Monica and Rachel were fighting over who got the last condom. They stood in the bathroom, playing rock paper scissors, as Richard and Ross waited outside of their girlfriends’ respective bedrooms. The studio audience roared with laughter and I smiled, too, as much at the familiarity of a Friends episode as at the dialogue. Then I glanced at my 10-year-old daughter, who was curled up on the other end of the couch, a quizzical expression on her face. She looked at me. “What’s a condom?” Hannah asked.
A few months earlier, Hannah asked me if she could watch Friends. I was surprised that my daughter knew anything about a television show that had gone off the air eight years before she was born, but she explained that one of her friends had watched the entire series and told her all about it. Now she wanted to see the show for herself.
Friends premiered my senior year of high school, but growing up with parents who instituted strict rules about TV time meant that I missed most of the first season. That hardly mattered; the show was so popular that it saturated the culture, and after I started college, I quickly caught up. Even as I cringed at the gay panic jokes, I felt a kinship with the characters and found echoes of the original idea of the show – how your friends could become a second family – in my own life as I moved through college, graduate school, and early adulthood.
I told Hannah that she could watch the show on one condition: that I watch each episode with her. My caveat was less because I was worried about objectionable content – the show had aired at 8 p.m. on NBC, after all – and more because I wanted this time with my daughter. We were long past the days where she wanted to watch movies or shows with me or her father, preferring instead to use her weekend allotment of screen time to watch YouTube with her friends or play Roblox on the computer.
Friends allowed Carol and Susan to be just as loving, exasperating, and funny as everyone else.
Watching Friends with Hannah was like watching it anew. She was drawn to different characters than I had been, quickly declaring that Susan was her favorite, as were the episodes that featured her and Carol. After their commitment ceremony (performed by Newt Gingrich’s sister!), I couldn’t help pointing out how groundbreaking this episode had been in 1996. “Wow,” Hannah said, her tone perfectly situated between awe and boredom. To my child, who didn’t know an America where same-sex marriage wasn’t legal everywhere, the time I was describing felt as unknowable to her as Watergate had been to me.
In fact, watching the show this time I was struck by how Carol and Susan were portrayed. Most mainstream depictions of lesbians at the time tended to show them as one-off victims, predators, or catalysts for a show’s lead to discover something about themselves. In contrast, Friends allowed Carol and Susan to be just as loving, exasperating, and funny as everyone else. The jokes about how titillating straight men found the idea of two women together had aged horribly, but Carol and Susan had the most stable relationship of anyone on the show, living in domestic tranquility with primary custody of their and Ross’s son as the six main characters flailed and stumbled their way into adulthood.
The awkwardness radiating off of her was almost palpable, and I felt a surge of tenderness for my daughter, for everything she knew and still had to learn, for the adolescence that lay ahead.
Part of the flailing and stumbling, of course, involved romantic relationships. Which was why, when we came to the condom scene, I grabbed the remote and paused the show. Hannah sat up straight, waiting for me to tell her what a condom was and why two women were fighting over it. Her hands were clasped in her lap, her dark eyes wide and her brow slightly furrowed. She looked just like she did when she encountered a particularly difficult homework problem.
I thought Hannah already knew about condoms. Her school had recently had a sex education class for everyone in her grade, and I’d just assumed that had included birth control, like my own fifth-grade health class had. But now I realized that, since I was in elementary school when AIDS was all over mainstream news, my health teacher had probably been instructed to add a safe sex component. The gulf between my childhood and my daughter’s had never seemed so wide.
When we came to the condom scene, I grabbed the remote and paused the show.
Should I start by saying that condoms were used to prevent pregnancy? But wait, they were also used by gay couples for safe sex – and by straight couples for that reason, too. OK, safe sex and pregnancy, that’s your answer. Does Hannah know what “safe sex” means? Should I get my husband in here so we can have the full discussion? Is it too much of a tangent to mention that it’s kind of cool that the show made condom use such a non-negotiable and also didn’t shame the girls for having as much, or more, sex as the guys? Yes, yes it is. Shit, just answer the question she asked. Just say something!
All of those thoughts raced through my head in about five seconds, and I knew I had to begin talking. So, I did, choosing my words carefully and remembering advice I was given when Hannah was a toddler: just answer the question the kid is asking, nothing more, nothing less.
I cleared my throat and put the remote down. “A condom is something that straight couples use when they don’t want a baby,” I told Hannah. “It’s a sheath, usually made out of latex, that covers the penis and keeps semen from getting into the vagina. Gay couples also use condoms for safe sex.”
Hannah nodded slowly, clearly turning my words over in her mind. The awkwardness radiating off of her was almost palpable, and I felt a surge of tenderness for my daughter, for everything she knew and still had to learn, for the adolescence that lay ahead. Then she nodded and nestled back into the nest of her favorite oversized, fuzzy blanket.
“Okay,” she said, her voice confident. “Thanks. That makes sense.”
“Do you want to talk about it more? Do you have any other questions?”
“No, but can we finish the episode?” she asked, reaching for the remote.
“Sure,” I said, letting out a quiet sigh of relief.
For 236 half-hour episodes she and I had returned to the media consumption of my youth, parent and child on the couch next to each other, watching the same entertainment at the same time.
Over the episodes and months, we had more unexpected conversations. Thanks to Friends, Hannah now knows what masturbation, sex workers, and porn movies are. I became better at explaining each, although masturbation was the most difficult to discuss, thanks to the set-up: Monica thinks that Chandler gets off to videos of sharks, misunderstanding ensues. Hannah understood the concept of masturbation quickly enough, but her follow-up question of, “but where do the sharks come in?” had me stumped. I wanted to say that they came in because this was a season nine episode and the writers were running out of jokes, but instead I fell back on a classic: “Different people enjoy different things, and as long as they’re not hurting anyone, that’s okay!”
Whenever I mentioned to friends that Hannah and I were watching the entire series, they all had the same reaction: “How are you explaining the gay jokes?” As it turned out, though, I didn’t really have to. Hannah frowned whenever any gay “joke” was made, occasionally rolling her eyes, sometimes saying that they were stupid. She’d intuitively figured out what it took me, and many of my peers, too many episodes to realize: that there was nothing funny here, just lines too cringey and dumb to even talk about.
As we approached the end of the series, I began to feel nostalgic. Soon we’d be back to her begging for just 15 more minutes of Roblox time or politely but firmly asking me to leave the room when she and her friends scrolled YouTube and streaming services for something to watch. But for 236 half-hour episodes she and I had returned to the media consumption of my youth, parent and child on the couch next to each other, watching the same entertainment at the same time. We had developed a shared language of inside jokes and references that bemused and amused my husband in equal measure; we had debated what fashions had aged the best and which character we were most like. (Hannah’s definitely a Susan/Phoebe combo; I’m a Monica with strong notes of Rachel.)
After the last episode aired, I turned off the TV. Hannah and I were both wrapped in the fuzzy blanket, my arm over her shoulders. “We did it,” I said.
“Yeah,” she beamed.
We sat in companionable silence for a few moments. Then she turned to me, her face bright and expectant.
“Hey, can we watch Felicity together next?”
