Yep. Same reason Happy days was a big tv hit in the 70s.
And not just nostalgia for those there at the time.
As a teenage girl in the 80s we had a fad for 50s style. Girls had posters of James Dean and Marilyn Monroe and there was a bunch of 60s songs re-released in the charts.
Back to the future was an 80s film set in the 50s.
Now we have Stranger Things and The Goldbergs on tv celebrating the 80s for those born at least a decade later.
Friends (90s) is hugely popular among those not even born when the show finished.
Even though that was only a couple of years ago, and fuck im old.
A few years ago, I discovered a French sitcom which appears to have the same
always-on-tv-in-reruns status as
Friends or
Frasier or
Everybody Loves Raymond. Short reason:
Where do I start? I'm British. This is a French sitcom. Where did I meet it? How do I even know about it? Scroll back. Seven floors up in a clifftop hotel in Folkestone, Kent, England, while a really Grand Guignol thunderstorm played out over the English Channel. Finding it impossible to sleep at midnight, I resorted to the TV set and discovered that when you're on the south coast of England (France is actually visible on a good clear day), then French TV - and to an extent Belgian - can be received loud and clear. Even in a lightning storm. This was an exotic revelation. If nothing else, I discovered French TV is, in the main, every bit as mediocre as British. And I tuned into the sort of TV station that must be the French version of Channel Dave, as it showed nothing but repeats of old sitcoms and cartoons on a sort of moebious loop. And this show came on. Now I can speak and comprehend French up to a certain level. Which is useful. And I arrived halfway through a show that instantly screamed "SITCOM!" at me: i honestly thought at first it was a French remake of
Friends as the same sort of vibe was happening - expensive looking apartment, big and spacious, inhabited by - I counted them - three men and three women of a thirtysomething aspect. Other characters came and went, but there were these six core people who were there all the time. I started tuning in. Nothing wildly original at all. Just
Up to Eleven sitcom stock characters running through the standard sort of plots. It wasn't hard to see why it hasn't been subbed/dubbed into English or sold for overseas remakes. A knock-off of "
Friends" with a side-salad of "
Three's A Crowd/ Three's Company". But there was still something indefinably charming/pleasant about it. also wondered if this was a case of TV Tropes having ruined my life -
oui, je parle francais, oui, je le comprends bien. But the sitcom formula was so strong here that I felt I could get the idea what was going on by just watching and ticking off tropes, even if I spoke no French at all.
Wikipédia francais says this show only ran for fifteen months - but they still made 170 episodes. That's three a week. Three. A week. So this explains the lack of originality or decent scripts or on occasion good acting. But damn. It grows on you. Even after returning
Oop North outside the reach of French TV I started looking it up on YouTube. It has its charm. And Cecile Auclert, who now joins the ranks of memorable French (well. French-Canadian) actresses, even though she is not in the same league as Huppert, Deneuve, Beart or Girardot (Now a young Annie Girardot in this sitcom - she'd have cracked it.) . Good for learning or improving French from!
So I wrote the TV Tropes pages for this show:
Series/LesFillesDaCote As you do.
And it's amazing how so many people, I have discovered, love this show simply because it encapsulates a particular sort of
French chic and style and period - the 1990's - that to people like me is pretty much yesterday and no big deal, but to people who were not alive then, it's iconic and totemic and a lost sort of Golden Age. And fuck, or perhaps
merde alors. It makes me feel old too.
