A friend of mine recently spoke to a young person. “I just started watching Friends,” the girl said. “I had no idea Jennifer Aniston was in it!” Two things were immediately apparent when I heard this: 1) time marches on for us all; and 2) headlines of the last decade have done a great disservice to Aniston. She is surely one of our most underrated sitcom performers.
Before she became magazine land’s “Poor Jen”, famous ex-wife of Brad Pitt, Aniston was Rachel Green: one half of one of TV’s most enduring love affairs and owner of a briefly iconic haircut. She started the show on a downer – runaway bride, dependent on daddy – and ended it as a successful career woman, a mostly single mother who had carved out a space in the world. That such a transformation was believable over the course of 10 seasons is testament to Aniston’s skill as a performer – she was, by turns, hilarious, sexy, cute, clever and angry.
Her greatest asset, in my view, is how ordinary she is: a perfect canvas on to which the audience can project. But she also hits a comic beat like few others. Her incredulous, “You fell asleeeep?” to Ross, her supposedly repentant lover, still makes me laugh so hard, several years later. For many, Rachel’s progression is firmly at the centre of the show; sure, she ends up the woman many of us might like to be, but what is most important is how she got there.
Aniston married again a couple of weeks ago. Perhaps now the magazines will lay off her. Wouldn’t it be great to see an Aniston resurgence? Someone get her the comic vehicle that suits her talents, and fast
