Simone Knox

<p>This chapter explores how the acting in <italic>Game of Thrones</italic> (HBO, 2011–present) both confirms and problematizes some common assumptions about British acting, and thus by extension notions of difference between British and American acting. The chapter anchors its analysis in the work by Conleth Hill (who plays Varys) and Liam Cunningham (Davos Seaworth). It considers the ways in which their performances challenge binary distinctions commonly found in discourses on British and American acting (e.g., technical strength versus organic "shooting from the hip," suitability for stage-versus suitability for screen-based work). By highlighting the complexity and nuance in Hill's and Cunningham's acting, the chapter makes an intervention into discourses about British acting that is especially timely given the considerable success of British and Irish actors in contemporary US film and television. In doing so, it makes a valuable contribution to scholarship on performance and transatlantic television.</p>

This chapter looks beyond Friends to consider the show’s intertextual brethren, whose different degrees of failure help to illuminate Friends’ appeal and success around the globe. An interview with Kevin S. Bright, who was executive producer for the Joey spin-off, informs the analysis of this short-lived programme, as well as an intervention into scholarly conceptualisations of what constitutes ‘failure’. The authors analyse the short-lived US format adaptation of the Friends-influenced British sitcom Coupling, which challenges established terms such as ‘creative borrowing’. The chapter then explores the reception of Friends in such diverse cultural contexts as India, Egypt and Germany and provides insights into how audiences from different socio-cultural backgrounds read the programme, and what issues may arise from audio-visual translation for non-anglophone viewers. The chapter considers Friends’ impact on global television production by exploring two ‘unofficial’ adaptations, fr...

This book offers a long overdue, extensive study of one of the most significant programmes in the history of television, namely Friends. This sitcom has become a cultural phenomenon, but received rather little scholarly attention thus far, and the available critical literature tends to lack in-depth analysis. Featuring original interviews with key creative personnel (co-creator Marta Kauffman, executive producer Kevin S. Bright, director James Burrows and production designer John Shaffner), the book pays detailed attention to Friends’ use of humour, performance, style and set design. It also considers the programme’s politics of representation and the critical backlash it has been receiving in recent years. Moreover, the book looks beyond Friends to consider the show’s impact on global television production and reception by viewers across a range of national contexts. The book’s central argument is that Friends has become such a seminal success because it adopts a strategy of intima...

This article explores the development and pre-production history of the 2001 HBO mini-series Band of Brothers. It does so via a combination of original archive research (conducted at the BFI Reuben Library) and interviews with several industry figures with relevant professional experience, including John Barclay, the current Head of Recorded Media for the UK trade union Equity, and Roger Harrop, the former director of regional film commission Herts Film Link. Using these methodologies, the article identifies Band of Brothers as the first significant US runaway television production in the UK, and uncovers how this HBO programme came to benefit from British film tax relief. Here, close attention is paid to dubious practices concerning tax policy and contractual agreements for actors, especially Damian Lewis's pay. The article demonstrates the impact Band of Brothers has had on television production in the UK in terms of providing Equity with a useful precedent when negotiating fo...

While important scholarship exists on the television representations of Asian American identities, research in the UK has been focused on African Caribbean and South Asian identities. Very little scholarly attention has been paid to televisual representations of British Chinese identities, despite the British Chinese constituting one of the larger and fastest growing ethnic minority groups within contemporary Britain. Informed by an understanding of the complexity of the term ‘British Chinese’, this article explores the representation of British Chinese identities in British television drama. Despite the long-standing absence and invisibility of such identities in British television, as perceived within the popular imagination in Britain and in British Chinese discourses, the article shows that a larger number of British Chinese actors have found notable employment in British television than is commonly acknowledged or remembered within the popular imagination. The article draws on ...

This reflection argues that, despite various good reasons for approaching the notion of the ‘universal’ with caution, cultural theorists should give up their resistance to the universal. The prominence of formats in today's television suggests that the time is ripe to do. Intentionally or not, accounts of difference implicitly also often reveal sameness; the more we probe heterogeneity, the more likely we are to encounter something that remains consistent and similar. Thus, it is time to collaborate with scholars from the numerous disciplines for which the universal has long had validity and pertinence.

