The one where we celebrate the best festive moments of Friends, and reflect on why this timeless TV show feels most at home at Christmas. Join us for the final episode of the year, and the season finale of this mini-series - Merry Christmas all xSong credit: Oystercatcher - Merry Christmas! I Love You! I'm Falling Apart!!! - https://oystercatchr.bandcamp.com/album/gifts-winter-25 Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
Chapter 1: What are the festive moments from Friends that resonate the most?
Hello and welcome to Friends Through a Lens, the podcast where I talk to my real-life friends about the show Friends Through a Lens of their choosing. My name is Caroline and this year I'm spending Christmas in Tulsa. And my favourite part was when Superman flew the Jews out of Egypt. It's Ella Risbridger.
Hi, best friend. There you are. Hi, best friend. There you are in Tulsa.
Here I am in Tulsa, which is an anagram for Dublin this year. I tell you what, dude, to let everybody behind the scenes on some movie magic of how I make this podcast, almost every episode of the podcast that you've heard of Friends Through a Lens so far was recorded in October and November when I was preparing to leave
Chapter 2: How does living alone affect the host's perspective on friendships?
to go live in Dublin to make The Rachel Incident, the TV show for Channel 4. Look it up. It's going to be great.
It's going to be so good.
And this episode, we're recording from... I'm recording it from a new build, a completely empty apartment in Dublin. I'm living by myself for the first time ever. And... Like I'm understanding not just the sort of like artistic need for friends in a person's life, but the social need for friends in a person's life. Because it's the first time I've ever lived alone.
And now I just have friends on all the time. So I don't feel lonely.
Friends is a friend. Friends is a friend to us all.
Friends is a friend. Friends is a friend. Friends is a friend. And that's what this is the lens for. The lens of friends is they are our friends.
No, the lens of friends through which we will be looking at friends today is, I guess...
Christmas and the holidays which will be a nice lens because we were initially going to do the feasts of friends but I don't know I couldn't quite be bothered I could you know the feasts are all at Christmas apart from that one time they make the lasagna and Monica's nail goes off in it I don't know I just very very tired I wanted to talk about like the twinkly bits and you know when they're all together or not all together because sometimes Chandler has to go to Tulsa and Caroline has to go to Dublin and let me tell you I am as bereft as Monica
We're all as bereft as Monica. It's really weird. Like, to be absolutely clear, I'm having a wonderful time here in Tulsa, Oklahoma. e.g. Dublin, Ireland.
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Chapter 3: What insights do the hosts share about the significance of Christmas in Friends?
And like, I'm getting to do something that I've spent my whole life dreaming of doing, which is making a TV show. And out of like a book that I wrote, which is a huge privilege, but like the fact remains is that it is Christmas and I live in a new build with nothing on the walls and I have no tree and nothing.
And the other day I went with some friends to go see a Muppets Christmas Carol, which I do every year in the cinema, if I can manage it. And I remember feeling in the cinema, I was like, huh,
kind of weird that we're watching this right because it's a Christmas movie it was like like it had completely escaped me totally that it's Christmas this year because there's nothing in my life that indicates Christmas
oh no, you're just like not being cued by the things around you. Whereas I feel like- Exactly, there are no cues, no cues. I feel like I have really dragged Christmas kicking and screaming into my life. I don't do every year. I don't, I'm not a huge fan of December, but I am a huge fan of magic. I hate force fun, but I love twinkly lights.
So, you know, I have to kind of balance that at Christmas. Whereas I feel bad because I'm sitting here with my Christmas tree, which by the way, new thing I've done this year, get a short fat Christmas tree instead of a tall thin one. New look. Radical new look for 2025.
Radical new look. A chode Christmas tree.
I'm loving it. And you know what I'm loving most? I'm going to be able to put it in the bin at the end of Christmas. I'm going to be able to carry it to the place where it goes in the bin. It's going to be amazing. It's the first Christmas in my life. I'm not thinking about dragging it away.
Every single year when it's time to get rid of that tree, it's like I have amnesia. I'm like, how did we do this last year? Did the council pick it up? Did a man come? Did I pay somebody else? Did they pay me?
Is it recyclable?
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Chapter 4: How do Monica and Chandler's arcs reflect their relationship with Christmas?
And I think perhaps it's funny and nice to tell the listeners that this is in fact our second go at recording the Christmas special because the first time we were both so unfestive and shit.
