TV Hangouts and the People We Call Friends
Part 1/3
The world is a little unhinged right now, I’m sure we could all agree. In times of violence, political vitriol, economic uncertainty, and division in our communities, we all need something to ease the stress we feel. Enter the warm nostalgia dished up by a good TV sitcom. That always seems to do the trick for me.
Nostalgia is baked into the experience of watching TV sitcoms, and it’s what keeps us coming back for more. This nostalgia is so powerful because it comes in many forms. When you turn on your favorite show, you’ll likely find your heart warming not just at the company of familiar faces, but also the presence of a social era that is now in the past. Maybe you’ve had thoughts like this: Ah, I miss the days when the world was simpler, when I could be part of a place where everybody knew my name, when offices felt less suffocating, and when you had to talk to the people around you rather than look at your phone. When you combine those feelings with characters that can make you guffaw by doing something that isn’t even objectively funny, it’s no wonder we turn to these shows for therapeutic effect.
Take Friends as an example of nostalgia that hits at the personal and social level. You might enjoy the personal company of Ross, Rachel, Phoebe, Monica, Chandler, and Joey. But, if you’re like me, you may also find yourself longing for a time in which people gathered in coffee shops to connect with their social circle as part of their daily routine. Of course, Friends is a romanticized vision of social connection (there’s that familiar quip about how inconsistently-employed 20-somethings can afford to live in New York and chat over coffee so often). Yet, I admit that I do feel a nostalgia for the characters and the world they inhabited, idealized as they may be.
Something is happening beneath the surface of the nostalgia, though. Recently I began to notice an interesting trend: the “hangout spots" in these shows take on the qualities of the social era in which they find themselves, and they serve as clear illustrations for how the world is changing.
More on that point in a second. First, you know what I mean by hangout spots when I talk about TV comedy, right? Practically every show has one. Some are at a workplace, others are at bars, some are even at college cafeterias. For my purposes, I’ll define a true TV hangout spot (super technical term, I know) as a public place in which the characters intentionally spend time with each other but are surrounded by other members of the community. Running with the Friends example, my definition here excludes the apartments since those aren’t public spaces, but includes the coffee shop.
Back to the main point. As TV comedies evolve with the world, their hangout spots illuminate a shift happening in our society away from wide-reaching community engagement towards closed social circles. Moreover, the hangout spots of our favorite shows give us a hint that this trend has everything to do with the increasingly difficult experience of friendship.
Let’s explore this shift by asking questions of our nostalgia. Why is it that we long to revisit other seasons of our history - seasons where community and life just felt easier - through TV shows? And why, then, do we subsequently find ourselves isolated in need of friends yet having less and less desire to connect with our communities?
Part 2/3
First, let’s get some concrete examples of sitcom hangout spots in front of us. I’m mostly going to reflect on the trend I see in shows that aired in my lifetime, so even though these are the ones on my radar, perhaps you’ve seen some of them and can inhabit those spaces in your mind as you read.
Monk’s Cafe in Seinfeld
Central Perk in Friends
Cafe Nervosa in Frasier
Luke’s in Gilmore Girls
The hospital and bars in Scrubs
Poor Richard’s and the office in, well, The Office
City Hall and JJ’s Diner in Parks and Recreation
Paddy’s Pub in It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia
MacLaren’s Pub in How I Met Your Mother
The Griffin in New Girl
The study room and the cafeteria in Community
The cafeteria and The Cheesecake Factory in The Big Bang Theory
The studio in 30 Rock
Shaw’s Bar in Brooklyn 99
The break room in Superstore
As I mentioned, I think these places illuminate shifts happening in the nature of friendship in America. It will be most helpful to make my case by putting the shows into three categories.
Category A: 90s Classics
Let’s start with Friends, Seinfeld, and Frasier. In all three shows, cafes play a huge role. Central Perk, as mentioned, provides a space for the company of friends to hold court nearly every day. We’re not meant to question how they make time for it or what else they may be doing that day; it is simply part of their life.
