We saw this episode last night – 9 p.m. IST on Star World (Mon-Fri) – for our daily dose of comic relief.
Curiously, earlier in the day I offered the name Barn Push as an anagram for an ELT practitioner in South East Asia. This was/is on a wacky ELT website deliciously called sixthings(dot)net. (Go to Comments – mine is the 42nd)
In this episode Phoebe can’t stand furniture from Pottery Barn. She says things are mass-produced there and that’s the cause of everything that’s wrong with the world. She prefers something ‘of yore’ – as Rachel delicately puts it. Rachel has just bought an ‘apothecary’s table’ for Pheebs from Pottery Barn – a fact she desperately wants to hide.
What I like about Friends is that they are all trying not to be losers. They all have their moments and each of them has a pique and a passion of his/ her own. They are all pursuing different ‘career paths’ but do, so often, jump the gun – like when Rachel thinks Ralph is coming on to her in the Ralph Lauren episode.
Their well-defined characters do sometimes collide though: Phoebe (off-key musician), Matt (aspiring actor), Ross (Professor of paleontology) and Rachel (fashion enthusiast). Given these central plot lines there is plenty of room for verbal faux pas.
Much of the innuendo would be lost on Indian audiences when the reference is to something that happened in an earlier episode in the sitcom. But the fact that it was first aired in 1994 from an apartment in the Manhattan area of New York city does not seem to be a turn-off for South Asia.
Pottery Barn was the most cohesive of the episodes we have seen recently. In many of the others the energy seems to dribble away and consume itself – with no help from the umpteen breaks for ads.
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Brian Boyle and Kevin Bright at http://www.friends-tv(dot)org/zz611.html; picture source: http://www.wallpaperbase(dot)com/
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