Then we just called it. Oh my God. It's so funny. So for people who don't realize is if they're just new to the series this year, every year for the last, I think five or maybe six years, we have recorded a Christmas special of this podcast. It's something we look forward to. It's something a lot of the listeners look forward to. And they're great episodes. Go look them up.
And this year we were like, well, of course, it's the Friends miniseries. So we're going to record the festive Friends or whatever. And then you came over to my house the day before I moved. And we spent an hour trying to be... that wasn't just like two incredibly stressed out women.
I had flu, which was not ideal. I just kept sneezing. And so I was just like, you know that stage of flu where you're like crying softly a lot of the time. And when people are like, what's wrong? You're like, nothing. I'm just weeping for my lost humanity. And so I had that and you had moving to Dublin and having not packed.
And so we were counting the plots of these Friends episodes to each other in this incredibly, like, both fake academic and totally joyless way. And of course, at Christmas, the friends gather together and they are often joined by Jack Geller, the father of several of the other characters. Monica, and of course, her brother, Ross.
He has a child, of course. In other sense, Jack Geller is actually the father of all of the friends in some senses, because, of course, many of the friends have celebrated previous holidays together. It was awful. And eventually after an hour of us trying to wring some charisma out of it, we were like, we got to stop this. We got it. We got to stop.
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Chapter 5: What role does nostalgia play in the holiday episodes of Friends?
I think it's important when you do any kind of performing or entertaining for a living to just know when you're not entertaining anyone. We weren't entertaining ourselves and we certainly weren't entertaining the listeners. So this is take two. And let me tell you, it's a lot more promising for these reasons.
We are on Zoom, which I wanted to avoid because we haven't recorded on Zoom since the deep days of the pandemic when we did our best books we've ever read, which is such a funny idea for a miniseries. Just books we like, I guess. Yeah, no theme, just we like them. So the reason here, I will enunciate the reasons that this podcast is better than the last one.
One, I have some very nice champagne that my dad brought to our house. So excellent. I have a fancy little mince pie from the bakery near Caroline's house in London. And sorry to say, this card is really delicious. My Christmas tree is up. I'm covered in velvet. And I've just posted 60 Christmas cards, some of them with airmail stickers on.
And let me tell you, there is nothing more festive than sticking a little blue airmail sticker on a card. You know... Cars winging their way across Europe to New York. I felt so continental and festive. And obviously it's not snowing, but in my heart, it's snowing. And so those are the reasons that I feel 10 times more charismatic and 10 times more ready to take on Friends the TV series.
Friends, brackets, you and me, our long friendship. Christmas of Friends. Christmas in real life. And I guess whatever else comes up, because of course, this is the last sentimental garbage for a long, long time.
For a long, long time, boys and girls. Because yeah, this is the other bit of news, really. Because this is the last episode of the year. But I'm also, I'm going on a hiatus after this, really. I mean, the reason that I wanted to cap out sentimental garbage with incredibly long episodes about friends is that I wanted to really feed people before I fasted them.
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Chapter 6: How does the podcast discuss the character development of Chandler?
I think it's kind of lovely that you've made this last series of like, let me talk to all my friends about Friends, this TV show that everybody knows and loves. It feels like the perfect pause.
You know what? It really is. And I'm so glad that you brought that up because the act of watching all these episodes and discussing them with people who I'm like really quite close with and people who I also know I'm not going to see for a long time because I'm going to be coming back to London for weekends here and there. But for the most part, like I'm going to,
head down in a new life where it was almost like recording with Kate, recording with Dolly, recording with Ryan. Yes, we were talking about this TV show that everyone knows and loves, but it's almost like talking about friends to millennials is almost like talking about like, you know,
stations of the cross or like it like very important biblical stories that everybody knows everybody knows it so well and all of these like archetypes of these pretend people are so recognizable whether you're talking about like you know like monica and her relationship with her mother or ross's relationship with phoebe or joey's relationship with phoebe or whatever there is such well-worn ideas because everyone has seen it like one million times
What I found with doing this series is that very soon I wasn't talking to Ryan about Phoebe or to Dolly about fucking Mrs. Geller or whatever. I was talking to some of my best friends about how they feel about the deepest human relationships in their life. how they feel at this point in their life, where they are with their relationships.
And like, I just feel like they offer this really interesting archetype of like how we talk about our relationships in general. Like the last episode I did, I ended up like realizing some of the feelings I had about being in a family that I never would have realized if I weren't talking about it through the guardrails of friends. Do you know what I mean?
