Lisa Kudrow is right: friendship ‘takes work’. But you wouldn’t know it from TV | Emma Beddington
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For decades I accepted what sitcoms and soaps told me: that groups of like-minded people form and stay together effortlessly. Now the former Friend has told it like it is. Lisa Kudrow says being and staying friends with her Friends co-stars was tough at times. “That six-way relationship took some work – and we did it,” she told the Armchair Expert podcast. They “worked hard at being friends”.
![[Emma Beddington]](https://i.guim.co.uk/img/uploads/2020/03/20/Emma_Beddington,_R.png?width=180&dpr=1&s=none&crop=none)
This is no Sex and the City-style daggers-drawn revelation – Kudrow essentially said that they sometimes had to act like sensible adult humans to maintain the easy screen intimacy we all watched play out on Monica’s couch. But for me it came as a relief and a confirmation of something I only recently muddled out: TV friendships aren’t real.
I know how daft that sounds, but the culture we consume is powerful. In my teens, my vision of romantic relationships was nourished, but mainly catastrophically distorted, by a diet of doomed love: books (Anna Karenina, Tess of the d’Urbervilles, Madame Bovary) and films (Jean-Jacques Beineix’s loopy but stylish Betty Blue has a lot to answer for in my early, unhappy, romantic history). I believed love should be dramatic, possibly tragic; we were supposed to rip each other apart. But then I grew up and realised that love could be gentle and incredibly prosaic, that it required more tolerance and painful self-examination than wild romantic gestures, and that culture had sold me a lie.
For some reason it’s taken me far longer to apply that critical thinking to on-screen friendships. For decades I accepted, unquestioningly, what sitcoms and soaps told me: that close-knit groups of friends form and stay together organically and effortlessly, and that unrelated adults can spend large swathes of their lives hanging out with each other having fun. That friendship is easy, basically.
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