Contemporary US sitcom is at an interesting crossroads: it has received an increasing amount of scholarly attention (e.g. Mills 2009; Butler 2010; Newman and Levine 2012; Vermeulen and Whitfield 2013), which largely understands it as shifting towards the aesthetically and narratively complex. At the same time, in the post-broadcasting era, US networks are particularly struggling for their audience share. With the days of blockbuster successes like Must See TV’s Friends (NBC 1994-2004) a distant dream, recent US sitcoms are instead turning towards smaller, engaged audiences. Here, a cult sensibility of intertextual in-jokes, temporal and narrational experimentation (e.g. flashbacks and alternate realities) and self-reflexive performance styles have marked shows including Community (NBC 2009-2015), How I Met Your Mother (CBS 2005-2014), New Girl (Fox 2011-present) and 30 Rock (NBC 2006-2013). However, not much critical attention has so far been paid to how these developments in textua...

This chapter explores how the acting in Game of Thrones (HBO, 2011–present) both confirms and problematizes some common assumptions about British acting, and thus by extension notions of difference between British and American acting. The chapter anchors its analysis in the work by Conleth Hill (who plays Varys) and Liam Cunningham (Davos Seaworth). It considers the ways in which their performances challenge binary distinctions commonly found in discourses on British and American acting (e.g., technical strength versus organic & 'shooting from the hip' and suitability for stage-versus suitability for screen-based work). By highlighting the complexity and nuance in Hill's and Cunningham's acting, the chapter makes an intervention into discourses about British acting that is especially timely given the considerable success of British and Irish actors in contemporary US film and television. In doing so, it makes a valuable contribution to scholarship on performance and transatlantic television.

The translation practices of dubbing and subtitling, according to Richard Kilborn, are more often than not held in disdain, with dubbing the more despised form. i However, it is worth pointing out that this negative attitude is more widespread in countries and television cultures that make less use of these practices, such as the United Kingdom. Both dubbing and subtitling are often conceived of in terms of necessity and practicality: the need for strict adherence to lip-synchronisation, the need for compatibility of source voice and dubbing voice, or the need to use no more than approximately 40 characters on screen in subtitling, ii to allow enough time for the viewer to read the words. A commonly held assumption is that dubbing and subtitling can, at best, produce a translated equivalent -if not equivalence of information, then equivalence of effect -to the source language version. iii It is also worth noting that inherent in this idea of equivalence are problematic assumptions t...

This chapter explores some of the textual specificity of the Steven Moffat/Matt Smith Doctor Who, in relation to its positioning within the current transatlantic television landscape. The chapter develops further the existing scholarship on Doctor Who, by both offering a critical assessment of the transatlantic dimensions of the Moffat/Smith-era Doctor Who, and by challenging some of the existing critical arguments about Doctor Who's transatlantic dimensions. Particular attention is paid to the casting, physicality and costuming of actor Matt Smith as the Doctor in relation to notions of Britishness.

This co-authored chapter explores the television work of actor Tony Curran as it has developed during the course of his professional life. Trained at the Royal Scottish Academy of Music and Drama (now Royal Conservatoire of Scotland), Tony Curran has had a successful career for roughly two decades; one that spans film (e.g. Shallow Grave (1994), Gladiator (2000), Red Road (2006; for which he won a Scottish BAFTA and a British Independent Film award), and Thor: The Dark World (2013)), theatre (e.g. Victoria (Royal Shakespeare Company/Traverse Theatre) and The Glory of Living (Royal Court)), videogames (Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3), and television. The chapter explores his work in terms of its notable variety and versatility, using the following case studies: Curran’s small-screen breakthrough as gay Scottish plumber Lenny in BBC2 drama This Life (1997); his portrayal of painter Vincent van Gogh for British SF series Doctor Who (BBC1, 2005-present); an alien in SF series Defiance (...

This chapter, takes an in-depth look at the specificities of the humour in Friends, arguing that humour is situated at the heart of its narrative, performance and aesthetic discourses; but also that Friends is a show about humour. The chapter introduces key humour theories and scholarly approaches to ‘sitcom as genre’ before providing a unique comedic typology of Friends’ main characters. This typology demonstrates that the series addresses a considerable range of humouristic themes, comic situations and types of comedic performances. It further illustrates how Friends’ humour is characterised by an ensemble dynamic in which individual jokes almost always serve a larger narrative ‘agenda’. Informed by interviews with Marta Kauffman and Kevin S. Bright and close analysis of several moments, particularly the first scene of the pilot, the chapter shows how densely woven Friends’ humour is and that its distinct comedic sensibility helps to facilitate its strategy of intimacy.

