Dr. Dolly Alderton

How much money is Michael Sheen really giving away?

I've done that with everybody who appears on Plum Sykes' newsletter.

I just typed their name into it.

Anyway, can we talk about what we're going to talk about?

Which is that when I pitched the series to you, you said immediately, it's all relative, the relatives of friends.

And you immediately had this entire thesis statement typed into WhatsApp of all the different... How...

I mean I think when we talked about Sex and the City the kind of thesis of Sex and the City is like all of the men that these women meet are there to sort of teach them something and I actually I think you said something in the WhatsApp that was like all of the familial relations that exist for friends because as we know and we've said many times in this podcast so far that kind of the point of friends is the period of one's life where your friends matter more than your family but all of these people do come from families of different sort of shapes and sizes and it sort of sets the quest in motion for them

Absolutely.

If Sex and the City is men that teach you about a lesson you need to hear, the families of friends set up what that lesson is.

You just said something there at the beginning that like I'd never thought about before, which is that you're right.

There is a kind of a sea change where, and I guess you see it as early as something like Annie Hall, where so much of like those characters growing is about him pushing her to see his analyst.

Yeah.

and like how that changes her and stuff.

And like, you are right that as a show, they do refer to each other's psychology quite a lot.

Like they refer to Chandler being unable to cry and unable to have arguments.

Yeah.

Like if we're used to these kind of like up till now, these sort of sitcom characters who have like outsized character flaws and it's like they're stupid or greedy or dumb or all these like very human flaws that we can sort of extenuate with the power of sitcoms.

The flaws of Friends are quite nuanced.

I mean, like Chandler's thing, which we'll get into in a minute, is so really quite complex for a half hour show that's aimed at everyone aged eight to 80 of like this kind of stunted, regressed character who can't express himself and can only really communicate through jokes.

And then even like, I find...