LIFE CAN BE a lonely journey, and that’s one reason we have television. It’s also why we have pornography, but that’s a different essay1.
It’s also the reason we have hangout sitcoms.
A hangout sitcom is a comedic show where most of the stories are spun out of and involving a group of people who spend most of their time hanging out2. The setting can change (work, school, someone’s house) but the mechanics are consistent: A group of people converge on a common spot where they chat with and about each other, get into hilarious capers together, and generally act as if living in some sort of communal existence.
The easy touchstone here is Friends, the ultimate hangout sitcom. Six young folks in New York City spend just about all of their time basically in three locations: A coffee shop and one of two apartments that happen to be across the hall from each other. It’s implied that every day these six people spend several hours together, chatting and getting up to mischief. Friends is certainly not the only example; Community is a hangout sitcom set at a community college; The Office is a hangout sitcom set at a small paper company. All that’s required is that the characters are essentially codependent and locked into an eternity of hanging out.
And we love them. Why do we love them is a very good question, because if you’re ever planning to write a story that focuses in on a gang of friends getting up to capers, you’ll need to understand the appeal and the mechanics of it3. Essentially, hangout sitcoms offer us three things: The assurance that friendship is forever, that our days of getting into mischief with our friends aren’t over, and that nothing can break those bonds once formed. Everything else about a hangout sitcom is secondary.
Friends Forever
As anyone over the age of 25 knows all too well, friendships are very dependent on physical proximity and constant interaction. There are exceptions, of course—please do not email me about your Japanese pen pal you’ve never seen in person but would walk through fire in order to defend—but most of us have had the experience of tearfully driving a dear friend to the airport and then waking up one day six months later and finding it very difficult to remember their name. Maybe I’m the only one who regards other people as amusing homunculi created for my entertainment who vanish the moment I look away, but the fact is when people move away or change jobs or graduate, friendships tend to wither4. You might still be very fond of that person, but the friendship will never be as close.
And making friends as an adult isn’t easy, in part because you’re all so damn weird and in part because getting older is just so exhausting5. Which is why so many of our relationships stem from our jobs, our neighbors, or other areas of life where interaction is constant and frictionless. But that just leads to eventual heartbreak: You change jobs, you changes houses, you change friends.
That’s one aspect of the hangout sitcom’s appeal. The key to the group of friends in a hangout sitcom is that they are always friends. Years go by. People get married, change jobs, have children, reinvent themselves—and yet the core group of friends is still hanging out constantly. No force in the universe can separate these people, and that’s comforting. The fact that they’re supported by a room of professional writers who ensure their snappy comebacks and random thoughts are by equal measure hilarious, insightful, and endearing ties into the sense we all have that our group of friends really is special, that our chosen family is somehow not just a bunch of randos brought together by circumstance but rather a group of clever, amazing people who found each other against the odds6.
I Love a Good Caper
Of course, while hanging out is a key part of a hangout sitcom, usually it’s best to have you characters do things, so the other crucial aspect of a hangout is the capers.
When I was in college, one of my roommates came home with a video camera one day, so my friends and I decided to make a horror movie, as one does. Instead of a script we made some vague gestures at a few scattered notes jotted down, and instead of special effects we relied on extremely clumsy and painfully obvious sleight-of-hand enacted while the camera panned about. For some reason at 4AM after a case of beer this seemed like a viable plan7.
Of course it devolved into chaos and recriminations almost immediately, but it was also great fun. We completely, utterly failed to make a movie, but we had a blast doing so8. That wasn’t uncommon back then—suddenly devoting 24 hours a day to some inexplicable project with your friends just sort of happened all the time. In my freshman year of college, my roommate and I started wallpapering our room with white ‛bricks’ made of paper and black tape with song lyrics written on them. Why? No one, including us, knows. That stuff just happened.
Now, of course, I’m an adult. Aside from being somewhat socially isolated for all the usual reasons, that also means I have a lower capacity for wasting time on capers that very, very obviously will never come to anything9. And thus, there’s a lack of capers.
The hangout sitcom says, don’t worry, there will be capers to come—there will always be capers! The Office suggests that even if you’re a 40-something drone in a dispiriting office, you can and will get up to capers with your friends, like an Office Olympics, or a complex prank on a co-worker involving wrapping paper and the art of illusion.
