Friends reconsidered: Cultural politics, intergenerationality, and afterlives : Special Issue
- Submitting institution
-
University of Southampton
- Unit of assessment
- 27 - English Language and Literature
- Output identifier
- 69097268
- Type
- B - Edited book
- DOI
-
-
- Publisher
- SAGE Ltd
- ISBN
- 0000000000
- Open access status
- -
- Month of publication
- June
- Year of publication
- 2018
- URL
-
-
- Supplementary information
-
-
- Request cross-referral to
- 33 - Music, Drama, Dance, Performing Arts, Film and Screen Studies
- Output has been delayed by COVID-19
- No
- COVID-19 affected output statement
- -
- Forensic science
- No
- Criminology
- No
- Interdisciplinary
- No
- Number of additional authors
-
2
- Research group(s)
-
-
- Proposed double-weighted
- No
- Reserve for an output with double weighting
- Yes
- Additional information
- This is the first academic volume to interrogate the continuing popularity and cultural relevance of American TV Series Friends. It began as a conference panel convened by the three editors; and was later commissioned as a special issue by the journal editor. Cobb took the lead drafting the introduction and was corresponding editor from proposal acceptance to submission. The edition comprises five 8000-word articles (one each by the editors) and a 3600-word introduction co-written by the editors. Two editors shared review and revision of contributor’s articles before and after the edition went through the journal’s peer review process. The edition is significant for being the first collection of critical research on Friends – a television show that had high domestic ratings at the time of its original airing, was broadcast internationally by season 2, and remains hugely popular around the globe, gaining further audiences in the streaming era. The articles’ interrogation of the show’s ability to speak to generational audiences from the 1990s – the present is an original intervention into television studies’ tendency to historicise shows only in their moment of first airing. The edition argues that the show’s idealised friendship family is the source of comfort in times of job loss, grief, and relationship demise in ways that spoke to Gen-X experiences of the growing neoliberalism of the 90s after the decade’s early recession and continues to function as a fantasy site for post-internet, post-crash Millennials and Gen-Zers, while raising and sublimating key cultural issues such as race, class, gender equality, and LGTBQ+ representation with Gen X irony. Cobb’s article analyses the show’s ongoing trouble with race and its incessant whiteness – situating its inability to integrate characters of colour while repeatedly including them in minor roles as emblematic of pre-9/11 and pre-social media ideas of post-racial America.
- Author contribution statement
- -
- Non-English
- No
- English abstract
- -