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When Kate finally gets her first period, her white jeans are bleeding all over.
Her friend Tully lends Kate her own pants and wears her top as a super-short mini dress for the rest of the high school day.
The first "You look like a bitch" abuse is not long in coming, Tully stays cool, but Kate's enough - she hooks the bully on the chin.
For over 30 years, the series "Firefly Lane" tells the story of two friends who have been inseparable since their teenage days.
It's a very special friendship, one that survives every jealousy, every adversity to life: Tully and Kate leave the street they grew up on together, go to college together, and later end up as journalists in the same editorial office.
It wasn't until Kate started her own family and Tully made a career as a television presenter that the friendship really began to falter.
“Always there for you”, so the German Netflix title, is based on a bestselling novel by Kristin Hannah and should be the next big hit in the “women's entertainment” segment for the streaming service.
Has worked out quite well so far: the series has settled at number one in the charts within the first week of its appearance.
Tully (Ali Skovby) and Kate (Roan Curtis) live as teenagers on the same street, "Firefly Lane"
Source: COURTESY OF NETFLIX
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But why actually?
Sure, the leading actresses are charming and personable;
Katherine Heigl and Sarah Chalke play Tully and Kate between the ages of 20 and 40, and the teenage duo of Ali Skovbye and Roan Curtis are just as good.
And the fact that the narrative form jumps back and forth between scenes from the 70s (then filmed in sepia tones), 80s and the early noughties creates tension where there actually isn't any.
Because history itself is of course almost as old as humanity.
The eternal female myth of the “best friend” is staged according to all the rules of cliché art: There are two women who cannot do without each other, yet are latently jealous of each other.
The glamorous, lively Tully meets the good-natured Kate.
Although she is a little less attractive and successful, she has not suffered as much trauma as Tully, whose drug-addicted mother gave her considerable fear of commitment.
The friendship thrives on shared memories and the availability of each other for decades: The friends talk to each other on the phone every day, in one scene Tully says: "You can't not get in touch for a day, you know that I can't stand it."
Tully and Kate as a prime example of girlfriends
Such scenes, in which Tully and Kate guarantee each other eternal support with champagne swipes on the sun lounger in the villa garden in Seattle (see series name!), Are of course cliché, pipe dream and agony at the same time.
The one best friend who stays for life is a motif that is almost more widespread in pop culture than love at first sight - and usually has just as little to do with reality.
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A few famous girlfriend pairings in recent history: Cher and Dionne (“Clueless”), Bibi and Tina, Summer and Marissa (“The OC”), Serena and Blair (“Gossip Girl”), Paris and Nicole (“The Simple Life ”): A reliable dramaturgy results in all of these productions from the girlfriend list alone.
Because women's friendships on the screen are always highly complicated: The MTV reality series “The Hills”, which became a cult in the mid-noughties and was reanimated in 2019, was fed by the dispute between the two leading actresses Lauren Conrad and Heidi Montag for several seasons.
And the incredible success of Elena Ferrante's already filmed Neapolitan saga about Lenuccia and Lila, the two brilliant friends, is also based on the extremely honest portrayal of the emotional worlds in which female friendships often move: They know everything about each other, know the most intimate secrets - and that is what makes the relationship so vulnerable.
Tully and Kate keep finding each other
Source: COURTESY OF NETFLIX
In “Firefly Lane”, too, a “once in a lifetime” friendship is the most stable and at the same time most fragile relationship in a woman's life, using the example of Tully and Kate.
For most women, the “best friends” should take turns or exchange ideas in the various phases of life, and a clique model à la “Sex and the City” with a different friend for every life issue is always very practical.
The fact that your best friend from your youthful days remains the number one contact person in adult life is a romantic, but also quite unrealistic idea.
Moves, changes of interests, careers, starting families come in between.
Even in friendship, nobody can and does not have to remain monogamous.
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And yet the ideal of the one, true, best friend, the BFF for all time, is once again flickering across millions of screens worldwide.
Is it because of the current, futile longing for real friendly closeness that the audience is so taken with Tully and Kate?
Maybe.
But probably also because the series finally gives a few answers to the question: What is a real girlfriend?
The conclusion after the first season can only be: be able to indulge and forgive.
And actually answering the phone when your girlfriend calls.
The best and worst on Netflix:
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