‘Friends’ Week: Why ‘Friends’ Is More Influential Than ‘Seinfeld’

Friends debuted on NBC on Thursday, September 22, 1994, and in honor of the classic sitcom’s hold on all of our imaginations, we’ve declared it Friends Week on Decider. We’ll be posting tributes to the show every day for the next week leading up to the big anniversary. Click here to follow our coverage.

OK, look: before you scroll down into the comments to tell me how stupid I am based entirely on my brilliantly provocative headline, let’s get this out of the way: Seinfeld is a better show than Friends. While Friends is funny, for sure (which, again, is a subjective opinion based on personal taste), Seinfeld was by far a more innovative sitcom — its premise, a show about nothing, was a surprisingly inventive concept. Friends, after all, took that idea and ran with it — it was a show without a real premise other than a group of six people living in New York and hanging out together. And while Seinfeld‘s comic stylings may have been slightly more highbrow and less broad than Friends, the latter certainly repackaged that initial premise and made it accessible — and managed to inspire many more imitations.

What is so intriguing about both Seinfeld and Friends is that their characters were not forced into interacting each other because of some outside force. For the most part, the characters on both shows were just pals who enjoyed hanging out together rather than, say, members of a dysfunctional family all living together under the same roof or a group of malcontents who had to share an office space.

Both shows were, at their base level, about groups of misanthropic white New Yorkers, and it’s surprising how novel that concept was two decades ago. (Then again: there’s Girls.) Both Seinfeld and Friends had long runs (with nine and ten seasons, respectively) and massive appeal, but it’s the latter that managed to have a broader audience. Sure, you can argue it’s because it’s a dumb-down version of the former, but Friends is one of the last great multi-camera studio sitcoms on television, one that utilized its lack of a premise to a more universal degree than Seinfeld.

The reason why we’re talking about Friends (“we” meaning those of us at Decider, as well as any other online outlet devoting coverage to its 20th anniversary) is because it was successful not just in terms of ratings but because it ushered in more successful sitcoms like it. Without Friends, there would be no How I Met Your Mother, New Girl, or even The League. I’d also mention the brilliant Happy Endings, which was cut short after three stellar seasons. The show even openly acknowledged the Friends influence:

When you take away the nerd thing, even The Big Bang Theory owes a lot of its set-up to Friends, for better or for worse. And while you may not take that as a great example of the Friends influence, and suggest that Seinfeld was high art that ushered in more brilliant sitcoms just like it, my answer would be that for every Curb Your Enthusiasm there’s a It’s Like, You Know…. Seinfeld was great partially because it was impossible to replicate with a different cast. Friends, on the other hand, established a formula that was easily translatable — again, for better or for worse.

At the end of the day, there’s no way to discuss the great sitcoms of the ’90s without mentioning both Seinfeld and Friends as the forefront of the Must See TV era. While both had their massive influence on series that came after them, Friends is the most enduring, bringing a more universal, broader experience to it’s six-member cast of characters (even decades later in syndication). While one can argue that the broad appeal of Friends is indicative of its watered-down comedic nature, it’s also a testament to its production and writing teams’ understanding of what makes a good sitcom work and maintain an enduring legacy: its appeal to a mass audience.

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Photos: Everett Collection