Desperately Seeking ‘Friends’

When will they ever learn? Over the next few weeks, beginning with this Thursday’s debut of NBC’s amusing but ordinary “Four Kings,”the broadcast networks will renew their never-ending quest for a new sitcom to match the mega-success of “Friends.” But in doing so they demonstrate their continued inability to deconstruct the basic truth that made “Friends” (and most other successful sitcoms of the last half-century) a hit: the presence of appealing, funny women, and the bumbling, inept men who love them. Instead,21st-century sitcoms keep failing – due to the continued domination of Hollywood by male comedy writers who believe there is nothing quite so funny in life as their penises.The appeal of “Friends” derived, at least in the show’s years at the pinnacle of the Zeitgeist, from its sexy and sensitive sextet – three smart, funny women and two soft, insecure men. Joey was its single sop to television’s standard over-sexed, heterosexual male; Chandler didn’t even like watching sports on the tube, and Ross was a science geek into commitment and children. At its core, “Friends” was a show aimed at the audience that comprises any truly successful show on television: women. Men only began tagging along later, amused enough by the jokes to tolerate the show’s essentially feminist attitude. (The show benefited from the perspective of its creators, a gay man partnered with a married woman.) Viewers howled at episodes like the one in which Joey gave Chandler a friendship bracelet – a situation that would humiliate most men in real life, but made for unforgettable comedy.In the years since “Friends” first triumphed, all six broadcast networks have tried repeatedly to duplicate the formula by creating shows with young, sexy, urban ensembles – and virtually all of them have failed miserably. Why? Because they typically turned over the writing responsibilities to men who made themselves the center of their fictional universe. Quickly (and in some cases, instantly), mostly female audiences rejected these premises as antiquated, if not offensive. They hated – and rightly so – the constant portrayal of women sitcom characters as sex objects slavishly devoted to the typically handsome, horny (and rarely amusing) guys at the forefront. Even on the hit NBC show “Will & Grace,” the premise depends on Grace as the supplicant to men who dominate and dictate her future; she has no say in her love life, forever slipping on emotional banana peels on her way to a real relationship.Now comes “Four Kings” and ABC’s disappointing “Emily’s Reasons Why Not,” two more shows that subject their female characters to the now-ritualistic abuse by sitcom men who love and leave with reckless abandon. With “Emily,” once you get past the inane setting at a Los Angeles-based bookpublishing company – there’s no such thing, last I checked – you’re left with the story of a beautiful woman who can’t get a decent date. And the premise of “Four Kings” leaves almost no room for women to exist, let alone shine. It’s the story of four friends from childhood who, in the pilot, move into a fabulous New York apartment inherited from one character’s dead grandmother.This creates a momentary crisis for the future host, who must reject his girlfriend’s pleas to co-habitate in the palatial pad; when he does so, his girlfriend clucks in anger like a chicken, and by the end of the episode she gets the permanent boot. Despite a steady supply of wit – the show was created by David Kohan and Max Mutchnick of the equally droll “Will & Grace” – it lacks the emotional resonance of “Friends,” where the core characters coped with the reality of romantic entanglements. Women won’t watch “Four Kings” after a while, much as they drifted away from its NBC Thursday-night predecessor, “Joey,” after that “Friends” spin-off tightened its focus on Joey as a sexual predator. That show’s abandonment of its one strong female character, Joey’s sister (played by the wonderful Drea de Matteo),foretold its eventual doom.But “Four Kings” plays like “The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants” by comparison with “Emily’s Reasons Why Not.” Heather Graham has never been more appealing, and yet she still can’t seem to escape the curse of playing an eternal sex object.The show (which debuts next Monday at 9:00 p.m.) purports to address her point of view on failed relationships, but instead she comes off as desperately needy for a man’s affections – and endlessly determined to pick her men according to the arrangement of their physical features.The two boyfriends who populate the pilot are equally gorgeous and dumb, yet they’re the ones in control of her love life. She’s rendered helpless by their hair.The show’s conceit – that Emily lists the wrongs of her potential mates – reveals its inherent weakness; she defines her character not by her career (she’s a successful book editor) but by her failings in relation to men. Every date becomes a setup for emotional disappointment; in the pilot she falls for a beautiful male co-worker who turns out to be a virgin, and in doing so reveals herself to be little more than a man-hungry animal. It’s especially sad to see her character dispensed with like this, because it’s clear Ms. Graham has the potential to be a true television star. The counterpoint of “Friends” suggests that there’s another way; Monica Gellar was a chef, Rachel Green a fashion professional, and Phoebe Buffay a masseuse, all with appealing insecurities and dimensions that made men swoon. They didn’t fall for every man who looked at them sideways, and the result was a 10-season run of unparalleled success. On “Emily’s Reasons Why Not,” you’re bound to quickly forget that Ms. Graham has any job other than to make googly eyes at her new crush.Whose fault is this? It’s easy to blame the writers, but they’re not the ones who put shows on the air.The network executives – horny old men who could do better throwing darts at the wall – make the choices among piles of pilots sent their way, and think the secret to the success of “Friends” lay in the casting of foxy females. Ironically, the opposite was true.While there’s no debating the attractiveness of Jennifer Aniston, Courteney Cox, and Lisa Kudrow, their appeal had more to do with their emotional strength than their legs. We enjoyed watching their joys and tribulations, and we relished laughing at their superiority over the goofy guys down the hall. It was Ross who got tongue-tied around Rachel, and Chandler who found himself hopelessly infatuated with Monica – and those old-fashioned courtships kept us watching, not Joey’s animal-like appetite for women and food.The problems stem, as usual, from executives who spend too much of their time calculating the marketplace, and not enough evaluating the storylines of their prospective series. Neither “Four Kings” nor “Emily’s Reasons Why Not” hold out much hope for the future; nothing in their pilots suggests a logical place to go. “Four Kings” has been organized around the principle that these men need only themselves to survive, and “Emily’s Reasons Why Not” has been defined by the defeatist attitude of its title. Both shows waste the talents of their writers and actors, forced – most likely by the demands of the network executives who control the green lights of television production – to pretend to be “Friends” without understanding the basic precepts of halfhour comedy. What “Friends” (and its great romantic comedy predecessors such as “Cheers” and “The Honeymooners”) gave us was a blueprint for storytelling that worked like a charm – and jokes that derived not from an endless obsession with sex, but from the lust for laughter that keeps most relationships truly alive.dblum@nysun.com

Desperately Seeking ‘Friends’

Desperately Seeking ‘Friends’

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