`I'll be there for you", whines the teeth-grindingly annoying theme tune of Friends, as you settle in for your weekly dose of Comedy Lite from Rachel, Monica, Phoebe, Ross, Joey and Chandler. The thing about friends, apparently, is that they don't judge you, they take you as you are, and they'll always provide a shoulder to lean on when times are bad. Absolute rubbish, of course, but it's an attractive notion in an age when the nuclear family is supposedly in meltdown and the extended family a thing of the past. Authenticity or social comment is hardly the strong point of Friends, a frighteningly well-crafted machine for the delivery of gags, but the show does strike a nerve in its sugary depiction of friendship as the most important thing a 1990s guy or gal can have.
"My friends are like a family in some ways," says one single, self-employed Dubliner. "There's a lot of the same tensions as well. You have to remember that, just because somebody's a friend doesn't mean you really like them."
American sitcoms, from The Odd Couple to Cheers to Frasier, have always superimposed the family model onto other relationships, with some pretty strange results at times. But Friends and the recently-deceased This Life - supposed polar opposites in their depiction of twenty-something lifestyles - both elevate friendship to a status rarely seen before. In both shows, friendship substitutes for the dysfunctional family unit (the shadow of divorced parents - who weren't there for you - hangs particularly heavily over Friends). As such, say some, they reflect a culture in which more and more people are single, and where the shine has gone off the 1980s notion of work as the place where your identity is formed.
As one of the most overtly Jewish shows on television, you'd expect Friends to have a strong sense of family, but the families in the series are intolerant, riven by disputes, and (crucially) rarely seen - a particularly American phenomenon. In modern Ireland, whatever about the first two, the last point is still not the case. Very few Irish people will admit their family is less important to them than their friendships.
"They're two parallel worlds which come together only rarely and briefly for the big occasions - births, marriages and deaths," says one woman. "They're vaguely aware of each other's names, but obviously there's whole sets of things that one group knows about me that the other doesn't, and I intend to keep it that way."
But as baby-boomers become the older generation (don't forget that even Homer Simpson's Mom was an agit-propping hippy chick in the Summer of Love), many of the formalities and taboos of previous generations are withering away. Perhaps, in the fullness of time, we can all just be friends.
Unlike the Simpsons, though, the Friends characters inhabit a very middle-class world, either through birth or aspiration. In terms of depicting the atomised lives, class tensions and random collisions of the modern city, a drama such as the BBC's recent Holding On, set in London, may be a far more convincing reflection of the way we live now, but both Friends and This Life celebrate the dream of living in one of the world's great cities. They trade on the myth of the Big Smoke (although one of the most peculiar things about Friends is its depiction of New York as a rather safe, dull, all-Caucasian place, where the idea of a great night out is a Hootie And The Blowfish concert. It's as if Manhattan had been transplanted to Canada).
In Ireland, even in Dublin, urban life still has a lot of the village about it. Here, there are rarely more than Two Degrees of Separation, especially within the micro-communities demarcated by geography, class and occupation. Meanwhile, one of the ironies of Irish society is that many people spent the Friends/This Life part of their twenties in London or New York. "I lived in Manhattan for several years, and it certainly wasn't anything like the way it's portrayed in Friends," says a returned emigre. "Actually, those kind of claustrophobic relationships are much more like the way people live in Dublin now."
The annoying sponsorship clips which bookend Friends on Channel 4 promote the notion of girl friendship, which seems to involve cuddling up on the couch and giggling, as opposed to boy friendship, which entails sneering at the performance of each other's favourite football teams. If only the world were so simple. Cross-gender friendships have their own complicated dynamics - although if a group of friends is long-enough established, the chances are that they have all got it out of their systems by sleeping with everyone else. What's interesting (and one of the most accurate elements of the TV shows) is the way in which gay people are more evident in these social groupings, and that gay and straight lifestyles are becoming increasingly similar.
Some thirty-somethings who came of age in the bleak 1980s, when a one-way plane ticket was the first essential purchase after finishing your education, look down a little on their younger siblings' assumptions of guaranteed comfort. "There's a certain level of prosperity taken for granted now," says one disapproving thirty-something. "I think when it comes to the crunch and there's an economic downturn, you'll see those people right at the front of a right-wing backlash." But it's more than two decades since the university-educated young even pretended to be politically radical. Changes in the structure of employment have delivered higher disposable incomes but much less job security across the Western world. Characters in shows such as Friends and This Life are apolitical and self-absorbed because that's the way we all are these days.
In a culture increasingly obsessed with self-exploration and pop psychology, friends act as amateur therapists for each other's neuroses and insecurities. It's a matter of opinion as to how much good this does, but it certainly demands a high level of diplomacy and cunning on the part of the sympathiser towards the sympathisee.
If your circle of friends extends beyond three, the likelihood is that at any given time at least one of the group is going through some kind of crisis. Relationship problems? Financial worries? Depression? Crack open that bottle of wine, get out the jumbo Kleenex and set to work (and for God's sake, don't tell them to snap out of it).
The navel-gazing tendency is exacerbated by the tyranny of shared tastes. Friends grow up watching the same programmes, reading the same books, listening to the same music. It's a common cultural space they refer back to again and again. At its best, it's harmless fun; at worst, a paranoid attempt to keep the rest of the world at bay. After all, do you really want to spend the rest of your life remembering obscure TV programmes from the 1970s? Surely one of the best things about friendship should be that it allows you to choose who you like, rather than succumbing to the lottery of what decade you were born in. "I think the generational thing becomes more and more ridiculous and pathetic as you grow older, but there's a slightly desperate hanging on to the notion of being young, especially among the many people who don't have kids," says a single woman. "The background soundtrack for many friendships is the ticking of biological clocks."
The producers of Friends acknowledge that the target audience for their show is 10 years older than the characters it portrays. The myth of a jeunesse doree with the city at its feet and all the time in the world to play may be an attractive one for those coping with baby vomit and mortgages, but there's a melancholic edge to these dreams, a sense of limited expectations, particularly when it comes to emotions.
In 10 years' time, when Ross and Rachel are battling over access to the children, Chandler and Joey have finally come out, Monica's in rehab and Phoebe's had her third platinum disc, it may be possible to discern what all this is really about. The announcement that there would be no third series of This Life leaves the characters forever suspended at a key moment. Aptly enough, the previous series came to an end with a wedding, a betrayal and a punch-up, the three classic ways of cutting loose, clearing out and moving on. Maybe it's time to switch on the answering machine, ignore the hammering at the door, and get a real life.