And that is powerful stuff. Every now and again, I have a daft idea about getting a bunch of people together to work on some ridiculous project or play some ridiculous game, and it all descends into sorrow the moment I contemplate the logistics of emailing 25 people with 345 children between them spread over a 500-mile radius10. And in those moments, I wish I went to Greendale Community College, where building a massive campus-wide pillow fort just sort of happens all the time.
I Want to Sex You Up
Finally, the hangout sitcom offers one last comforting confection: The idea that in a tight group of you’re-my-real-family friends you can have sex with each other and nothing changes.
This is actually one of the most important aspects of the hangout sitcom, the idea that you can become friends with an attractive member of your preferred gender, get to know them and become emotionally entangled with them over the course of constant hanging out and capers, then sleep with that person—and then go back to status ante bellum. When in fact sleeping with a member of a social group in reality is often the equivalent of driving down to the fireworks factory and casually tossing a hand grenade through the window. In other words: It usually has a startlingly destabilizing effect11. If you doubt me, go ahead and sleep with someone in your social circle right now and then come back here and let us all know how it goes. Warning: You will be amazed. And possibly injured.
Of course, there might be exceptions (again, please don’t bother me with your Japanese pen pal you totally sexed during a whirlwind tour of Tokyo and are still good friends with), but that doesn’t matter. The point is it’s a fixture of the hangout sitcom that Jeff Winger can sleep with Britta Perry, or Ross and Rachel can have a lengthy, dramatic relationship that ends in tears and recriminations, but the group survives, and eventually everyone is, yes, friends again.
In Perpetuity
And that’s the core aspect of why hangout sitcoms work as stories: Permanence. In a world where nothing is forever, where our pets, relationships, and faith in each other die on the regular, stories that imply that it’s possible to have relationships that endure—and endure despite your poor choices and lax morals—are irresistible. The idea that you can do all sorts of crazy stuff with people and just reset the next day is irresistible. Sure, the jokes have to be good, and the performances have to encourage you to like the characters—but in the end the reason these stories work so effectively is because they appeal to that part of us that wishes we could get the old band back together and have everything be exactly the same.
Because in a hangout sitcom, those relationships don’t change. Sure, the character might change. They might get a new job, or have a personal revelation, grow or evolve. But their fundamental relationship with the rest of the gang will remain unchanged and eternal—because that’s what’s appealing about it.
That, of course, and the fantasy of always having a razor-sharp riposte to every insult, comment, or question, instead of waking up at 3AM shouting something about the Jerk Store.
Next week: The real reason y’all love Breaking Bad so much.
Also a sexier essay.
I blame television for convincing me that Day Jobs would essentially be me saying witty things eight hours a day, then going out for drinks.
Generally speaking, I recommend understanding your fellow humans if you are going to write stories about them, as opposed to, say, recipes involving them.
Is it possible my friends are simply pretending to move to California and have been secretly meeting at an out-of-the-way bar for six years in order to avoid me? Yes.
And in part because so many of you think eating dinner at 5:30pm is strange NO YOU’RE THE WEIRDO.
Spoiler alert: Your group of friends is 100% a group of randos.
We had a lot of plans in those days, most of which involved in-jokes only we understood and the expectation that they would mysteriously generate money, like cryptocurrency.
There is, or was, a 15-minute video we put together where we all went insane and crept out of our rooms to the tune of Dance of the Sugarplum Fairy and murdered each other, but as far as I know it only exists on a VHS tape in a storage facility somewhere in New Jersey. Which is best for everyone, really.
And the definition of “capers” is slowly expanding to include anything involving getting out of bed or basic grooming.
That’s a lie. I haven’t had 25 friends since 1993 <bursts into tears>
“Startlingly Destabilizing Effect” is also how I describe myself to strangers as well as my next band name.
Again another insightful, witty essay from Jeff. Enjoyed this am reading with a mimosa and read aloud to anyone who would listen. In short. The birds and squirls in my back yard enjoyed and my children wandered off somewhere else. As to be expected, the index slash content guide was also delightul. My band name would be the "still here" and it would be me mostly singing into a mirror with a compilations of assorted drinks and eats. Like asmr for donkeys.