Similarly, Monk’s Cafe in Seinfeld is a frequent location in which Jerry, George, Elaine, and Kramer meet one another or their acquaintances. And Cafe Nervosa is Frasier Cane’s favorite place to commiserate in public for all to hear.
What strikes me about these iconic 90s shows is the prevalence of other people from the community in the cafes. In each spot, you can expect the camera to find recognizable faces - the cashier, the owner, old friends from high school, whomever the character happens to be dating at the time, and so on. Furthermore, the cafes exist within the larger social framework of New York City and Seattle. You are generally aware of what is around each cafe, including rival cafes, the street names, vendors, etc. Luke’s Cafe in Gilmore Girls fits the same bill, and the social connectivity is even higher in its small town setting.
Notably, work is not the thing that brings people together in these shows. The characters have a bond that was formed outside of work, and these bonds of friendship are brought with them to the hangout spots in which they spend time. So, then, the friendships are personal in nature, and they are supplemented by the relational connectivity to the other people in the cafes.
I call these social connections to people in the community “relational inputs.” Relational inputs are positive bids for communication given by a person who knows a character’s name and has some kind of concern for their wellbeing. They can be given by anyone, even people who only know the characters at the surface level. All it takes is a “hello" from a newspaper vendor or a “how’s the family?” from the diner owner. Psychology, specifically the concept of scaffolding, teaches us that relational inputs are a good thing. Our social development is contingent upon necessary relationships and experiences that nurture our overall wellbeing. In other words, a wide variety of relationships is a very healthy thing for a person.
Furthermore, the scaffolding concept teaches us that our relational inputs have a huge bearing on how we make friends. If we have a few friends but a low number of relational inputs, it puts a lot of pressure on those friends to meet all of our relational needs. On the other hand, if we have a few friends but an overall high number of relational inputs, there is less pressure on our friends to meet all of our relational needs.
Therefore, our level of relational inputs predicts how picky or open we are to befriending people we feel are different than us. When you’re in a wide social network, you don’t need friends to satisfy all of your relational needs - those are met by a whole village - and there is low cost to an experimental friendship with a weirdo not working out. When you’re lonely, though, it may actually be harder to make friends because they are put in the difficult position of bearing the entire weight of your social life, causing you to be more picky about who you allow into your circle. In that scenario, it’s easier to look for companionship among people just like you.
Back to the shows. In Friends, Seinfeld, Frasier, and Gilmore Girls, the characters are often friends with people very different than them. Seinfeld is a great example - Jerry and George are polar opposites. Even with Friends, we may have become so accustomed to the main crew that we forget how different from one another they really are. Can you imagine in today’s world a paleontologist befriending a soap opera actor through a convoluted series of connections through shared living situations? Many young people today would rather go broke than live with a roommate after college, let alone be friends with someone who does not immediately “get” them. And it’s true for older people, too, trust me: in my job as a discipleship pastor, the people who quit church groups the most because the group dynamics don’t click right away are older people, not younger people.
The broad range of people featured in these fictional cafés, then, highlights just how important relational inputs are to forming friendships with unlikely people. The whole community bears the weight of the characters’ relational needs, allowing unlikely companionships to be possible.
Category B: Workplace Comedies
Contrast these shows with the shows that took over TV in the 2000s and 2010s: workplace comedies. The defining feature of these comedies is their focus on the workplace and the oddball misfits who inhabit them rather than the personal relationships of the main characters. Despite the emphasis on work, though, public hangout spots continued to be important features of the social environment.
Shows I’m putting into this category (and their respective hangout spots) include Scrubs (unnamed bars), The Office (Poor Richard’s Pub), Brooklyn 99 (Shaw’s Bar), and Parks and Recreation (JJ’s Diner, which is held afloat financially due to Leslie Knope’s waffle addiction).
