“It’s so cozy and comforting”: 1 Season of FRIENDS Stands Out for Being So Different It Felt Like a Whole New Show Before David Crane, Marta Kauffman Changed it All

After half a century of genre-defining sitcoms like I Love Lucy reigning over television screen time, a shift was noticed in the aftermath of the Cold War-era world. A new kind of sitcom, FRIENDS, had come into existence that encouraged a certain degree of adorably carefree lifestyle that was neither possible nor dreamed of before.

However, FRIENDS was anything but a superficial attempt at drawing in viewers for network ratings. Inadvertently, and unaware of its transformative powers, the show started an entire revolutionary movement that popularized the concept of Manhattan culture and independent lifestyle.

Colored with muted tones of pastel hues and overall optimism, David Crane and Marta Kauffman’s FRIENDS became a vocal piece that defined as well as empowered an entire era of viewers with its innovative narrative structure.

FRIENDS Resonates Among the Fans From the ’90s to the 21st Century

FRIENDS (stylized as F.R.I.E.N.D.S.), the television sitcom that dictated most of our childhoods and guided us into a moderately functional adulthood, ended 20 years ago. Since then, the show has neither waned in popularity nor relevance. And unlike some of the more modern-day projects, FRIENDS was as monumentally powerful in its pilot as in its Season 10 finale.

The 24-episode seasons of the ’90s era sitcom perfectly encapsulated the transitioning society at the turn of the 21st century. From its mid-90s aesthetics to the end of the 1900s and from the ground-shaking tragedy of September 2001 to the end of an era in 2004, FRIENDS has survived it all and pulled an entire generation of audience with it.

As such, the comfort and familiarity that the show holds over its audience cannot be described in simple words but in terms of feelings and abstract emotions. For some, those emotions include nostalgia for a bygone era. In other cases, it evokes a sense of warmth and comfort in its humdrum familiarity, as if resembling the memory of returning home.

FRIENDS Goes Through Some Changes of Its Own

For a project spanning across such a radically evolving decade, FRIENDS rode the wave of change seamlessly. But that is not to say that there weren’t any notable shifts in its form or structure at all. As far as its theme and content were concerned, the sitcom maintained a consistency in quality that is deserving of its own separate award.

However, a subsection of some eagle-eyed fans has noticed a drastic change in the tone and color palette of the show before and after the millennium mile-marker, especially concerning Season 1 launched in the Fall of 1994.

According to a Reddit user named Giancarlo_Edu, the first season has a much different vibe compared to the remainder of the series. A FRIENDS fan with the Reddit handle Spiritual_Argument60 agrees with that theory, claiming, “It’s so cozy and comforting.” But primarily, the tonal shift can be chalked up to the era’s visual technology and television editing formats.

Another fan, auntieup had a slightly different take on the tonal shifts in the series from its Season 1 color palette saying:

This color palette was also very early-90s. We went from 80’s brights to neon to earth tones to jewel tones to muted neutrals between 1989 and 1999. We were playing with some clear optimistic blues when 9/11 happened, and we’ve never really been able to shake those military tones since.

Other fans approached the shift more pragmatically: “For me part of it is visual – it was either lit differently or they were using a different type of film. The first season looks more “romantic” to me, like the lighting at a nice restaurant.”

20 years down the line, the show headlined by Jennifer Aniston, Matthew Perry, Courteney Cox, David Schwimmer, Lisa Kudrow, and Matt LeBlanc continues to inspire and shape us through every highs and lows, keeping us company through the good times and the bad, and helping join the entire planet in a common vernacular where anyone could yell “Unagi” and we’d all roll our eyes in unison.

F.R.I.E.N.D.S. is streaming on Netflix.