This chapter begins to offer the authors’ final reflections on Friends and its place in present and future television culture by attending to an intertextual reference to the series within a television show that in many ways could not be more different from it, namely The Handmaid’s Tale. The contrast between the multi-camera sitcom and the dystopian thriller allows the authors to conclude their considerations of Friends’ strategy of intimacy and to think through the ways in which the programme complicates notions of the ‘then and now’ and discourses of continuation and transformation. Informed by interviews with co-creator Marta Kauffman, executive producer Kevin S. Bright and director James Burrows, the authors sum up the key contribution the book seeks to make to television scholarship and finish by reflecting on Friends’ 25th anniversary in September 2019.

This essay explores how The Truman Show, Peter Weir’s film about a television show, deserves more sustained analysis than it has received since its release in 1998. I will argue that The Truman Show problematizes the binary oppositions of cinema/television, disruption/stability, reality/simulation and outside/inside that structure it. The Truman Show proposes that binary oppositions such as outside/inside exist in a mutually implicating relationship. This deconstructionist strategy not only questions the film’s critical position, but also enables a reflection on the very status of film analysis itself.

This chapter outlines both Friends’ considerable success and global cultural impact as well as the backlash to which it has been subject in recent years. Mapping how the show’s politics of representation have received criticism in much cultural commentary, the chapter identifies that rather little scholarship on the programme exists, and that the available literature tends to lack in-depth analysis. The authors consider how this lack of scholarly engagement links to issues concerning ‘quality TV’ and legitimation, genre and authorship. They then reflect on the book’s methodological framework, especially the much-needed close analysis and the use of original interviews with Friends co-creator Marta Kauffman, executive producer Kevin S. Bright, director James Burrows and production designer John Shaffner. They set up their key argument concerning the strategy of intimacy that underpins the programme’s success, before concluding by offering an outline of the subsequent chapters.

This chapter analyses Friends’ use of style, space and set design, proposing that multi-camera sitcom may achieve an aesthetics of intimacy. Informed by interviews with John Shaffner, Kevin S. Bright and James Burrows, the chapter’s focus lies with Monica’s iconic apartment, and how intimacy here is constructed through an emphasis on rich texture and the particular placement of the couch, which enables a creative engagement with space for the performers. The chapter uncovers how notions of intimacy are reinforced through carefully managed change for the set design and an accumulation of meaning for long-term viewers. The authors then propose that multi-camera sitcom offers a particular mode of address, a regime of looking in, which facilitates an intimate viewing experience. Overall, they suggest that multi-camera sitcom is productively understood as facilitating the potential for a style that is no less complex than ‘cinematic’ single-camera production, requiring and rewarding deta...

Phil Davis has had a distinguished career, receiving widespread acclaim for his ‘invisible’ acting. This article illuminates Davis’ approach to acting via a transcribed interview conducted at the ‘Acting on Television’ symposium at the University of Reading in 2016. This material is framed by a contextualising introduction that proposes that John Flaus’ concept of lamprotes is useful for understanding Davis’ acting. The interview is structured by four case studies exploring Davis’ work across a range of medium/genre contexts: feature film Vera Drake, docudrama The Curse of Steptoe, drama serial adaptation Bleak House and crime drama Sherlock.

This essay considers the presence, role and significance of British drama on US television screens. Drawing on original archival research, it focuses on PBS and its acclaimed series Masterpiece Theatre (1971–present). Taking into account how this long-running series has evolved in relation to changes in the broadcasting landscape, the essay analyses how Masterpiece Theatre schedules and promotes the British dramas it acquires, and how the assimilation into US broadcasting and PBS branding contexts transforms these dramas, before considering how these imports are consumed and received by both US viewers and critics. Challenging some of the prevailing perceptions of Masterpiece Theatre, the central argument is that Masterpiece Theatre and the discourses surrounding it are marked by a sense of tension that has so far not received enough critical recognition.

This essay explores how The Truman Show, Peter Weir’s film about a television "reality" show, deserves more sustained analysis than it has received since its release in 1998. The Truman Show problematizes the binary oppositions of cinema/television, disruption/stability, reality/simulation and outside/inside that structure it by suggesting that such binaries exist in a mutually implicating relationship. This deconstructionist strategy not only questions the film’s critical position, but also enables a reflection on the very status of film analysis itself.

