against the precise plot lines found in Friends.

Behold: “Will reveals to his friends that he and his wife have finalised their divorce, after discovering her infidelity” – Ross pretty much does this in the Friends pilot, due to his wife Carol having an affair with a woman!

“Andi’s second pregnancy has progressed to the overly-amorous stage, which exhausts Bobby” – Rachel’s pregnancy saw her lusting over a cardboard cut-out of Evander Holyfield.

“The gang finds a sex video from Bobby and Andi’s honeymoon” – there are sex videos flying all over the place on Friends – namely the video that captured Rachel and Ross conceiving Emma, and the video that Chandler finds of Richard and a woman he believes to be Monica.

“Bobby and Will try to get rid of a rat that they discover in the house” – there’s an episode called ‘The One With Phoebe’s Rats’. Enough said!

What struck me about this show is the way the six characters sit in strategical and un-natural formations around their living rooms discussing topics such as the dating scene. Truthfully, this theme in television is totally out-dated. It worked in the ’90s, but even as Friends moved into the 2000s it changed its tact, focusing on a variety of topics that were actually funnier – from fake tans to getting sofas up stairways to convincing the ugly naked man across the road to let you sub-let his apartment.

Today, in 2014, we are over the trials and tribulations of dating.

We all accept that our love lives and dating lives, whether we are single, attached or married, can be ridiculous. Sitcom scenarios now aren’t so ‘out there’. I won’t start referencing my back-catalogue of unimaginable dating stories, but it puts shows like Friends With Better Lives to shame.

So, in summary – shows like this don’t work anymore, because they are representative of a scary reality rather than an escapist fantasy.

Andrew’s blog can be read at drewjbullock.wordpress.com