Friday was also a big TV day. I rarely watch TV, save for the saturday morning ritual of a quite obscene wake-up (7:50am for Pete’s Sake!) in order to catch Transworld Sport, however this friday was particularly good.
It started with the last episode of Friends. I was happy and sad as most Friends-a-holics were, back in the day my sister and I were rabid fans. I was cheered up by the prospect of the next evening’s “Best 6 Friends Episodes Ever” marathon on Channel 4, although I was apprehensive - many people haven’t seen the complete catalogue of Friends episodes and so weren’t in the perfect position to judge. In addition 10 years is a long time and some older episodes would have slipped from the mind of the nation.
Thankfully the list was voted for online, as soon as I heard about that I realized that it had been chosen by total Friends FanBoys like myself and sure enough the lineup was almost perfect.
The one with the football won, and for good reason. The others were, The one with the rumor, The one with all the thanksgivings, The one with the embryos, The one where everybody finds out and The one with the prom video.
On the whole that’s a good list, although there were a number of changes I’d have made, first of all The one with the prom video isn’t that great in my opinion and The one with the rumor only gets chosen because it has Brad Pitt in it. I’d replace them with The one where nobody’s ready which is a firm favourite of many and of course The one with all the haste. If they’d have played The one with all the haste (where the girls get their apartment back) after The one with the embryos (where they lose it) they could have put that excellent plot-arch in a nutshell and included 2 of the best episodes ever. Then again I’d still probably find other episodes to shoe-horn in, the only certainty would be that The one with the football would indeed win as it is the best episode ever.
Friends was a great show and as I wrote in an older post:
The thing is that Friends was all about a bunch of 20 Something Year olds dealing with 20 Something Year old issues. It was pioneering in its reliance upon characters relating their experiences 2nd hand, telling them to the group instead of you the viewer always being privy to every waking moment of their lives. However it soon lost that aspect. All I can say is vintage Friends is superb. I used to watch endless episodes with my sister when it first came out that we’d videod. After that we watched even more episodes, on VHS and eventually when they were made available in HK on DVD. It seems kind of ironic that Friends is coming to an end just as I’m entering the period in my life which that group of 6 were dealing with. Makes me wonder how mine’s going to turn out.
My sister articulated exactly the same idea at the dinner table on sunday. All this does is steel my resolve re: buying every single TV program I ever loved on DVD when I’m making money.
Speaking of which, every Futurama Boxed set will soon be mine. Amazon.co.uk was selling them cheap (like £15 cheap) so I jumped in and bought series 2-4. I already have series 1 on DVD at the moment (borrowed from my Father last summer) and it would be greedy to just buy it for the sake of having the actual box.
Posted by John Swaine at May 31, 2004 07:36 PM