Larry Ryan: Should the Premier League have been cancelled at the same time as Friends?
WE’LL BE THERE FOR YOU: Alex Ferguson with current Manchester United players Scott McTominay, Brandon Williams, Harry Maguire, and Phil Jones at the premiere of the documentary ‘Sir Alex Ferguson: Never Give In’ at Old Trafford.
Trailers were released this week for an upcoming special revisiting one of the great cultural phenomena of our times. A divisive global juggernaut that dominated the nineties and delivered some of the most powerful collective experiences of the television age.
And besides the new Alex Ferguson documentary, there’s also the reunion on the way.
Or should that joke work the other way round? Either way, could it BE more Chandler.
How can you separate them? Twin pillars of Irish life that came in and took over.
They changed our haircuts — the Rachel or the Becks. They SO changed how we talked, even at squeaky bum time. And they influenced what we wore — from man bags to hideous green and yellow numbers with a laced collar.
Friends led us to coffee shop culture, the Premier League gave us mind games and our first complaints about simulation.
Sure, we were acquainted with top-flight English football before the Premier League reinvented it in 1992, but not live on TV twice a week and certainly not with Manchester United winning every week.
We had to wait until 1994 for Friends to start and for a decade they dominated conversations side by side. And the central figures steadily got paid more and more.
RTÉ helpfully stuck Friends on after Monday Night Football on Sky, and its stars filled magazines while the Premier League spread out and made itself at home in ever-expanding newspaper pullouts.
For every Ross and Rachel twist, there was a top of the table subplot boiling. And a rich universe of background characters found their way into our lives: from Fun Bobby to Uncle Sir Bobby Robson; from Janice and ‘oh my God’ to Kevin Keegan and ‘I would luv it’.
Of course there were the haters, the ABUs, the Seinfeld devotees. The people who never tired of telling us how sick they were of the likes of Bolton and Coventry on ‘Super’ Sunday — using the air quotes Friends popularised.
Neither juggernaut commanded critical acclaim. Many preferred football’s early stuff. And there was little evidence of a spin-off boost for domestic industries. The League of Ireland was chased off to Friday nights. RTÉ made The Cassidys.
And then, 10 years after it arrived, Friends pulled the plug, refused to outstay its welcome, tied up its loose ends and left it at that, save for an ill-fated spinoff.
On Sunday, the Premier League rounds off its 28th run of episodes. It’ll be a relatively low-key conclusion, with precious few plot points to wrap. And if you were to look at it with the cold eye of a TV exec, has it really done enough to warrant yet another season?
Indeed, a few short weeks ago the six central characters in the Premier League, much like their Central Perk counterparts 17 years ago, decided things had run their course.
Sunday was due to be the series finale, the hit show making way for a spin-off everyone hates. With Spurs cast as the token comic relief.
Maybe it should have been cancelled years ago too and allowed us move on with our lives. After all, if they could bin …
The Premier League’s grip on the zeitgeist loosened with Fergie’s exit. The conversations became repetitive, the dramas reheated, the pullouts slimmed. All those nineties arrivals to football remembered better times, when matches went on as long as was required and the linesman’s flag always went up.
By now people had begun to gather in front of big screens to watch rugby and pubs had started to hush for the kickers. You might go into these places and ask for ‘the match’ to be put on and be tragically misunderstood.
A high-tech makeover — The VAR Years — hasn’t really worked. The special eighties revival commissioned last season satisfied a large and vocal contingent, but left as many feeling slightly nauseous.
As Fergie’s documentary makes clear, he’d have blown the final whistle on the whole thing in 1999. It finishes there, the treble won, the French upstart back in his box. That was a mission accomplished. Thereafter it was business. It was just winning.
In truth, the drama was only getting going, just like Seinfeld took a while to warm up. The pivot into The Rivalry Years was genius. Fergie v Wenger, Keane v Vieira.
In fact, just a few months after Friends left us, there was the perfect opportunity to go out in a final blaze of action with The Battle of the Buffet.
In fairness, the clever casting of Jose Mourinho briefly breathed new life into the franchise as we entered The Controvassy Years. The focus switched from the pitches to the press conferences. The results became almost secondary to monitoring who shook hands with who before and after games. Pundits became part of the story, often were the full story.
This avalanche of talking points, combined with the explosion of social media, meant the Premier League now occupied every waking hour. It started to tire you out.
The last decade of it was essentially justified by one miraculous moment, the moment of the millennium so far. And Sergio Aguero says his goodbyes this weekend taking a lot of the credit for ensuring that we still drink it all in.
These days it dutifully puts in a shift, always there, plugging away. There’s nearly always a match on. Just as there’s nearly always a Friends rerun.
How would Friends be faring if they were still making new episodes? Probably relying on improbable, outlandish cameos that would require superhuman suspension of disbelief. Probably jumping the shark with stuff that just doesn’t ring true in real life.
Like Alisson last Sunday.
