Were the Friends even human? Watching the old shows again, they certainly don’t breed like the rest of us | Nell Frizzell

One minute Rachel and Phoebe are giving birth, the next they’re perfectly groomed and having coffee with their mates. That’s not a picture I recognise

I’ve started watching this great fantasy series from the mid-90s and early 00s – it’s called Friends. It follows a group of humanoid characters who treat childbirth as a social occasion, wear full makeup postpartum and never look after their babies. The fantasy element is very clever – so subtle in fact that it is only now, watching it decades later, as a parent myself, that I even noticed it.

Perhaps back in the 90s the otherworldly nature of Phoebe Buffay waiting to give birth to triplets in a room chock-full of her wise-cracking friends, despite it being a high-risk pregnancy, was understood. Maybe the way that Ross Geller’s baby Ben is delivered under a sheet, by an obstetrician apparently working blind, was a well-known speculative fiction trope back then. Possibly when it originally aired, parents were simply amazed by the special effects involved when Rachel Green was shown sitting in a coffee shop gossiping about her love life, three weeks after giving birth, in full makeup and blow-dry, high heels, a pair of size 10 jeans – and entirely without her baby. Whatever was going on, no one at the time seemed fazed by this uncanny valley where babies breastfeed just once in their life, never get ill and are put behind glass in hospital nurseries to be glanced at by visiting relatives who then have sex in cupboards.

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Were the Friends even human? Watching the old shows again, they certainly don’t breed like the rest of us | Nell Frizzell

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