This film plays like the first season of Friends—or rather the other way round. All the coffee houses and dating talk and offbeat friends making witty remarks. The tone is almost identical. Singles is, of course, somewhat hipper. Friends is ever so slightly dumbed down and more accessible, but the similarity is remarkable. Friends ripped Singles off, let's face it. At least they made arguably the greatest sitcom of all time doing it.
shareI enjoyed "Friends" when I was a kid but then I got to my 20s and discovered that life wasn't like that, no matter how educated and good-looking you might be. It was an offensive fantasy in which six people lived in a hermetic world where any outsider, especially if they were from out of town, mostespecially if they were foreign or black, were seen as a disruptive threat to their solipsistic clique. Nothing ever had any lasting repercussions for the 'Friends' and everything always worked out fine no matter how much they acted like self-absorbed jerks.
Contrast that with a genuinely great comedy like 'Cheers' which was populated by fundamentally good people who were nevertheless all losers for the most part (dim-bulb Woody and his equally blissfully ignorant debutante girlfriend excepted).
"Friends" was, at heart, set in a high school. They just masked that by saying the characters were in their 20s.
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