It honors the Friends gang that they resisted the pressure to make a regular new episode of Friends.
It has not made TV favorites like Arrested development, Gilmore girls and most recently the Swedish Brokers any services to be resurrected from the dead after having been in the TV cemetery for many years.
Instead, the Friends are seen in the studio
.
They walk around the two apartments where much of the series took place and say "do you remember this?"
interspersed with clips from the series' nearly 300 episodes.
For the rest of the one-hour and 45-minute reunion episode, the gang is interviewed by James Corden in front of a live audience.
He asks questions such as "who had the loudest laugh", "when did you feel that the world changed around you?"
and "do you still keep in touch with each other?"
When a person in the audience is asked the question "was there something you did not like about recording the series?"
Corden gasps that she is not positive enough.
We still get to know from David Schwimmer (Ross) that the worst thing that happened between 1994 and 2004 was to collaborate with the monkey Marcel, because he ate disgusting insects and could not act, hihi.
Of course, no one had expected
a shotgun interview, but this nostalgia party had really needed a little blackness to be something worth seeing.
The actors state how much they like each other, that they are still seen and how wonderful everything was. The only exception is Matthew Perry (Chandler) who is silent most of the time and gossips (due to an acute dental procedure, according to his own statement) that he sometimes felt like he would die if the audience did not laugh. Followed by a clip where he throws himself into a scene he does not belong in to get the laughter that belonged to Matt LeBlanc (Joey), but no one really follows it up.
The series is still finding new audiences on the streaming services, despite the fact that time has run away from it in many ways. Friends are almost all white and the jokes at the expense of overweight and homosexuals had not flown in a newly written series. But of course James Corden does not ask questions about how to look at it today. This is one hundred percent cozy and sentimental piano music. Instead, fans from Ghana and India and a newlywed lesbian couple have been told how much the series meant to them.
But for those of us who have spent embarrassingly many hours
(weeks? Months?) Watching Friends, there are a few clarifications.
Of all the guest celebrities, Lady Gaga's performance of Smelly Cat with Lisa Kudrow (Phoebe) and a gospel choir is the highlight.
Some behind-the-scenes clips during the filming where the actors interact with each other are also fun, but on the whole this is a product that is there to market the launch of the streaming service HBO Max.
And it shows.
See you on HBO Nordic 27 May.