'The One Where Monica Gets a Roommate' (1994)
Genre: Sitcom
Follows six friends as they help each other overcome the trials and tribulations of life.
Friends was created by David Crane and Marta Kauffman and ran from 1994 to 2004 for 236 episodes over 10 seasons.
Analysis:
Sitcom and Performance:
In sitcoms, actors typically balance acting and performance as shown in Friends, as when the characters tell jokes they perform to the audience to make them laugh, but they act during more emotional moments, such as scenes between Ross and Rachel, meaning the audience also become invested in the character's personal lives.
Also, this show suggests that character types are portrayed in different ways by different actors, as all of these characters at some point act in a way that can be seen as stupid. For example, Matthew Perry performs so that it appears Chandler is emotionally underdeveloped in contrast to Lisa Kudrow who interprets Phoebe to seem to be emotionally response to situations.
Close-ups are typically framed wider than in drama as comedy does not want the audience to focus too long on the character's reactions. This is sometimes the case in Friends but some close-ups are framed as if they are from a drama, because of the element of the audience's emotional involvement in the character's lives.
This show also uses limited sets as is typical in sitcoms, especially since they are domestic settings such as the characters' apartments and the cafe where the group meets up, The Central Perk.
Review:
What I liked most about the pilot episode of Friends was that it was more interesting than I had expected because the characters seemed to already have backstories from before the first episode, that could further be explored. They also had a meeting place, a cafe called The Central Perk, that the character of Rachel was integrated into at the end when it was discovered she had got a job there, which I found was clever as not only did it join the plot points of when she was trying to make coffee earlier in the episode, but also further connected her to the other characters, as at the beginning she was very different from them, being rich and living off her father while the others work and live in quite small apartments. The only thing I didn't enjoy about this episode was that there was a continuity error when Phoebe was over one side of the apartment, standing up, but when it cut to the next shot she was in the background on the other side of the apartment, sitting down, which made the joke she had just told no longer funny as I was confused as to how she had moved instead. Overall, I enjoyed this episode and would like to see more of Friends, not only for the humor, but also to see how the character's emotional lives develop and intertwine.
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