“I’ll be there for you,” they told us, and they weren’t lying. This week marks 25 years since the US sitcom Friends first aired on UK television, although sometimes it seems as if no time has passed at all. Between 1995 and 2004, Friends was such a dominant presence on UK screens that it is difficult to remember what our nights in were like without the old gang. Even now, getting in some hang-time with Ross, Rachel, Chandler, Monica, Joey and Pheebs is as easy as firing up Netflix or switching to Channel 5.
US television has been waging a steady invasion campaign for decades, so while Friends was a turning point, it certainly wasn’t the first American TV show to find a major audience on British screens. In the days of three channels and no streaming, Texas-set soap opera Dallas regularly attracted more than 20 million viewers to the BBC. In 1980, its “Who shot JR?” cliffhanger kept an entire nation in suspense for the eight months between the oil baron’s attempted murder and the big reveal of the culprit. By that point, evidently, UK audiences could wait no longer and the BBC decided to compress the usual two-week delay between US and UK broadcast to just 18 hours.
Dallas had our attention, but did it have our respect? In his 2013 book, Armchair Nation: An Intimate History of Britain in Front of the TV, Professor Joe Moran details the extent to which British appreciation of the show was couched in mockery. Terry Wogan would often begin his Radio 2 morning show with a devilish takedown of the previous night’s episode, and the soap was also a favourite subject of the legendarily wry Observer TV critic Clive James. “It was never embraced as quality television because, frankly, it wasn’t,” says Moran now. As such, Dallas’s influence on the shows that came after was limited: “Part of its appeal was that it was very American and very different, so there would have been no point trying to replicate it. The appeal of Dallas was that it took itself seriously. Television drama has generally got higher quality since the 1980s.”
This upgrade was already evident by the late 80s and pre-Friends 90s, when US imports such as the cop show Hill Street Blues and offbeat murder mystery Twin Peaks were impressing UK critics. These proto-prestige dramas, involving non-cliched narratives and complex characters, were forerunners for The Sopranos, Mad Men, Breaking Bad and other shows that would come to define US television’s 00s “golden age”. Screenwriter Mark Frost, who worked with David Lynch on the game-changing Twin Peaks, was describing his “Dickensian” ambitions for the humble TV drama long before David Simon started work on The Wire. Yet, despite Twin Peaks’ subsequent influence, in UK ratings terms, it remained in the realm of “cult viewing”, albeit cult viewing watched by the Queen of England herself (well, according to a secondhand Paul McCartney anecdote relayed in a Twin Peaks DVD extra).
In contrast, Friends was a near-instant hit in the UK, and while it was at first subject to the same sort of anti-US snobbery that afflicted Dallas, this surely said more about mid-90s British audiences than it did about mid-90s US television. Even as Seinfeld, “a show about nothing”, innovated the sitcom form, the assumption lingered that British humour was somehow more sophisticated. “It’s a common generalisation in Britain that Americans don’t understand irony,” wrote the standup Stewart Lee in a 1998 Guardian article. “This seems ironic, given that when the BBC tried to show The Simpsons, the cleverest, funniest, mainstream TV show ever, in the primetime slot it obviously deserves, they pulled it after a couple of weeks when the oh-so-clever British audience, who do understand irony, preferred to watch Sabrina the Teenage Witch.”
In Friends, though, Channel 4 found a show that could appeal equally to the Simpsons/Seinfeld crowd plus Sabrina’s many young fans. Indeed, Friends originated out of the US networks’ desire to skew younger, and arrived on UK TV during a period when home-grown sitcoms – One Foot in the Grave, Last of the Summer Wine – were looking particularly doddery. And that’s without even taking the endless Dad’s Army reruns into account.
Beyond any initial sniffiness, broadcasters proved willing to not only persist with US imports but also to put the full weight of primetime scheduling behind them. Friends arrived on Channel 4 as part of a formidable Friday night block, preceded by Ellen DeGeneres’s groundbreaking sitcom Ellen at 9pm and followed by the Cheers spin-off Frasier at 10pm. As the US sitcom writer-turned-Channel 4 acquisitions chief Rick Mitz explained in a 1995 missive from Los Angeles, the hunger for US content was near-insatiable: “Although US shows are getting more pricey, they’re still much cheaper than producing home-grown UK shows. And if you hit it right, ad revenues go through the roof.”
So confident was Channel 4 in its investment that in 1999 the broadcaster spent $200m (£124m) on a deal to poach from Sky the UK terrestrial and pay-TV rights to both Friends and the Chicago-set medical drama ER. And the Friends phenomenon wasn’t a brief, caffeinated high. Its rerun-friendly package – with short episodes and a high gag-rate – helped usher in the era of global mass-syndication deals, which, in turn, funded the first headline-grabbing, $1m-per-episode cast salaries. From 2007 to 2019, with The Big Bang Theory, AKA “the new Friends”, Channel 4 would pull off a similar trick, capturing the, by-then much geekier, youth zeitgeist and also airing each episode multiple times, sometimes in the same week.
Arguably, the invention of the gold-plated re-run was a much more appreciated thank-you gift to Friends’ British supporters than their 1998 attempt to ‘do London’. Having introduced Ross’s British love interest, Emily (Helen Baxendale) at the beginning of season four, the main cast (minus heavily pregnant Phoebe) decamped to London for a season finale featuring Tom Conti and Jennifer Saunders (Absolutely Fabulous was big stateside). This inspired its own minor — and regrettable — US sitcom trend, with episodes of Parks and Recreation and Will & Grace also making the trip.
As the century ended and the golden era dawned – The Sopranos first aired on British television in the summer of 1999 – UK attitudes to US television were completely transformed from lazy derision of the likes of Dallas to breathless admiration. A wave of British imitations inevitably followed, initially the Friends-like Coupling, written by a pre-Doctor Who Steven Moffat, and later gritty antihero dramas such as Peaky Blinders. More recently, the trend for co-productions has established a kind of transatlantic hinterland where Sex Education and The End of the F***ing World combine an aesthetic that is glossily American with a cast that’s mostly British, and the trade routes have reversed once again. Now it British shows, typically those which, like Fleabag, cling most doggedly to their own cultural identities, that are being talked up by “in-the-know” American viewers.
In 25 years, TV’s version of the “special relationship” has had its ups and downs. It is an on-again-off-again, sometimes dysfunctional, always codependent affair but, importantly, it endures. Ross and Rachel could probably relate.
