There are several reasons why I've chosen David Crane and Marta Kauffman's sitcom 'Friends' as a starting point in my journey through TV's pilot episodes. For one, 'Friends' was one of the defining series of my youth, debuting when I was 12 years old and ending about a month before my 22nd birthday. It is also a rare show from the era which I watched from beginning to end on its original transmission. Before the days of streaming services and catch-up TV, it wasn't uncommon to stumble into a new series a few episodes late, maybe as a reaction to word-of-mouth or just a fluke of channel-hopping, but I distinctly remember tuning in for 'Friends' first episode at 9pm as part of Channel Four's Friday night comedy lineup. Another reason for choosing 'Friends' as a starting point is that it's recent appearance on Netflix has led to a re-evaluation by existing fans and fresh perspectives from a new generation who have found its frequent homophobia, occasional mean-spiritedness and often reprehensible characters to be distasteful in a more enlightened world. With these tensions still relatively current at the time of writing, the temptation to return to square one of this immensely popular phenomenon is too strong to resist. So let's take a look at 'The Pilot' or, as it was retrospectively rechristened, 'The One Where Monica Gets a Roommate'.
The first thing long-term 'Friends' fans will notice about 'The Pilot' is that it doesn't have a cold open. These little pre-credits sketches worked well with 'Friends' hanging-out concept but it was perhaps wise not to attempt one in the first episode. Instead, we launch straight into the iconic images of the six main characters dancing around a fountain to The Rembrandts' nauseatingly ubiquitous 90s hit 'I'll Be There For You'. It's a well chosen theme tune which highlights the theme of platonic comfort in the face of life crises which is so prominently featured in at least two of 'The Pilot's three plot strands. As the show itself begins, we immediately find ourselves in the famous Central Perk coffee house, one of 'Friends' main sets and the inspiration for the series' dreadful original title 'Insomnia Café'. Establishing its hanging-out vibe from the outset, the episode launches into a series of four small sketches that, while not hilarious, cleverly begin to delineate the dynamic between the characters while also dropping in some crucial pieces of information. The first sequence features Monica Gellar (Courtney Cox) being teased by Chandler Bing (Matthew Perry), Joey Tribbiani (Matt LeBlanc) and Phoebe Buffay (Lisa Kudrow) about her upcoming date. Since dating and relationships are so central to 'Friends', it feels like the natural place to start. The subsequent sketch features Chandler recounting a Freudian nightmare he has had in which his penis has turned into a phone on which he receives a call from his mother. This establishes the extreme neuroses that would quickly come to define the character of Chandler and provide a reason for his constant defensive quipping. At this stage, this is unclear as Chandler is one of the less developed characters in 'The Pilot' but it's a useful piece of foreshadowing nonetheless.
Next we meet Ross Gellar (David Schwimmer), whom we learn is in the midst of a divorce from his recently-out lesbian wife Carol. This is the first major plot-point to be introduced and also the first warning sign of 'Friends' less-than-progressive attitude to homosexuality. In an attempt to have its coffee house muffin and devour it, 'Friends' would often flaunt its ancillary lesbian characters as a signal of its liberalness while also littering the script with loathsome one-liners based on the crudest of stereotypes. Tellingly, Joey's line "You really didn't know she was a lesbian?" gets one of the biggest laughs thus far, though it is unclear whether the joke is supposed to just be that Ross married a lesbian or that he wasn't aware of the fact, the faulty implication being that someone's sexuality should be obvious to all but the comically naïve. But the more offensive line comes later in the episode when Ross, reminiscing about his ex-wife's favourite brand of beer, says "She always drank it out the can. I should've known." That's pretty much the basic recipe for the rest of the million lesbian jokes you have to endure until Carol and her wife Susan are unceremoniously phased out of the series. Fortunately, that's the extent of the gay jokes in 'The Pilot'.
Back in Central Perk, we are introduced to the final and most iconic Friend, Rachel Green (Jennifer Aniston), who gets a suitably grand debut as she dashes into the coffee house in a soaking wet wedding dress. This is another major plot-point as Rachel, we learn, has left her fiancé Barry at the altar because she doesn't love him. Her rejection of Barry is symbolic of a wider rejection of the empty socialite lifestyle on which her acceptance into the group is dependant and this journey from belle-of-the-ball to credit-cardless waitress is 'The Pilot's most compelling plot. This is chiefly down to Aniston who immediately demonstrates her superior comedic abilities in a subsequent scene in which she discusses her abortive engagement on the phone with her father ("Because I don't love him... Well it matters to me!"). As a newly pubescent boy, Rachel was always my favourite Friend for obvious reasons but revisiting the series (as I recently did in its entirety) it becomes clear that Aniston is a phenomenal comic actress and her turn as Rachel Green is a sitcom performance for the ages. Time and time again, she makes the funny stuff funnier and deftly wrings laughs out of the weaker material by virtue of her exceptional likability and naturalistic performance. Rachel is a role that could easily have been played as a broad, airheaded stereotype and there are certain moments in the writing that hint at that intention (her offhand demand for Sweet'n Low, for instance) but instead Aniston plays her as a much smarter character who has realised the vapidity of the life laid out for her and opted for something more fulfilling. Her comedy, then, comes not from a tired oblivious princess stereotype but from a determined woman in transition from pampered to independent. It appears from this first script that Aniston's take on the role may have significantly influenced where the character ultimately went.
