I have a midterm to study for and I have not started so the way I coped with that is, yup you guessed it, by binging a new show. This time it's Friends From College.
It is a drama-comedy about a tangled, tension-filled group of Harvard alums reunited in New York with a promising set up, revolving around complicated groups of dysfunctional adults.
It starts off with a bang when the viewers find out that two of the friends in the group are actually in a 20-year-affair even though they are both respectively married to their spouses and are either trying for kids or have them. As you might presume, this unravels rapidly into cinematic tension that should leave you hanging at the edge of your seat but instead frustrates you to no end.
It doesn't take long to figure out that something crucial is missing from this particular show.
Now, I'm somebody who only reluctantly gets on board with narratives about infidelity: if it's a valuable part of the story — very engaging, emotionally fraught, or plot-thickening — then I'm totally here for it but there needs to be a point to casually portray something just so wrong on screen. In this show? There is no point why this is happening in the first place.
Simply watching two people make a bad decision over and over again is not what makes cheating interesting to watch.
The compelling drama of an affair — the entertainment value and the emotional pull — typically arises when we can sympathize, even barely, with the cheaters. To do that — which is to say to put ourselves in a character's shoes (even if we dislike them) — we need to understand why they're cheating. That means exploring their pasts, vulnerabilities, values, and insecurities — things held by people with complex nuances.
The problem with Friends From College is that it gives us no reason to relate to or forgive the one-dimensional, utterly unsympathetic Ethan and Sam (they are the ones cheating, by the way, I forgot that I forgot to mention their names but it really doesn't matter because they don't give us a reason to remember their names).
They are written so shallowly that they don't appear to have even a semblance of inner conflict; an inkling of guilt or regret and it frustrated and bothered me from episode one. And the other characters? We don't even know much about them because the whole first season - eight episodes - we are forced to listen to Ethan and Sam not want to cheat and then subsequently, watch them cheat. Every other character is but a background curtain to their cheating extravaganza.
In the end, the most damning reason Friends From College fails is also the simplest: It's not nearly as much fun to spend time with these characters as either they or their creators think. Watching Friends From College just means watching unpleasant people do unpleasant things for no reason other than the sake of doing them. So when one friend of the group, Max's boyfriend Felix finally snaps halfway through the season and tells Max how pathetic it is that Max's entire college group is stuck in arrested development it's just such a relief to know that someone else sees the Friends From College for what they really are.
Why am I still watching it? Did I not mention that midterm? Procrastination is a nuanced, complex process that involves watching a show that makes you want to scream at every one of the characters in it but still continue watching because you really don't want to study.
