"Friends"

Grace Cuiming Li

          ìFriendsî is a sitcom that has been a great success for NBC since it first aired in 1994. The program's distinctiveness lies in being a comedy made out of trivia and minutiae, a fusion of casual incidents and situations of everyday metropolitan life, all of which signify conventional notion of friendship and the notion, of kinship indeed. We see Monica and Rachel in their apartment, with next-door neighbors Chandler and Joey constantly dropping in, and Ross (brother of Monica as well as former college roommate to Chandler) and bizarre friend Phoebe (ex-roommate of Monica) visiting, or in the cafÈ where they are all regular customers, or at their work place respectively. ìFriendsî has been adding something new to television comedy, a new representation of the work-family situation comedy. It depicts six adults who are loosely coupled rather than inside a family (ALL IN THE FAMILY) or a workplace (MURPHY BROWN).