This past week, I watched the first episode of Full House I've seen since the mid 90's- the one where Danny invites that Rusty kid to a Tanner family barbecue, and he writes a fake love letter to DJ supposedly from the paper boy she has a crush on. The love letter passes from set of wrong hands to set of wrong hands, and soon everybody in the Tanner household in convinced that another member of the house has a crush on them. Individual characters' suspicions are revealed through an inner monologue device, underscoring the episode's psycho-sexual nightmare with a touch of Godard's hyper-realism: this was truly one of the most dreadful 30 minutes of television I'd ever experienced, a comfy second place to that half-episode of The Surreal Life I saw once while descending into an LSD trip.

Upon tweeting my realization that Full House is- shockingly- terrible, I was inundated with IMs from friends asking me how I could so casually malign a series so close to their hearts. The phrase "my fantasy!" was thrown around a lot, and I found it hugely interesting that Full House still served as a famial ideal to so many friends.

In Linda Hutchinson's essay Irony, Nostalgia, and the Postmodern, the notion is put forth that ironic appreciation is often a component of nostalgia, in that "nostalgic distancing sanitizes as it selects, making the past feel complete, stable, coherent, safe"- and that ironic distance communicates the same "dissatisfaction with modernity." Full House is one of those shows which I feel most fans enjoy ironically, but that doesn't negate the very real place it holds some folks' hearts.

Which brings me to Friends. Prior to this evening, I had never seen a complete episode of Friends. Not out of any snootiness, I just wasn't savvy enough to keep abreast of NBC's Thursday night comedies in 4th grade, my age when the show premiered. By the time I'd reached the age where I was tuned in to that sort of thing, I was intimidated by the show's then lengthy history. Season-long story lines are incredibly hard to keep track of in syndication, so for one reason or another, it just never happened. Being the cultural touchstone that it is, I certainly have a cursory understanding of the show and it's tropes- I know the characters, I know "How you doin'?", I know Pheobe's cat song, I know Ross and Rachael. I've just never seen it.

The difficulty I'm having digesting what I saw this evening (three episodes described as the best of the series- the one where Ross and Rachael finally kiss after watching the prom video, the one where the friendship knowledge game is played for possession of the big apartment, and the series pilot) is that I'm SO familiar with the series' trappings and the influence it had on TV sitcoms both immediately and after the fact, that I have trouble seeing the show as anything more than the sum of it's parts. I understand how and why it's seen as more than a proficient three camera sitcom- Friends defined much of the genre's stylistic language. But I'm just as sure that if I saw, say, Pulp Fiction for the first time this evening, I'd be saying the same thing: I don't get it.

Is the show's prominence in the annals of comedy television a byproduct of nostalgia or ironic appreciation? Both it and Full House certainly share a maudlin streak punctuated by blithe sassyness, all set in a non-traditional (yet oddly perfect) family unit built on perpetual forgiveness and zero consequence for anti-social behavior. Or is this really and truly a great television show that I just missed the boat on? And if that IS the case, doesn't acknowledging that I "had to have watched it from the beginning" also acknowledge that there is a certain level of nostalgia and (in turn) merely ironic appreciation of the series?

TL;DR: I don't think I like Friends. But I'll give it further study if recommended.

*That bit about the family unit and anti-social behavior may well be true of all sitcoms.