It doesn’t take long to notice that the characters in workplace comedies have less relational inputs from the broader community than characters in Category A and are more picky with who they call friends. The dramatic arc of these shows is uniform: the main characters undertake a journey to forge meaningful friendships with the office mates they’re stuck with, only to hesitate at first due to the weirdness of the coworkers. Despite this initial choosiness, though, the characters exhibit a willingness over time to befriend the unlikely people with whom they work. The bond holding them together is their job, and that’s enough to make something like a friendship work despite dissimilarities across other areas of their lives.
Michael Scott and Jim Halpert from The Office demonstrate this effect perfectly. Jim sees no future in his career at Dunder Mifflin Paper Company, and generally finds his coworkers to be insane (except Pam, his crush). By the end of the show, however, Jim is willing to admit that his idiotic and impulsive boss, Michael, has become something of a friend. What contributes to this development, though? Is it a shared acknowledgment that they are both human beings part of something bigger than themselves, or a commitment to their community? No - the change occurs because there aren’t many other social options. Throughout the show, we don’t experience any connection that Jim or Michael have to a broader community. Instead, their office mates are the cards they’ve been dealt, and they choose to pursue relationships with them despite initial pickiness. (The same could be said of Ron Swanson/Chris Traeger and Ann Perkins/Leslie Knope in Parks and Rec, and Jake/Boyle and Rosa/Amy in Brooklyn 99.)
The hangout spots of these Category B shows make visible this stark difference from the rosy, bustling cafés of the Category A shows. In Brooklyn 99, Shaw’s is the bar of choice for the law enforcement officers of the 99th precinct, so much so that it’s a bit of a joke that people with sketchy records ought to avoid it. True to the genre of workplace comedy, characters that interact here are coworkers who spend time with one another but don’t really engage with other people at the bar. The camera doesn’t find its way to other customers, family members or acquaintances, outside vendors, etc. Additionally, Shaw’s could exist anywhere; the fact that it’s in New York City is ancillary. It is a group of oddball coworkers who have come to accept each other as friends in the absence of other relational inputs. (The same case could be made for the physicians of Scrubs in their after-shift venting sessions.)
Don’t get me wrong, it’s significant that characters in workplace comedies are still willing to open themselves up to unlikely friendships. In fact, I’d argue that they are more embracing of social possibilities than most of us today, even if they are on the whole less embracing than our friends from Category A shows. In today’s world, I think Jim Halpert would be on LinkedIn hunting for other options rather than sticking it out with Michael, and I think he’d go home and stream Netflix rather than go to Poor Richard’s with people who drive him mad. Jim, like other characters from this category, are part of the social world they’ve been dealt, and I happen to think that workplace comedies highlight a relational resilience that we ought not lose.
We might ask before moving on why the shift from the social world of Category A to Category B occurred at all. Why did television go from cafes where characters knew the whole village to offices full of strange people trying to be friends? Well, the short answer is the world made that shift and television followed. The long answer is harder and is perhaps best reserved for a different discussion. (Though if I did have room to discuss it here, I’d say that shareholder economies and city zoning accelerated the takeover of suburban grids stifled by stoplights, shopping franchises, and highways, fundamentally affecting our ability to gather with others apart from picking a fight with traffic. I’d also point out that when communities became less accessible, a growing reality that sociologists call the work life/private life divide forced people to spend more time in two places, and two places only - work and home. And I’d end by saying that these changes hindered the formation of relational inputs from the village, necessarily shifting attention to the readily-available relationships in workplaces. But I don’t have time to say that stuff here.)
Category C: 2010s Cliques
This brings us to our last category of shows, most of them airing throughout the 2010s. After the workplace comedy trend peaked, TV characters began to adapt more and more to a world marked by individualism.
