Oscar and Felix, Friends, and The Evening News

When I was in graduate school in the mid 1990s, I returned home to live with my parents who graciously and generously welcomed me in, since I had no money, and what little money I did have was going to pay for my tuition. We coexisted beautifully, and every night, my parents would turn on the 11:00 news to catch up on current events and they would lovingly invite me to join them on the family room couch. And much to my parents’ dismay and disappointment, every night, I would sheepishly retreat to my bedroom to watch The Odd Couple on my very small and old television. My rationale at the time was quite simply “The news is depressing.”

I loved Oscar and Felix, the odd couple of divorced men who shared a Manhattan apartment and boasted contrasting personalities and supremely different degrees of personal hygiene. Their antics always had me low chuckling and it was the perfect way to relax before heading off to sleep.  And frankly, The Odd Couple was so much more uplifting and funnier than anything I was hearing on the evening news. Some might say I was burying my head in the sand or isolating in my own personal happy bubble. Maybe. But while I did care about being informed, I would argue that at that time I was staving off anxiety and depression because the only time the newscasters reported about happy events was in the last two minutes of the broadcast when they halfheartedly tried to leave their viewers with a teeny tiny drop of hope for humanity, and the news in its entirety was just too overwhelming at a younger age, and especially before bedtime.

Here we are, thirty years later, and as an educated adult, I am trying desperately to stay informed and invested in the trials and tribulations of our world because I am a citizen who cares about what is happening in her country and beyond. But friends, I am regressing big time because there are hordes of bad things happening and it’s simply overwhelming and feels like there is just too much that needs fixing. Headlines are infused with words like conflict, escalation, shutdown, hush money, bribery, death, wildfire, flood, lawsuit, school shooting, heist, and hell, I am just scratching the surface. The violence, power, corruption, and lack of integrity in our world is embarrassing and scary. And the negatives on the evening news are compounded by incessant political advertisements as local DMV politics heat up and the race begins for Virginia Governor, Attorney General, and House of Delegates representatives. What this means, is that every news break is filled with acrimonious commercials where each person running for office throws their opponent under the bus. I hear my middle school teachers reminding students equipped with poster board and magic markers that they are expected to run “clean campaigns”, and I yearn for commercials where each candidate talks about why they are best for the job, instead of taking their opponent’s words and contorting them into something they think makes them look better. Not a clean campaign to be found.

I desperately want to stay informed, but I am drowning in the negativity and find I am shrinking from the evening news again, spending less time on social media, and I am quickly retreating, this time to the syndicated TV show Friends, a show for which, over 30 years, I have seen all 236 episodes at least ten times each. The joy and benefit of skipping the evening news and political commercials and watching Friends is that I know what is going to happen on the show. It is predictable. There is a steady laugh track (probably the same one that was engineered for The Odd Couple!), and nine times out of ten, there is a happy ending. Friends does not increase my anxiety and depression because Chandler, Monica, Ross, Rachel, Joey and Phoebe are wrapped up in storylines about spying on neighbors in adjacent high rises, getting stuck in leather pants, finding a thumb in a can of soda, learning to play poker, adopting a monkey, and living out Princess Leia fantasies. There is comfort found in phrases that are now part of our vernacular like “she’s your lobster”, “we were on a break”, and “Pivot!”.  In watching this show, unlike the evening news, the tears I shed are from laughing.

But today I started thinking about how maybe we could borrow some of the lessons The Odd Couple and Friends teach us to help our sadly fragmented world. In almost every episode of The Odd Couple, Oscar and Felix taught us the value and joy in accepting and celebrating differences, recognizing that relationships require compromise to grow, and how mutual respect is essential. Across ten seasons of Friends, Monica, Chandler, Joey, Phoebe, Ross, and Rachel taught us the value in embracing individuality, maintaining a sense of humor through all of life’s ups and downs, being persistent in finding and cultivating love, and the importance of slowing down and sharing a cup of coffee with a friend.

How much nicer would it be to turn on the evening news, and hear that Congress compromised, or that groups who are diametrically opposed to one another agreed to stop the hate and coexist happily amidst their differences? If political advertisements didn’t come from a place of instilling fear but were upbeat and hopeful? That policies and laws were changed or implemented so that our schools were again safe places filled with love and learning, and not violence? Or that as a nation we agreed we should not just share coffee with a friend, but with a stranger? Maybe we can learn something from the sitcom writers who desperately try to keep our spirits up, so that eventually our evening news has a little more “Odd Couple” and “Friends” in it. Fiction influencing reality. I promise I am trying to balance being an educated grown-up who is invested in the future of her country and world with not becoming a woman who feels anxious and depressed by it all. I know you are trying too. Whenever I am grappling with the evening news, but grateful for all that IS good, I appreciate even more Monica’s line in the Pilot episode of Friends: “Welcome to the real world. It sucks. You’re gonna love it!”.