Their names are Damon Wayons Jr. and Casey Wilson …oh, and the super hot Elisha Cuthbert also stars on the show.
The jokes, the gags, and the writing are alot like Modern Family and Cougar Town in that it seems to be laughing at the prototypical sitcom. No laugh track. No studio audience. An apparent absence of a “set” in the traditional sense.
NBC didn’t have the balls to make Chandler gay, but Happy Endings made Chandler gay. Happy Endings also made Ross a black guy, and has him happily married, but still funny and self-deprecating. Cuthbert’s character is like Jennifer Annistons character, but way hotter. And the Joey character is actually cool, and not whatever version of “cool” that Joey represented back in the 1990s. Did Joey ever get laid? What was with NBC back then? Did they think we couldn’t handle the idea that a single guy in a big city might have casual sex and one-night stands?
First of all, I liked this show. I thought there was some nice chemistry right off the bat. That being said, I don’t think you’re right about your assessment of Friends. Joey had all kinds of hookups, and even though we didn’t see semi-nudity on a regular basis, we did often meet the girls and hear about his exploits. And as goofy as Chandler was, he never really read as “gay” to me, other than the way he and Joey were attached to each other, which ended up being quite endearing. At least to me.
There was always issue taken with the fact that NBC did not put any people of color into the cast, save for the fact that Monica, Ross and Rachel were Jewish and Ross had an Asian girlfriend for a while. (Making Ross black might be tough to explain since his sister and parents were both white.) Bottom line is that the show was a glossy, sitcom version of Manhattan where people’s apartments were absurdly large and life was grand, except for when it wasn’t. If you want to debate me on the merits of Friends, we can do that. And maybe I love it because of the fact that it aired from my senior year of college to right after I had my first child, but I will stand by it. Yes, even through the rough patches; those will happen in 10 years. Still one of my faves of all time.
Maybe I’ll start DVR’ing Friends and see if I see anything redeeming. You make it sound like it was a real show with real entertainment value. Blech.