Despite the decline of American community life, hangout spots retained a resilient role in TV sitcoms of this era. There are a good number of shows and their respective hangout spots I’ll put in Category C, the category I think we’re still in today: New Girl (The Griffin Bar), How I Met Your Mother (MacLaren’s Pub), It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia (Paddy’s), 30 Rock (the studio), Community and The Big Bang Theory (college cafeterias). The commonality between these diverse shows is the way that friendship is portrayed as a given, defined clique among similar people rather than an evolving pursuit pointing to a diverse community.
Let me explain. In Category A, the characters had many relational inputs that resulted in a rich social life, of which their friends were only one part. In Category B, the characters had less relational inputs and came to accept their coworkers as friends over time. But now, in Category C, the characters already have friends, and their friends make up a closed group to which no one else is allowed access. These “cliques” comprise their entire social lives: there is little emphasis on belonging to the surrounding community or even the people of their workplaces. The relational inputs of the characters are so low that the pressure to satisfy their social needs rests wholly on their friends. Therefore, people outside the clique - strangers who might be weird or judge them - are not allowed in, since the presence of other people might throw off the balance and throw their entire social lives into disarray.
This exclusivity is why very few of these characters came to know each other at work. That would require befriending new people! Instead, what we get in these Category C shows are personal relationships among people who, for some unexplained reason, just seem to “get” each other. Life has brought them together by some extraordinary means or by fate, and now the clique is set. Take a closer look, though, and you’ll see that the clique members are from the same socioeconomic class, have a similar degree of popularity, and hold beliefs that can coexist under one roof. Lest you think I’m casting judgment, I remind you that these shows, many that I adore, are simply responding to the social era to which they belong.
Why, though, did the social world of sitcoms change from B to C, causing such a deficiency of relationships? Again, the simple answer is that the world changed and TV changed with it, and the longer answer would require more time. If I had to take a stab at it, I’d say that franchising, city zoning, and movements away from managerial workplaces towards shareholder control had a profound impact on not just our communities, but the gathering places within them. It’s harder to justify a local, conversation-friendly pub built to foster connection and togetherness when a bright, peppy arrangement of modern chairs and flashy craft brews is what maximizes the profit needed to pay astronomical rent. The most important change, though, is the prevalence of handheld social detonators. Phones allow us to compare ourselves with others ad nauseam on social media and ignore the people in our surroundings. Heck, phones even allow us to ignore talking to the waiting staff at our favorite restaurant and have a faceless agent bring it to our front door.
Consider how hangout spots illuminate these social dynamics. In New Girl, we don’t get an extended look at the characters’ lives outside each other. Jess, Nick, Schmidt, Cece, and Winston have workplaces, but those aren’t significant to the story. Los Angeles is the setting of the show, yet the city appears so infrequently that the loft might as well be anywhere. They go to hang out at a bar called The Griffin. Like Category A, the friends on camera in the bar are personal friends rather than work friends. Like Category B, the camera rarely pays attention to the eclectic conglomeration of other people in the bar, and focuses instead on the main crew. How I Met Your Mother shares these traits in common with New Girl, and is indicative of how the pressure put on friends to fulfill one’s entire social lives leads to relationships among similar, rather than oddball pairings. (My wife pointed out that in How I Met Your Mother, Lily frequently voices approval or disapproval of Ted’s dating choices because she doesn’t want a girl she doesn’t like to spend time in the friend circle.)
Category C’s unique combo of social dynamics goes unnoticed when we watch, but imagine if the Friends crew hung out at a placeless Starbucks and never acknowledged anyone else in the café. Imagine if the camera stayed tight on the six of them jammed together in a booth having hushed conversations so that no one could hear. In the case of Seinfeld, what if Jerry, instead of meeting Kramer through a building directory, bumped into him in the hallway while looking at his phone, said hello, sized him up as weird, and then went inside? What if they saw each other at Monk’s all the time, but only as acquaintances? Of course, seeing those situations acted out would unsettle us. Yet that is our world - a world in which outside forces and the phones in our hand hinder connections to an authentic community, causing relational pickiness, increased isolation, and an unwillingness for people we assume different than us to be counted among our friends.
