Friend Joey Tribbiani, of the fabled and now-completed American television show Friends, has ensconced himself in popular consciousness as an everyman one-and-a-half steps behind the everyman. Fortunately for Matt Le Blanc, the program that signed his checks is lodged more firmly in the esophagus of our hearts than even an ultimate-orange-pounding Heimlich could account for.
This fall on the National Broadcasting Company lineup, Joey is moving away from his friends and the old couch in Central Perk (one would imagine it more thoroughly coffee-stained than Juan Valdez’ stock portfolio), and into his own series, unassumingly titled Joey, perhaps intended as a moderna identitist extrapolation of the same motif Friends cluster-bombed the American psyche with at its own inception. (The name “Joey” is simply “Friends” minus the quantity [Friends - Joey].) Their binding recognition is at once inexorable and distance-compliant.
While some would point out, somewhat obviously, that the motive behind such a spinoff is to press forward with the Friends brand while carrying only one of its shining stars, there is another angle to be considered: the television spinoff as metaphor for the collective consciousness of an aggregated supercommunity. So it is with Joey, and its fraternal twin Frasier before it.
Carl Jung expressed it thus: “We cannot change anything unless we accept it.” Friends lay dead on the throne — long live King Tribbiani. But long live Friends?
Not quite.
NBC easily could have left Joey in New York, banking on the quasi-burlesque coax that old friends might drop in. But the character is switching coasts, as would a slick-haired, migratory ladies’ bird, from the oblique-angled, soot-enshrouded Manhattan skyline to the be-palm-treed, chlorofluorocarbon and silicone trap of LA.
But there is a time for nostalgia, and there is a time to move forward. Old things are loved, cherished, but ultimately badgered away in the sepia-litten attic of memory, dust-moted and thick with joy and tears. Could there be a better parallel to the mindset of a nation shaken by unknown threats? Three years after September 11th and a war in Iraq, the American populace is ready to fold the familiar slip into a new, more-pushable envelope. A nation that lay trembling and shattered has faded away. All the resolve on Earth couldn’t keep Tribbiani from the West Coast.
Joey is hope.