This article explores the development and pre-production history of the 2001 HBO mini-series Band of Brothers. It does so via a combination of original archive research (conducted at the BFI Reuben Library) and interviews with several industry figures with relevant professional experience, including John Barclay, the current Head of Recorded Media for the UK trade union Equity, and Roger Harrop, the former director of regional film commission Herts Film Link. Using these methodologies, the article identifies Band of Brothers as the first significant US runaway television production in the UK, and uncovers how this HBO programme came to benefit from British film tax relief. Here, close attention is paid to dubious practices concerning tax policy and contractual agreements for actors, especially Damian Lewis’s pay. The article demonstrates the impact Band of Brothers has had on television production in the UK in terms of providing Equity with a useful precedent when negotiating for subsequent international productions such as Game of Thrones (2011–19). Band of Brothers offers important and timely lessons to be learned, especially given the recent growth of US television runaway productions in the UK.

Production studies has given television studies a welcome chance to investigate the processes of putting television together, highlighting sense-making structures that are engaged with in the processes of production (see, e.g. Caldwell, 2008; Mayer et al., 2009). While, as Elana Levine (2007) highlights, this has uncovered the ‘audience-like’ behaviour of production personnel, an European Communication Research and Education Association (ECREA)-organised conference (‘Making Television in the 21st Century’, Aarhus University, October 2013) has also investigated how these processes of labour have been changed as a result of digitalisation. It is our interest to extend the debates by looking at the wider contexts in which television production operates – its cultures of production – and to build on the work by scholars including Vicki Mayer (2011), Miranda Banks et al. (2016) as well as Michael Curtin and Kevin Sanson (2016) to widen the focus of existing debates by focusing on production contexts beyond the Anglophone sphere.

In doing so, we are part of the collaboration between Critical Studies in Television and the Television Studies Section of the ECREA. This collaboration seeks to promote both non-Anglophone television scholarship and scholarship on non-Anglophone television and facilitate closer dialogue between colleagues in Europe (and beyond, of course). To this purpose, we called for contributions that investigate the conditions and television cultures that determine television production across Europe. Such was the volume of high-quality submissions we received that the editorial board of Critical Studies in Television agreed to allocate two special issues to this: The present one, focused on European Cultures of Production, and an additional one in Spring 2020, which will move the debate further by exploring Transnational European Cultures of Production.

In what follows, readers will find six articles as well as the first of our full-length aerial reviews of the state of television scholarship within a particular national context. Readers will notice a range of perspectives and contexts across the contributions, which cover different parts of the European continent, the work of a number of different television personnel, as well as fiction and non-fiction programming. What the contributions have in common is a shared commitment to engage with the ways in which television is produced and disseminated within contexts that are inevitably embedded within a global television landscape and being transformed by digital technologies, but also marked by their own specific particularities, histories and traditions. Individually and collectively, the contributions provide insights into the fascinating texture of these particularities, which they have uncovered through a range of methodologies. Readers will further notice that the contributions also engage – at times more implicitly, at others more explicitly – with the ways in which the work of television personnel is conditioned by structures of power (see Giddens, 1984), with their professional agency simultaneously constrained and facilitated. With wrangling for sociopolitical power within Europe (and elsewhere) especially acute at the present time, and – as the contributions reflect – with the cultures of television production in Europe experiencing a number of significant changes, such a commitment to critically engage with power is especially welcome and needed.

Heike Bruun’s article begins the special issue with a study of the on-air schedule of Danish broadcaster TV 2 in the digital era. She articulates the broadcaster’s response to the need to negotiate public service obligations within an increasingly fragmented and non-linear television landscape. As her analysis points out, this may involve resurrecting older practices in the contemporary need for competitive distinction, thus pointing to the possibility for future transformations that, the more things change, the more they may stay (or become) the same. Working at the intersection of the global and the local, Heidi Keinonen presents an analysis of the programme format import and adaptation in Finland. She introduces the format catalogue as a central tool in marketing new programme formats, with a role not unlike that of the mail-order catalogues of the 20th century, and considers how television production in a small national market may be affected by transnational flows and structures.

