Friends is a program presented by NBC that leads the genre of situation comedy. It is on every Thursday night at 8 p.m. and is on its eighth season with the support of its long-lasting popularity.

     Friends focuses on the friendship of three men and three women; Chandler, Joey, Ross, Monica, Rachel and Phoebe, each with its unique characteristics. The show deals with many real life issues that surround the lives of these six friends through a humorous approach and this aspect of the show has earned the title of “Must See TV” on Thursday night. Here is the official site for more information.

     Jennifer Aniston, Courtney Cox Arquette, Lisa Kudrow, Matt LeBlanc, Matthew Perry, and David Schwimmer stars in Friends, whose popularity became an important part of the show, both in contribution to winning many awards and situating themselves on a stardom.

Click on these photos for more information on the STARS of Friends

Plus, check out this site for more on Friends, including episodes and ratings.

     In doing this study of Friends, we did not focus on a specific episode, but watched as many episodes as we could. We realized that every episode is different in terms of its contents, issues and character emphasis, and therefore, we decided that it would be best for us to gather as much information about the shows. We examined Friends to see if viewers were 'reading' television, and the five of us took the job of analyzing different aspects of the show. Content analysis was done by Susan, Genre analysis by Grace, semiotic analysis by Lisa and audience analysis by Daniel and Rina. We realized that different conclusions can be reached from doing the study of a single show, and this site presents our tasks and results for you. Here is Stefan Herrmann's article that gave us a start on this assignment.

Presented by: Daniel Kwok, Grace Li, Lisa Alfano, Rina Baik and Susan Zhu