How would we have made it through the pandemic without nostalgia TV?

The ‘Friends’ reunion has provided us with the blast-from-the-past fix that dreams are made of, writes Harriet Hall

Covid perk: Jennifer Aniston et al were friends reunited (EPA)

It’s hard to imagine how we would have clung onto our sanity during three national lockdowns without the aid of streaming services. Come to think of it, it’s a wonder more conspiracy theorists haven’t attempted to connect Ted Sarandos and Jeff Bezos with the genesis of Covid-19.

Alongside the key workers that kept the world turning, there sat Netflix, Amazon Prime, NOW and Apple TV: our entertainment saviours that prevented us from having to actually speak to our partners or take up needlepoint to distract ourselves from the apocalypse.

Though the virus put paid to TV and film production for months, this ultimately didn’t matter for those of us craving, not newness, but comfort in the old. Our collective desire to stick our heads in the sand and pretend we were in fact home by choice, manifested in a yearning to revisit old reliable favourites.

Among the TV shows viewers revisited during 2020 and 2021, according to a 2021 survey, were Desperate Housewives, Family Guy and Grey’s Anatomy. Was it a chance to live vicariously through these characters? OK, they may have been murdering their neighbours and conducting extramarital affairs in hospital wards, but at least they were leaving the house, dressing up and hugging!

Our craving for nostalgia has been satiated this week via the long-awaited Friends reunion. Six people with whom millions across the world spent a decade connecting, caring about and laughing with, returning to our screens is the nostalgia fix that dreams are made of.

Friends is the ultimate comfort viewing because it requires no particular thought, offers no challenge or jeopardy and has a guaranteed happy ending. It simply shows a snapshot of a simple, comfortable and trouble-free life.

Looking back at the sitcom through our increasingly considerate lenses, there’s much to question about how certain storylines might play out were it to be aired today. But if you ask me, these downfalls also make Friends even more appealing – as it reminds us how far we’ve come in questioning previously accepted behaviours. I personally don’t agree with every takedown of the show as many of the storylines were clearly designed to send up stereotypes.

No one told us life was gonna be this way and chances are, if they had, we’d have had a hard time believing it. So, let’s suspend our disbelief instead and immerse ourselves, guilt-free, into a heady dose of nostalgia viewing.

Could it be any more appealing?

Yours,

Harriet Hall

Lifestyle editor