Notions of public service broadcasting and small nations already engaged with by Bruun and Keinonen become the focal point in the article co-authored by Ruth McElroy, Jakob Isak Nielsen and Caitriona Noonan. Their cross-national study explores how small nation public service broadcasters navigate the changing ecology of television production in Denmark, Ireland and Wales, highlighting the need for more nuance in considerations of power. With their case studies located at the global–local intersection, their discussion considers how international appeal and local specificity are not necessarily mutually exclusive, but that the latter may indeed be instrumental for the former. Kai Hanno Schwind successfully negotiates the different levels of industrial reflexivity (Caldwell, 2008) presented by his ‘exclusive informants’ (Bruun, 2016) in order to explore the copyright infringement of Stromberg, the German format adaptation of the British sitcom The Office. By thinking through the complex relationships between conceptualisations of ‘format’ and creative agency, his article makes a valuable contribution to both non-Anglophone comedy production studies and format scholarship.

Building on John T. Caldwell’s (2008) work, Petr Szczepanik moves the debate to Central-Eastern Europe by examining how the self-conceptualisations of independent producers in the Czech Republic may affect their working practices, providing an insight into the relationships between film and television as experienced by the practitioner. Through articulating the differences between Czech producers and their British and American counterparts, his work provides a fascinating and timely counterpoint to the critical attention to the showrunner in Anglophone contexts. With a similar commitment to providing a synthetic overview as Szczepanik, Ana Vinuela presents an in-depth study of how television documentary production in France has operated within a shifting regulatory framework. By doing so, she joins scholars such as Helen Wheatley (2004) in extending discussions concerning ‘quality television’ beyond fiction programming by considering how documentary production has been affected by discourses of value and evaluation.

Georgia Aitaki concludes the special issue by providing an insightful assessment of the present state of scholarship on Greek television, both mapping the dominant concerns and approaches of the existing (both Greek- and English-language) literature and signposting future directions.

Phil Davis has had a distinguished career, receiving widespread acclaim for his ‘invisible’ acting. This article illuminates Davis’ approach to acting via a transcribed interview conducted at the ‘Acting on Television’ symposium at the University of Reading in 2016. This material is framed by a contextualising introduction that proposes that John Flaus’ concept of lamprotes is useful for understanding Davis’ acting. The interview is structured by four case studies exploring Davis’ work across a range of medium/genre contexts: feature film Vera Drake, docudrama The Curse of Steptoe, drama serial adaptation Bleak House and crime drama Sherlock.

This article explores the transatlantic work of Beryl Vertue (b. 1931), whose distinguished career includes selling the format for Till Death Us Do Part (BBC1, 1965-1975) and Steptoe and Son (BBC1, 1962-1974) to American television, as well as producing the Upstairs, Downstairs format adaptation Beacon Hill (CBS, 1975) in the USA. I map how her crucial involvement in the genesis of All in the Family (CBS, 1971-1979) and Sanford and Son (NBC, 1972-1977) has been neglected in existing accounts, which have tended to focus on Norman Lear. I contrast these with Vertue’s own recollection, drawing out her role in the creation of these two seminal programmes. I then locate Vertue within a broader transatlantic movement of British television production personnel during the 1970s. I explore Vertue’s decision-making process for Beacon Hill, a programme that deserves a more prominent place in accounts of US television history, not least because of its connections to discourses on quality. I uncover how her creative agency was informed by her difference and productive Otherness whilst also subject to tensions and limitations present within complex industrial structures. Informed by an original in-depth interview with Vertue, the article considers her an unwitting pioneer of transatlantic format adaptation.

While important scholarship exists on the television representations of Asian American identities, research in the UK has been focused on African Caribbean and South Asian identities. Very little scholarly attention has been paid to televisual representations of British Chinese identities, despite the British Chinese constituting one of the larger and fastest growing ethnic minority groups within contemporary Britain.

Informed by an understanding of the complexity of the term ‘British Chinese’, this article explores the representation of British Chinese identities in British television drama. Despite the long-standing absence and invisibility of such identities in British television, as perceived within the popular imagination in Britain and British Chinese discourses, the article finds that a larger number of British Chinese actors have found notable employment in British television than is commonly acknowledged or remembered within the popular imagination.

The article draws on a database that deploys a range of research, including archive research at the BFI Reuben Library, to map the presence of British Chinese actors in British television drama since 1945. Through this historiographic focus, the article identifies some of the most significant trends in representations of British Chinese identities in British television drama. It then illustrates and provides more specific texture to these broader patterns through the close textual analysis of a case study, the BBC1 flagship series Sherlock (2010-present). It concludes by reflecting on the contemporary period, which has seen an influx of British Chinese actors in British television drama as well as high-profile diversity campaigning within Britain.

