What can we learn from TV shows about friendship?

In the last episode of FX’s new comedy series Adults, which follows a group of friends in their twenties, Paul Baker (Jack Innanen) gets a letter from the US government notifying him that his visa is expiring and that he must leave the US and go back to Canada. His friends, Samir (Malik Elassal), Billie (Lucy Freyer), Anton (Owen Thiele) and his girlfriend Issa (Amita Rao), who he lives with, are devastated. To ensure he can stay in the country, Issa asks him to marry her, to which he gratefully, but also begrudgingly, agrees. 

While the journey to get there is incredibly convoluted, they eventually arrive at the courthouse to wed. However, before they’re about to get married, Issa gets cold feet, telling Billie that marrying Paul is different from when she jokingly married her ex-friend Zack-Carlos because her marriage to Paul would be real. To Paul’s surprise, Billie walks down the aisle in Issa’s place, telling Paul that Issa isn’t ready to marry him but that they do not want to lose him and that she will marry him instead. This results in the entire friendship group arguing as they all volunteer to marry their Canadian friend. To end the bickering, Issa rejoins the group at the altar, apologising and professing to Paul: “We all love you. We just want you to stay. So, literally, any of us would marry you. Paul Baker, you choose. What do you want?” 

I’ve already spoiled enough of the show, so I won’t tell you who he weds, just that he does pick one of his friends to marry, and they’re all able to live together in the US. I found Adults outrageously funny, but what makes the show so good is how dedicated Samir, Billie, Anton, Issa and Paul are to one another. When they offer to marry Paul, none of them selfishly worry about what their families or future partners will think, or if other people will question their sexuality. They do not care that they are technically committing visa fraud. They can not live without their friend, so they decide not to. 

Sitcoms about friendship like Adults, New Girl (2011-2018) and obviously Friends (1994-2004) are great at reminding us of how radical and life-affirming friendship can be. This may seem obvious to state because we all love and feel enriched by our friends. Still, they show us examples of friendships where individuals’ lives are tangled up with one another. Their relationships aren’t casual; they don’t just see each other every other weekend or every other month because their busy work schedules dictate their lives or because they are in a romantic relationship – their lives are enmeshed, their relationships are deep, and they go above and beyond for each other. 

While these depictions of friendship seem unrealistic, they can also inspire us to rethink what we are told is important: work and family. They remind us that our friends are equally important, and potentially even more so

In their book Joyful Militancy: Building Resistance in Toxic Times, Nick Montgomery and carla bergman write that “under neoliberalism, friendship is a banal affair of private preferences: we hang out, we share hobbies, we make small talk… Empire works to usher its subjects into flimsy relationships where nothing is at stake. Under neoliberal friendship, we don’t have each other’s backs, and our lives aren’t tangled up together”. Montgomery and bergman’s assessments on friendship aren’t just sweeping generalisations. It is no secret that in the UK, we are in a loneliness epidemic. According to the Campaign to End Loneliness in 2022, 49.63 per cent of adults in the UK reported feeling lonely, with 7.1 per cent experiencing chronic loneliness. In 2024, the Centre for Social Justice found that 70 per cent of 18 to 24-year-olds suffer from loneliness. Social media is also making us even more disconnected from each other. We are in this situation for many reasons, but one of those reasons is the systematic devaluation of friendship by the state, which we then internalise.

Friendship has no real use in a capitalist society. It’s not productive, it is not a unit that one usually reproduces within, and it doesn’t amass capital. It just makes you happy, and for certain groups of people, particularly young Black boys who hang out together, that kind of relationship is seen as dangerous and is criminalised. As Sophie K Rosa writes in her book Radical Intimacy, “some forms of kinship threaten nation-building and capital by embracing ‘wrong’ values and social forms”. The demotion of friendships, as Rosa writes, “is naturalised in capitalist social relations”, because the ‘right’ type of social forms are seen as being romantic, sexual (within the context of marriage), and familial. The fact that friendship is ascribed less value than these other social forms signals, as Rosa assesses, “the beginning of the end” of these fragile bonds. We can see some of this in our relationships and other people’s, too – like our friends who become more reclusive once they are in romantic relationships and only want to hang out when their partners are busy. Or individuals who don’t want to take their friends to the airport, prioritising work above all else. Have you ever questioned why you’d take the day off for your partner’s birthday but not your friends? 

To some extent, this isn’t entirely our fault. We prioritise work because we are in a coercive relationship with it, as Helen Hester and Nick Srnicek write in their book After Work: A History of the Home and the Fight for Free Time. “We are coerced into work on pain of homelessness, starvation and destitution,” they write. In shows like Adults, New Girl and Friends, their jobs are unrealistically secondary to them or seamlessly work with their friendship groups. They rarely miss significant events with one another, with both Adults and New Girl having episodes where they all go to the hospital together to support their sick friends (and pay for each other’s hospital bills) without a second thought. While these depictions of friendship seem unrealistic, they can also inspire us to rethink what we are told is important: work and family. They remind us that our friends are equally important and potentially even more so.

It’s important to note that while TV shows about friendship can demonstrate the radical potential of these relationships, they are also realistic about how these relationships are seen as preludes before one enters “real life”, meaning marriage and kids. Rosa highlights this with the ending of Friends, where each character bids farewell to Monica’s apartment as they all (apart from Joey) have heteronormative happy endings: “Ross and Rachel got back together, Monica and Chandler got their babies, and Phoebe was married,” Rosa explains. New Girl has a similar ending, where Nick and Jess get married and decide to leave their infamous loft, following in Cece and Schmidt’s footsteps. Though Adults is only in its first season, it’s already challenging the narrative that you only need these deep and life-affirming relationships until you get married. In Adults, they use marriage not to isolate themselves but to continue their lives, which they have already started together.