Friends reunion as highly anticipated in China as anywhere, and social media is flooded with reactions
- Friends first grew in popularity as a tool to help Chinese people learn English, but quickly captured the imagination of the Chinese public
- Like millions elsewhere, fans of the show in China counted down to the moment it began streaming on Thursday, and reacted on social media
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It would be easy to dismiss the power of a slightly outdated, mildly problematic but still wildly popular TV sitcom to build cultural bridges between two feuding geopolitical giants.
But Friends, an American sitcom that pundits consistently consider to be one of the five most successful sitcoms of all time, accomplished just that.
For 34-year-old banker Nicole Yu, working in Hong Kong, the cast, setting and lifestyle promoted by Friends are what she thinks of when asked about the “American dream”.
“I saw them living together, with a lot of drama but also love, and I envied their lives,” she said. “The show planted in my heart a dream that I would someday visit the US.”
She first watched the show in secondary school because it was recommended to her by an English tutor as a way to learn authentic American pronunciations. She became addicted to the show, and bought DVDs of all 10 seasons.
Yu, and numerous others in China, have spent the past week counting down the days until Thursday, when a long-anticipated Friends reunion show brings its stars together on television for the first time since the final episode aired in 2004.
When I saw the preview, when they were all sitting in the living room, I was struck. I felt that, as long as the six of them sat together, I will watch them, no matter what they say or do
The show, titled Friends: The Reunion, aired at 3:02pm on Thursday in China across platforms including Tencent and Youku, the latter owned by Alibaba, which also owns the South China Morning Post.
The topic “Friends reunion” had more than 180 million hits on Weibo, China’s Twitter. “Only a few minutes into the show, I teared up,” one user commented on Weibo. “I have rewatched the show numerous times, no other show will top this.”
“My youth is gone but my feelings endured,” another wrote.
Teng Hao, a 26-year-old fashion blogger in Beijing, said the screening time overlapped with work, so he and some friends are planning a viewing party this weekend, where everybody will dress up as one character. He personally chose college-version Chandler, with his signature wacky hairdo.
“When I saw the preview, when they were all sitting in the living room, I was struck,” he said. “I felt that, as long as the six of them sat together, I will watch them, no matter what they say or do.”
He said Friends had been more than a television show to him. It gave him a sense of belonging as he was growing up.
Teng realises the show glorifies reality, but the honesty between the characters still felt real, he said. While watching it again, in his 20s, he began to understand the choices the characters made.
The sitcom first became popular in China as an English-language learning tool in the 1990s when the Chinese government introduced economic reforms and encouraged exchanges with the West. The show was also a window for people in China to witness American lifestyles.
Even though China had its own sitcoms in the 1990s, such as I Love My Family and Editorial Department Story, they mainly focused on family life and the workplace. Friends was one of the first shows broadcast in China that explored the lives of young, single people living in a metropolis.
