29 h. ago
Were the Friends even human? Watching the old shows again, they certainly don’t breed like the rest of us | Nell Frizzell
One minute Rachel and Phoebe are giving birth, the next they’re perfectly groomed and having coffee with their mates. That’s not a picture I recogniseI’ve started watching this great fantasy series from the mid-90s and early 00s – it’s called Friends. It follows a group of humanoid characters who treat childbirth as a social occasion, wear full makeup postpartum and never look after their babies. The fantasy element is very clever – so subtle in fact that it is only now, watching it decades later, as a parent myself, that I even noticed it.Perhaps back in the 90s the otherworldly nature of Phoebe Buffay waiting to give birth to triplets in a room chock-full of her wise-cracking friends, despite it being a high-risk pregnancy, was understood. Maybe the way that Ross Geller’s baby Ben is delivered under a sheet, by an obstetrician apparently working blind, was a well-known speculative fiction trope back then. Possibly when it originally aired, parents were simply amazed by the special...
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