Not every member of the cast starts as strongly as Aniston however. One thing that is instantly clear in 'The Pilot' is that several cast members are trying a wee bit too hard. In most cases, this is because their characters have yet to be given any strong material. Matthew Perry's Chandler is a mere wisecrack machine and he launches himself at the punchlines with a smugly gleeful force that would eventually become a trait of Chandler himself but which, at this stage, is very much Perry's own. Lisa Kudrow's Phoebe Buffay is featured significantly less than the rest of the cast, a problem which haunted the series for years as it became clear that, outside of isolated moments of kookiness, the writers had no idea what to do with this character. Phoebe's relative independence from the group became something of a running gag later down the line but here her presence seems baffling. Obviously instructed to play weird, Phoebe wanders through 'The Pilot' as if she's been struck on the head with a mallet, occasionally letting loose a non-sequitur and being regarded with similar bewilderment by her fellow cast members and the audience alike. Her one big moment in which she unleashes an unasked-for autobiography of her harsh, suicide-riddled youth and time living on the streets is perhaps 'The Pilot's strangest moment and, while the series continued to build on this backstory, it never really rang true. Its emergence here seems like a desperate attempt to justify Phoebe's presence by giving her something interesting to bring to the table but ends up being the only moment in the episode in which exposition is poorly handled.
Matt LeBlanc's Joey Tribbiani is the least defined character of all. When the writing for Joey was at its best, it delicately balanced his comparative lack of brain power with an endearing optimism, childlike joy and a sense of moral decency that often sat oddly with his sometimes-extreme misogyny. The latter is the only trait that makes an appearance in 'The Pilot', with his eagerness to attend a strip club scoring an easy but unearned laugh in the early scenes. More troublingly, Joey gets a longer speech in which he compares the various women now available to the newly-single Ross to flavours of ice cream, urging him to "grab a spoon". It's a poorly judged, insulting metaphor but 'The Pilot' treats it as actual, honest-to-goodness wisdom, even alluding to the speech in a final line from Ross that is meant to be moving and even garners a small ripple of applause. This reaction is testament to David Schwimmer's comparatively strong performance as Ross Gellar. To 21st century audiences, Ross has become one of 'Friends' major sticking points and as the series progresses he transmogrifies surprisingly quickly from a sympathetic, hangdog boy-next-door type to a wild-eyed, shrill maniac. Try watching 'The Pilot' back to back with an episode from several seasons down the line and you'll realise just how much the character and performance change over the years. I always preferred Ross in his more laidback early incarnation but as the character became more outlandish it did allow Schwimmer to demonstrate a flair for physical comedy. We see a glimpse of this in 'The Pilot' in an amusing bit of business involving an umbrella and Schwimmer also shines in his quiet, serious moment with Aniston at the end of the episode, which quietly but not over-insistently sets up the forthcoming will-they-won't-they plot that dominates the subsequent series. Like his fellow cast members, Schwimmer also oversells several of his punchlines but the extra screentime and emphasis given to Ross's story allows him to develop a more rounded creation by the end of the episode.
Finally, we have Courtney Cox as Monica Gellar. Cox was the most famous member of the cast when the pilot aired, having famously appeared in Bruce Springsteen's 'Dancing in the Dark' video and films including 'Cocoon: The Return' and 'Ace Ventura: Pet Detective' and she was originally asked to audition for the part of Rachel but felt she was a better fit for Monica and successfully auditioned for that role instead. Monica would eventually become 'Friends' most annoying character when the writers decided to magnify her Type A Personality quirks and Cox's performance, like Schwimmer's, got louder and more exaggerated as a result. It's a shame they chose to go this way because at this stage Cox gives the second best performance of the ensemble. In 'The Pilot', Monica feels like the de facto leader of the group, a level-headed force for good whose kindness and decisiveness are a major factor in setting Rachel on her route to independence. Cox and Schwimmer also make for extremely convincing siblings, making the thought of her playing the role of Rachel strangely creepy.
With six characters to introduce, you might expect 'The Pilot' to be light on plot but one thing that 'Friends' always did impressively was juggle multiple storylines within a 22 minute running time and this was a factor from the very beginning. Among the network's notes on the pilot script was a suggestion that one of the three plots should be given prominence but Crane and Kauffman were insistent that they all be given equal weight. So we get Rachel's first tentative steps towards independence alongside Ross's adjustment to the single life and Monica's date with "Paul the wine guy." The fluidity goes at least some way to disguising the fact that Monica's story is extremely flimsy and the threads are deftly woven together in a way that creates a refreshing forward motion without ever feeling choppy. Unfortunately the same can't be said for the editing, which has an awkward amateurishness to it which would disappear as the season progressed. At one point, Phoebe delivers a line while standing in the kitchen and the camera cuts to the seating area where Phoebe can be seen sitting and seemingly reacting to her own statement! The final payoff in which Chandler relates a second subtext-laden dream ("I'm in Las Vegas. I'm Liza Minnelli") is also cut together with an abruptness that steps on the joke, a weakness that is exacerbated by the fact that it is the climactic line.
Reviews for 'The Pilot' were mixed, with many critics commenting on the underdevelopment of several characters but singling out Schwimmer for especial praise and acknowledging the sheer amount of event packed into a short runtime. Strangely, a recurrent criticism was that 'Friends' was an inferior version of 'Seinfeld' when there is clearly no similarity between the two series beyond their New York settings. While 'Seinfeld' maintained its 'No Hugging, No Learning' mantra, 'Friends' is predicated on a warmth and sentimentality that could be one of its great strengths. This is clear in 'The Pilot' in the characters' ready acceptance of Rachel and in Joey and Chandler's attempts to support Ross through his divorce. If several of the Friends remain vaguely defined by the end, a sense of their connection is established more emphatically. Ultimately, 'The Pilot' is a very decent first episode which achieves its aim of making me want to continue watching.
TOP 20 - Sadly, though it has its strengths, 'The Pilot' falls some way short of consideration for the top 20 list. For now then, the quest continues to find our first truly great pilot episode.
No comments:
Post a Comment