Recently, I was listening to an episode of The Nerdist podcast with guest David Schwimmer, of Friends fame (if you don’t know about Friends, see my article from last week) and he expressed his surprise that the show is still resonating with fans, even 12 years after it ended. The host of the program, Chris Hardwick, said something that I don’t remember exactly but I’m sure it was wise and wonderful. I, however, have a simpler explanation. A good majority of shows we all talk about or have seen take place in a time period that is not 2016. Think about it, six of the ten seasons of Friends take place before the year 2000. All of That ‘70s Show takes place in, as the title suggests, the nineteen hundred and seventies. Stranger Things, the most talked about show of the summer, takes place in the month before Christmas in 1983. I gave three examples of television shows that take place not in modern times, but there are some good examples of popular films that aren’t set in the modern era. Grease, often called the most popular American musical of all time, takes place in the 1950s. So does A Christmas Story, the Christmas movie that is shown for 24 hours every year from Christmas Eve to Christmas Day. So, the question stands, why are all of these things so popular even now?
I genuinely believe that people my age are nostalgic for parts of our lives that we either don’t remember or were never a part of. My main group of friends, even though we are generally from 18 to 21, can find parts of ourselves in characters from Friends and even Stranger Things, even though on Friends they’re closer to their mid to late twenties and on Stranger Things they aren’t even 13 yet. We want to be a part of a simpler time, before you had to worry about presidential elections at 13 or not being able to get a job after you graduate at 19. We love how complex and interwoven we all are with each other, but we also long for the simplicity shown in these shows and movies that ended even as recently as 2004. I’m not complaining about phones or social media and all of that because I don’t believe that they are the root of all evils in this situation. We, as people, are all so influenced by what we see in the media that we don’t know what to do when we all get together besides watch TV and look at our phones because we’ve never been shown these things on a television program or in film. That sounds pathetic, but we aren’t shown how to act and even though generations before act like they haven’t been influenced by the media, they always have.
The simplicity of the premise of Friends and How I Met Your Mother, basically a group of five or six friends hanging out with each other every night and even though they date and break up and do it all over again, they work everything out at the end of the night. One thing that we, as friends and as people in general, forget is that real life happens. In real life, there is no audience laughing or a girl with strong telekinetic powers that can, in one of the coolest scenes of the year, flip an oncoming van with her mind. In real life, we are people who have complex and intricate thoughts that aren’t scripted out by writers so that everything will be perfect and beautiful because that’s not real life. It wasn’t in 1994 or 2004 and it for sure isn’t in 2016. Life isn’t always beautiful and it is almost never perfect. Life is ugly and mean and kinda sad. We can laugh and we can cry and everything can be perfect at the end of the day. Just not the kind of perfect that we see on TV. People don’t always get off the plane and people don’t all disappear at the end of a tense scene. We have to face our struggles and we have to be unhappy to get to the happy place. While it’s perfectly okay to look back at the past and long for simplicity, we have to understand that there’s a new definition of simplicity. While it may not be as small as the definition of simplicity in 1972, it’s the 2016 version. I would much rather live in the present and look back on it in 20 years than look at how simple things were in 2004, when I was 7 years-old and everything was simple.