Part 3/3
So, what should we take away from the changing dynamics of friendship in TV?
Let’s simplify our discussion to its bare bones: TV is following culture, and culture is becoming more individualistic. As our communities change, we’re becoming choosier in all areas of our lives, especially in regards to the people we call friends. I offer no judgment on the shows or the characters in them - on the contrary, I love many of the shows I’m picking apart here. The characters, like us, are caught up in forces bigger than them that influence their behavior. Reflecting critically of that behavior, though, is important.
Perhaps the first thing we should ask is, “Is this choosiness a bad thing?” These TV shows don’t offer a verdict on the question, but we can ponder if the implications are good or harmful for our lives.
My personal evaluation is informed by a pastoral perspective. I worry that as people become more exclusive in their friendships, they’ll give up on making friends altogether, and this loss would certainly harm us in the long run. The data backs me up here. Social isolation and mental illness are at all time highs. (Check out The Atlantic’s recent article, “The Anti-Social Century.”) People with technology and money report lower amounts of personal flourishing than those in third-world countries who have a fraction of what we have. (See Christianity Today’s excellent report on global flourishing, “Measuring the Good Life.”) There is no way around it: we need relationships, and a lot of them at that.
I also worry that the more we limit our acceptance of friends to the people that we think will meet our needs, the more we’ll caricature the people that don’t. In the absence of curiosity, prejudice of all kinds stews. We start to tell stories about people with less social IQ than us - those awkward people who come off a little odd. Or people in different economic classes, age brackets, or political camps. Before long, we might even tell stories about entire groups of people, and what started as a skepticism of those weird families over there has turned into a preference to deport people on legal pathways to citizenship. Assuming the stories of other people is a slippery, slippery slope, and no one is immune: progressives, conservatives, young, old, rich, poor (yes, I do think progressive-leaning people such as myself are just as prone to making assumptions).
An important caveat, though, is that a social mandate to be friends with everyone is not the solution. Nobody, including myself, wants that. It is important that we make an effort to develop some kind of relationship with the people in our community, though, even if it’s just an acquaintance, and this is where I can think reflecting on TV comedies can help us.
This point leads me to my first of two suggestions as to what we can do about this slip towards isolationism: we should make intentional efforts to engage with the people in our communities rather than ignore them in public. Think about your relationship to your neighbors in the grocery store, workplace, schools, DMVs, etc. There is huge potential for a healthy network of acquaintances for all of us. So, then, might those neighbors qualify as worthy to receive a greeting, eye contact, a listening ear, a basic level of concern? Or is your phone screen more important? The more you feel like you’re a part of a bigger community full of people that you know and know you, the less likely you’ll put unbearable pressure on your friendships and get caught up in exclusivity that breeds narrative assumptions about others.
The second thing you might consider - and this will shock you coming from a discipleship pastor - is attending a church. Especially a church striving for diversity. Churches provide great environments for you to surround yourself with strangers and, over time, immerse yourself in a web of relationships leading towards possible friendships. It’s no wonder that nearly every major sociological study on the breakdown of our social lives points out the decreasing engagement in churches.
At the end of the day, I believe that the nostalgia we feel when we watch our favorite TV comedies is trying to tell us something. It’s more than the comforting company of familiar people who can make us laugh, it’s a longing for a time when smartphones weren’t rewiring the fabric of our humanity, and when our gatherings with friends and neighbors was a staple of our lives. We ought to recognize that those blessings are not out of reach or gone. They’re right in front of us if we’re willing to practice intentional curiosity with our neighbors and push back the lie that choosiness is the only path towards happiness.
There is no better benediction than the words of Joey Tribbiani dictated to his unlikely paleontologist friend he came to love while sitting in Central Perk Café. The journey towards meaningful community can be daunting, but: “You can’t just give up! Is that what a dinosaur would do?”
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