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Back in 1994--that Reality Bites, Kurt Cobain year--the show wanted to explain people in their 20s to themselves: the aimlessness, the cappuccino drinking, the feeling that you were, you know, "always stuck in second gear." It soon wisely toned down its voice-of-a-generation aspirations and became a comedy about pals and lovers who suffered comic misunderstandings and got pet monkeys.
But it stuck with one theme. Being part of Gen X may not mean you had a goatee or were in a grunge band; it did, however, mean there was a good chance that your family was screwed up and that you feared it had damaged you. Only Ross and Monica have a (relatively) happy set of parents. Phoebe's mom (not, we later learn, her biological mother) committed suicide, and her dad ran out. When Chandler was 9, his parents announced their divorce at Thanksgiving--Dad, it turned out, was a cross-dresser, played by Kathleen Turner. Joey discovered his father was having an affair. Rachel's mom left her dad, inspired by Rachel's jilting her fiance at the altar.
For 10 years, through all the musical-chairs dating and goofy college-flashback episodes, the characters have dealt with one problem: how to replace the kind of family in which they grew up with the one they believed they were supposed to have. One way was by making one another family. But they also found answers that should have, yet somehow didn't, set off conniptions in the people now exercised over gay marriage and Janet Jackson's nipple.
There was, of course, all the sleeping around, though that's not exactly rare on TV today. More unusual was Friends' fixation--consistent but never spotlighted in "very special episodes"--with alternative families. Like all romantic comedies, Friends tends to end its seasons with weddings or births. And yet none of the Friends has had a baby the "normal" way--in the Bushian sense--through procreative sex between a legally sanctioned husband and wife. Chandler and Monica adopt. Ross has kids by his lesbian ex-wife and his unwed ex-girlfriend. Phoebe carries her half brother and his wife's triplets (one of the funniest, sweetest and creepiest situations ever--"My sister's gonna have my baby!" he whoops). As paleontologist Ross might put it, Friends is, on a Darwinian level, about how the species adapts to propagate itself when the old nuclear-family methods don't work.
The message of Friends, in other words, is that there is no normal anymore and that Americans--at least the plurality needed to make a sitcom No. 1--accept that. (To the show's discredit, it used a cast almost entirely of white-bread heteros to guide us through all that otherness.) In January 1996, when Ross's ex-wife married her lesbian lover, the episode raised scant controversy, and most of that because Candace Gingrich--the lesbian sister of Newt, then Speaker of the House--presided over the ceremony. "This is just another zooey episode of the justifiably popular Friends," yawned USA Today. Sure, sitcoms like Roseanne had introduced gays earlier--but it's not as though that had rendered gay marriage uncontroversial, then or now. The bigger difference was in attitude, both the show's and the audience's.