How Friends: The Reunion is a 'superexpressway of memory lanes' for fans and the sitcom's stars

The Friends stars are, give or take a few zillion dollars and magazine covers, just like us. Nostalgia was built into Friends right down to the concept, which co-creator David Crane describes here as, “It’s about that time in your life when your friends were your family.” In other words, it’s a show about a time that you know will end even as you live through it, that you will look back on later, with a new life and new responsibilities, romanticising the days when you were young, hot and broke, yet somehow living in an unreasonably large apartment. For this reason, the obligatory talking-head testimonies are nice but superfluous — though it’s charming to hear Nobel Peace Prize winner Malala Yousafzai described by her best friend Vee Kativhu as “Joey with a hint of Phoebe.” Likewise, Corden’s interview feels peripheral among all the elements here, particularly since so many of his questions boil down to “Remember when?” and “What do you remember about?” The special is better when it gets out of the cast’s way and shows us what drew us to them, and them to each other. The cast’s reading from “The One With the Jellyfish” — in which Chandler, Joey and Monica confess to using the pee-on-it trick to kill the pain of a sea-creature sting — shows the talent it takes to wring the laughs out of a comedy scene that’s written like a survivor’s horror drama. When an audience member asks what the actors disliked about making the show, Corden jokingly chides, “Way to keep it positive!” But then, nobody watched Friends to be reminded of the world’s woes.