The story of a group of young people living in New York in that vital moment in which your friends are your family. This is how I summarized Marta Kauffman, creator of ‘Friends’, the premise of the series during the special released by HBO Max in 2021. Simplicity is the secret of its success. ”Friends’ tells a story that everyone has experienced: the moment you leave your parents’ house, your first job, relationships, the difficulties that life places before you… The series makes you feel at home and that you want to be part of that gang of friends that Today he mourns the loss of one of them, the biting and ironic Chandler Bing.
The ‘sitcom’ aired for 10 seasons on the NBC network, from September 1994 to May 2004, ten years in which he consolidated his legacy, catapulted his protagonists to stardom and laid the foundations for what would end up being a very lucrative business. Everyone wanted the series in their catalog. In the US, local television stations paid a lot of money for rebroadcast licenses, which showed no sign of exhaustion. Those who had already seen it, saw it again and those who had not, quickly became hooked. Creators and protagonists made gold at this stage, with settlements that are estimated to have exceeded nine figures. The ‘Friends’ phenomenon arrived in Spain somewhat diluted. Canal+ had acquired the rights, trusting that the prestige of the series would encourage subscriptions to the payment platform, but it did not have enough muscle to fight against the two private television networks, which were fighting fiercely for the viewer’s attention.
Ten years after the end of the series a new turning point would occur. Netflix decided to add it to its catalog and the magic happened again. ‘Friends’ was not only rewatch fodder for the original audience. He also managed to enter the hearts of a new generation of spectators, the Zetas, those who were hooked by outdated clothes and life without cell phones like no other program.
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Netflix turned ‘Friends’ into the global, transgenerational and inexhaustible hit that it is today. It didn’t take long for the series to have many boyfriends, willing to spend astronomical sums to add it to their catalogue. In 2020 the series left Netflix and entered the HBO Max catalog, who had paid 500 million dollars for it. An expensive but beneficial agreement. ‘Friends’ continues to be a candy for customer loyalty: a proven successful product, with self-contained episodes (which can be viewed in any order) and many seasons and chapters per season (which guarantees many hours of entertainment).
The success of ‘Friends’ is, in part, the success of very skillful commercial exploitation, of those famous marketing windows that streaming has insisted on annihilating. The industry mourns Matthew Perry as much as the fictional model he represents: lucrative, prestigious and long-lived.