The six are back on the rebuilt set and for stretches it is lovely to watch them simply talk. Then Ben Winston keeps cutting away to a chat show, a fashion parade and a line of famous fans, and the warmth leaks out through the gaps.
Seventeen years after the last episode went out, Ben Winston puts the six of them back on the soundstage where Friends was made and lets the cameras follow. That is the whole idea, and for the first twenty minutes or so of the 104 it is enough. Jennifer Aniston, Courteney Cox, Lisa Kudrow, Matt LeBlanc, Matthew Perry and David Schwimmer arrive one at a time, walk into Monica’s flat, open the fridge, find the cookie jar and start talking over each other the way people do who have known each other for most of their adult lives. Nobody is performing. Then the special remembers it is a special and starts to fill the time.
John Shaffner’s production design rebuilds both flats and Central Perk, and the detail does the emotional work: the cast keep stopping mid-sentence to touch something. The best stretch is a table read. The six sit with old scripts and run scenes from the series, and the timing comes back at once, Kudrow and Schwimmer especially. We did not expect to be got at by this and we were, twice: when Kudrow walked into the coffee house and simply stood there, and at the table, when Perry, who says less than the others all evening, took a Chandler line and the laugh round the table was the real thing.
The rest is a chat show. James Corden is credited as moderator, and that is the right word. He sits the six on a sofa, with an audience behind him, and keeps the traffic moving: a question, a clip, applause, next question. Nothing he asks could produce an awkward answer, and nothing does. Then the chat show becomes a variety bill. Cindy Crawford, Cara Delevingne and Justin Bieber walk a runway in costumes from the series, Lady Gaga joins Kudrow for Smelly Cat and stays for a verse the joke did not need, and Elliott Gould gets about a minute. By the fashion parade we were bored, and then, because the people on the sofa looked bored too, mildly cross on their behalf.
Three cinematographers are credited, Chloe Weaver, Tore Livia and Matt Garrett, and it looks like three jobs. The walks through the set are close and handheld; the sofa interview is lit flat and bright, like Saturday night television; the fan interviews, cut in from around the world, look like adverts. Guy Harding, who edits and produces, breaks the evening into segments of a few minutes each and drops an episode clip into every gap, so that no conversation is allowed to run on. Whenever two of the cast start to say something interesting to each other, there is a clip. That is a decision taken by someone who did not trust six people talking to hold a screen for 104 minutes, and the first twenty minutes are the evidence that they could.
It is also careful. The series has been argued over since it ended, its all-white Manhattan, its jokes about Monica’s weight, and none of that is put to anyone. Nobody is asked a question whose answer they had not already given to a magazine. Aniston and Schwimmer revisiting Ross and Rachel’s first kiss is the one passage where the two of them seem to be talking to each other rather than to the sofa, and it is over in a minute.
If you loved the show you will want to see them on that set, and you should, and you may find your hand drifting towards the remote somewhere in the middle third. If you did not, there is nothing here for you; at no point does the special try to explain why anyone cared. It runs 104 minutes and carries a PG, and the good bits would fit in forty.
