Television & New Media Special Issue: Friends Reconsidered: Cultural Politics, Intergenerationality, and Afterlives (ISSN 1552-8316)
- Submitting institution
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University of Winchester
- Unit of assessment
- 34 - Communication, Cultural and Media Studies, Library and Information Management
- Output identifier
- 34NE1
- Type
- B - Edited book
- DOI
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- Publisher
- SAGE Publishing
- ISBN
- 0000000000
- Open access status
- Out of scope for open access requirements
- Month of publication
- December
- Year of publication
- 2018
- URL
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https://journals.sagepub.com/toc/tvn/19/8
- Supplementary information
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- Request cross-referral to
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- Output has been delayed by COVID-19
- No
- COVID-19 affected output statement
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- Forensic science
- No
- Criminology
- No
- Interdisciplinary
- No
- Number of additional authors
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- Research group(s)
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- Proposed double-weighted
- No
- Reserve for an output with double weighting
- No
- Additional information
- This special edition began as a conference panel interrogating Friends as a show with high cultural currency that remains a lacuna in television scholarship, with publication initiated by invitation from the journal editors. The edition comprises five articles (including one by Ewen) of 8000 words and a 3600-word co-written introduction. Each editor reviewed all articles before and after they underwent the journal’s formal peer review process.
This special edition is significant for being the first collection of academic research dedicated to Friends. The collection’s interrogation of the show’s ability to speak to multi-generational audiences that span the 1990s to the present is an original intervention into television studies’ tendency to historicise shows only in their moment of first airing.
Together, the articles argue that the show’s friendship group is an idealised source of comfort in times of job loss, economic anxiety, and relationship demise, in ways that speak both to Gen-X formative experiences during the growth of neoliberalism of the 90s and to Millennials and Gen-Zers during the contemporary, post-2008, crisis of capitalism. Key to this process is the way that Friends raises and sublimates important socio-cultural issues such as ‘race’, class, gender equality, and LGTBQ representation, through an ironic mode typical of 90s texts, and now trades on nostalgia for an imagined simpler past.
Ewen’s article analyses Chandler Bing’s perpetual crisis of masculinity (his infertility, his periodic reliance on his wife’s income, and the constant questioning of his sexuality) and argues that it a productive lens through which to consider the violence of contemporary capitalism on the lives of the middle class, for whom the aspirationalism of the twentieth century has quickly dissolved in the opening years of the new century.
- Author contribution statement
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- Non-English
- No
- English abstract
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