HBO Max’s much-anticipated Friends: The Reunion finally reunited the gang, seventeen years after the show ended.  

A group of close friends, unburdened by heavy workloads or crippling rent prices, who spend their days sipping coffee and enjoying each other's company, has always been aspirational to the point of fantasy; today, Friends feels more distant than ever.

Hence, the reunion is strongest when recapturing that magic, that sense of intimacy; watching the six actors explore the perfectly reconstructed set, or simply sitting on a couch chatting, gives the impression that they really are good friends - or at least, they were, during that extraordinary decade of their lives. 

As Matthew Perry dryly points out, the group are no longer in close contact with one another. But it doesn’t take long to rekindle the spark, as the group managed to recreate iconic moments from the series, through table reads. 

Other segments of the reunion, however, feel like misguided attempts to pad out the runtime, featuring fans across the world rave about the show, or, somewhat bizarrely, actors who have never appeared on Friends explaining why they found the show enjoyable.  

James Corden as moderator feels somewhat jarring, as out-of-place as the celebrity and fan endorsements; one wonders, especially with the explosive success of table reads, reuniting actors through their most iconic films, why the Friends reunion needed to reach beyond the core cast. 

Viewers are surely watching for the sake of a nostalgia-fuelled dopamine hit, along with a hope of peeking behind the curtain, a taste of the group’s true dynamic, outside of their performances. The reunion is very cautious in this regard; Corden is there to prompt “positive vibes only,” gently lobbing softballs, steering away from the slightest hint of drama. 

While a couple of revelations are revealed (Perry’s crippling performance anxiety, David Schwimmer and Jennifer Aniston’s real-life romance), it’s somewhat amusing how the cast of Friends have managed to completely avoid murmurs of melodrama and scandal - did these people never argue, never succumb to petty rivalry and resentment, the way their characters did?

It might have been interesting to dwell more on the cast’s experiences throughout their years making the show, rather than the cutesy tidbits that remained in the final cut.

The glowing aura surrounding the set of Friends is almost suspiciously wholesome - but considering the bleak, behind-the-scenes horror stories continually leaking out of the entertainment industry, perhaps that’s for the best. 

The reunion ends with the cast speculating on where their characters would be right now, which is, I suppose, as close to a scripted special as viewers are ever going to get; really, we should be thankful that we were spared a brand new episode of Friends, cynically resurrected for the sake of nostalgia.

Leaving these beloved characters behind in that magical, carefree vision of New York, free of adult responsibility, blissfully ignorant to the surreal horrors of the modern world, seems like the best way to remember them.