It's like a safe thing to hold onto while you navigate some like kind of interesting psychological territory for yourself.
I think it's really interesting. It's something that I thought a lot about when I was writing In Love With Love, my most recent book, which is a history of romantic fiction that you can probably still buy as a very late Christmas present. There's probably somewhere doing next day delivery and you should, it's great.
But about how fiction kind of allows us to practice how we feel about the world and it gives us a framework to think about how we think about things. And I was writing specifically about romantic fiction, but I do think that all art is supposed to be a way to...
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Chapter 7: What parallels are drawn between personal experiences and Friends episodes?
Not that many. Ross is always punching above his weight, but Chandler, I don't think he's getting hit on that much. And so for Chandler to get hit on by Selma Blair and to be like, I love and respect my wife, that's a real sacrifice. Much more than it would be for Ross, who is always getting hit on by women out of his league.
Always, constantly. But yeah, I've got some very strong theories on Ross' sexuality, which I believe to be strong and magnetic. But I kind of want to sit on Chandler for a while because he's also, this being the last episode of Friends Through a Lens, he's kind of the friend we've spoken about the least.
And I actually think Christmas belongs to Chandler in a way because I think one of the most satisfying arcs of the show is Christmas and Chandler, you know?
Yeah.
So one thing that... So I'm actually amazed that nobody has talked that much about Chandler. I'm thrilled because I love to talk about Chandler. He's such a complex and rich scene for me. Because you must admit that although it's obviously Rachel's show, Chandler is the other person who has a complete up. Chandler goes from being the boy who hates Thanksgiving because he has no family...
to the man with his children and his wife and his friends moving out to live a life of like domestic bliss and he's not gonna have an affair with the pool boy he's not gonna repeat the patterns of his parents it's about learning to be your own man oh my god of course because the whole thing with Chandler's whole story is he hates Thanksgiving the Gellers hate him because he hates Thanksgiving and because he got Ross high and the boy who hates Thanksgiving
And they're like, yeah. And every year it's all throughout the series. It's like, oh, and I guess Chandler is going to be like Eeyore about Thanksgiving again and say something snappy about Thanksgiving again. And then when it gets to the point, and of course, like that root trauma is in the fact that his father was having an affair and it was revealed to him on Thanksgiving.
And then it's like Chandler is given the opportunity to have an affair on Thanksgiving and doesn't take it and comes home to his wife. Yeah. And it's like also, and it's a clip show episode. And it's like one of the only arguments for like, oh wow, it's an artistically substantive clip show episode. It's never happened anywhere else in culture before.
But because the whole arc is about him leaving behind this childhood trauma of like, I hate Thanksgiving because of who I was age zero to 20. And actually people was like, oh, I love Thanksgiving because of who I became age 20 to 35.
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Chapter 8: How do the hosts reflect on their own Christmas traditions compared to Friends?
Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah. He's his college roommate. And then he's like, and I will marry your sister and I will be at every Christmas and every Thanksgiving for the rest of your life, Roskella. Like, are you lucky they like each other? Yeah. Like, Ross is lucky that he likes Chandler because Chandler's like, oh, I see a normal family. Like your mom's neurotic. Your dad's kind of like bumbling.
I want to be in there. You know, the Gellers have this nuclear family, which no one else in the show does. Ross, so many marriages, children by different women. Monica and Chandler actually do kind of replicate the nuclear family, even though they adopt.
Like they have a boy and a girl, which I think is very important for the show, that Monica and Chandler end up with the replication of the Geller family legacy.
Yeah, yeah.
As does Ross. A boy and a girl. Yeah, but he's also got lesbian co-parent wives. Ross has three wives. One of my favorite parts of this series is when you and Kate were having a really good time thinking about Ross and Rachel's wedding. And you know what? Oh, yeah. I love to think about Ross and Rachel's future life. With Ben and Emma and the kids they have after that.
You know what I always think about with that? I always think about, you know when Monica announces that she's moving to Westchester and Rachel, and she's like, I don't want to raise kids in the city. And Rachel goes, I'm doing it. Sarah Jessica Parker is doing it. And I'm like, yeah, Rachel, you're going to raise kids in the city forever.
You're going to have like a snotty little teenager who goes to like insane private schools in New York that bankrupts you both. And she's going to be friends with all of the kids in Gossip Girl.
No, the Gellers will pay for that. The Gellers will pay for that.
Oh, sorry, of course the Gellers will pay for that.
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