Fiction format adaptations have scored notable successes in recent years and been attracting increasing scholarly attention. The US version of Shameless has been one of the most conspicuous: based on Paul Abbott’s series (C4 2004–2013), Shameless USA (2011-present) has become a signature series for Showtime. While Shameless USA has attracted a good amount of coverage in critics’ and press discourses, it has, compared to its British progenitor, received scant mention in scholarship.

This article provides a detailed examination of Shameless’ transatlantic move, because this offers the opportunity to capture the complex push-pull of textual and contextual factors that impede or facilitate fiction format adaption. The article traces the protracted development process for Shameless USA and considers the ways in which this format adaptation engages with issues concerning the politics of representation, especially in terms of the family and social class. Via a comparative analysis of the presence of actors David Threlfall and William H. Macy in their respective versions, the article furthermore pays attention to star casting. Drawing and building on the notion of ‘contested cultural space’, the article argues that star casting is crucial to, yet has thus far received insufficient attention in scholarship on fiction format adaptations.

This article is interested in the long-standing exchange visits by broadcasters across the Atlantic, as these give insight into the developing relationships between British and US broadcasting. Drawing on original archive research at the Library of Congress, Washington D.C., and the BBC Written Archives’ Centre, Caversham, this article focuses on 1955-1956 as a foundational historical moment when particular developments and notions concerning the identity of, and competitive difference between, British and US broadcasting crystallised and came under pressure. It pays detailed attention to the words, work and experiences of then-President of NBC Television, Sylvester ‘Pat’ Weaver (1908-2002), and then-Director General of the BBC, Sir Ian Jacob (1899-1993), who engaged in a charged rhetorical exchange in London and New York. The study of their transatlantic exchange illuminates the move from war-time cooperation to post-war global competition between the two broadcasting systems and helps to uncover the thus far marginalised history of the US pressure and influence on the arrival of commercial broadcasting in Britain. The historiographical analysis further demonstrates that Ian Jacob deserves more scholarly attention and recognition than he has received so far.

Jean-François Lyotard's 1973 essay ‘Acinema’ is explicitly concerned with the cinematic medium, but has received scant critical attention. Lyotard's acinema conceives of an experimental, excessive form of film-making that uses stillness and movement to shift away from the orderly process of meaning-making within mainstream cinema. What motivates this present paper is a striking link between Lyotard's writing and contemporary Hollywood production; both are concerned with a sense of excess, especially within moments of motion. Using Charlie's Angels (McG, 2000) as a case study – a film that has been critically dismissed as ‘eye candy for the blind’ – my methodology brings together two different discourses, high culture theory and mainstream film-making, to test out and propose the value of Lyotard's ideas for the study of contemporary film. Combining close textual analysis and engagement with key scholarship on film spectacle, I reflexively engage with the process of film analysis and re-direct attention to a neglected essay by a major theorist, in order to stimulate further engagement with his work.

This reflection argues that, despite various good reasons for approaching the notion of the ‘universal’ with caution, cultural theorists should give up their resistance to the universal. The prominence of formats in today’s television suggests that the time is ripe to do. Intentionally or not, accounts of difference implicitly also often reveal sameness; the more we probe heterogeneity, the more likely we are to encounter something that remains consistent and similar. Thus, it is time to collaborate with scholars from the numerous disciplines for which the universal has long had validity and pertinence.

This book offers a long overdue, extensive study of one of the most beloved television shows: Friends. Why has this sitcom become the seminal success that it is? And how does it continue to engage viewers around the world a quarter century after its first broadcast? Featuring original interviews with key creative personnel (including co-creator Marta Kauffman and executive producer Kevin S. Bright), the book provides answers by identifying a strategy of intimacy that informs Friends’ use of humour, performance, style and set design. The authors provide fascinating analyses of some of the most well-remembered scenes—the one where Ross can’t get his leather pants back on, and Ross and Rachel’s break-up, to name just a couple—and reflect on how and why A-list guest performances often fell short of the standards set by the ensemble cast. Also considered are the iconic look of Monica’s apartment as well as the programme’s much discussed politics of representation and the critical backlash it has received in recent years. An exploration of Joey, the infamous spin-off, and several attempts to adapt Friends’ successful formula across the globe, round out the discussion, with insights into mistranslated jokes and much more. For students, scholars, creative industry practitioners and fans alike, this is a compelling read that lets us glimpse behind the scenes of what has become a cultural phenomenon and semi-permanent fixture in many of our homes.