Why do we love friend comedies so much?

BarcelonaFriends, Girls, How I Met Your Mother, The Big Bang Theory and New girl These are just some of the titles that come to mind when talking about comedies centered on groups of friends in urban environments, a genre in themselves. The list expands this Wednesday with the premiere on Disney+ ofAdults, an approach to the world of friendship from the perspective of generation Z.

The new Disney+ comedy doesn't rack its brains too much in its approach: as happened in Friends, the comedy that everyone tries to imitate, the protagonists are a group of twenty-five-year-old friends who share a home in New York. Unlike what happened in the 90s series, the protagonists do not live in Manhattan, a district that currently has sky-high prices impossible for any young person to afford, but rather they live in Queens, which is more affordable for the working class. If Friends Monica lived in an apartment her grandmother lent her; in the new comedy, the characters share a house owned by the parents of one of them, Samir. Something they both have in common is the absence of older characters, one of the main innovations of Friends.

One of the differences ofAdults Regarding the series, what is reflected is the diversity of the casting: while in Friends All the protagonists were white (there was no racialized recurring character until the ninth season), here the characters are from different backgrounds, although this is not a particularly relevant issue.

Apart from Samir, the group is made up of Billie, a friend of his from high school who doesn't like to take risks; Anton, the most sociable of them all; and Isa, the life of the party and permanently horny (the American media have pointed out the many similarities between this character and that of Ilana Wexler, the protagonist of Broad City). Finally, there's Paul Baker, Isa's partner, whom everyone refers to by his first and last name. Over the course of the first season's eight episodes, the five struggle with their work lives, party, and try to be their best adult selves, often failing.

The Chosen Family

Comedies about groups of friends are a product of the evolution of the social concept of family. In the early days of television, sitcoms They exploited the humor associated with traditional families because they were specifically looking for an intergenerational audience. Examples range from And I love Lucy until Roseanne and Household things. Their plots were transversal and represented every possible demographic, from grandparents to parents to children.

As families began to change and lose social weight, sitcoms sought out new subjects of interest. With the emergence of the concept of chosen family, that is, the group of friends with whom you share your daily life and who support you in important moments, television found fertile ground that appealed to a particularly interesting audience: young people in their twenties and thirties who could identify with what they saw on the screen. The exploding success of Friends It has provoked a flood of imitations that have had varying success. Could it be Adults One of the successful successors or will it remain a failed substitute for Generation Z?