First broadcast 30 years ago this week, the hugely popular show Friends became much more than a sitcom – it brought a new way of living into the mainstream. Barely three minutes into the pilot episode of Friends (The One Where Monica Gets a Roommate), the audience gets introduced to Rachel Green – played by Jennifer Aniston – as she bursts through the doors of the now universally recognised Central Perk in her wedding dress, having hotfooted it straight from the altar, leaving behind her orthodontist fiancé Barry. She's run away from her potential domestic set-up – married at 24 to a man she didn't love – to search for an alternative life in the big city.
Later in the episode, she sits at her high-school friend Monica Geller's kitchen table as the others encourage her to cut up the credit cards paid for by her father. It's a symbolic severing of ties to her family as she starts a new life in the city with Monica, Phoebe, Chandler, Joey and Ross. "Welcome to the real world," says Monica.
"It sucks. You're going to love it." More like this: In that opening episode, which premiered 30 years ago this month, Friends let its audience know exactly what the show would be about.
Marriage was abandoned (or, in Ross's case, over not long after it had begun). Parents were out of the picture. The people these characters would rely on every week were each other.
They were six slightly clueless twenty-somethings muddling their way through relationships, jobs and life. Not sure w.