How I started to watch Friends

Most of the time when you watch a show, there's some kind of special way you got to watching it in the first place. I have almost never met someone who has been watching a show from the first episode on and has been a fan ever since. Instead there are funny little stories how you started watching a certain show. In this little series of blogs titled "How is started to watch..." I want to tell you my stories in a random order.

This week I'm going to tell you how I started to watch Friends and how this show has affected my life and my future profession.


It's the dark year of 1999 and a 9-year-old girl is watching a show called "Sabrina, the Teenage Witch". It's her favourite show and pretty much the only one she watches. It airs at 6.30 pm and sometimes she starts watching a little earlier: And what's that? Six people drinking coffee all the time, talking really fast and some of them even kiss. How scandalous!
Two years later I'm (You get that I'm the little girl, right? ;))standing in a DVD store and thinking about which DVD I could buy, you know, just for fun. The selection isn't very big, because - let's face it - it's 2001 and so I inevitable buy Friends - The Complete Season 1. I start watching (in German) and it's really funny, although a little bit 90's. So I get the second season. And the third one.

After that I started watching the show in English and that was one of the key moments in my TV life. The original version is sooooo much better than in any synchronised version. Some puns and jokes just can't be translated in German; the cultural background is very different and it just doesn't fit.
It's actually a pretty funny story why I started to watch them in English in the first place: I was and still am a huge Lord of the Rings fan and when I first got the Extended DVDs of "The Fellowship" Christmas 2001 I had one huge problem: A very big part of the extras wasn't subtitled - neither in German nor in English. But I really, really needed to understand what they were saying. So I rewatched and rewatched the interviews until I understood every single word. And then I thought: Maybe I'll try those DVDs I own in English, maybe I'll understand that, too.

Over the course of the next three years I bought seasons 4-9, got completely hooked and have seen most of the seasons at least 7 times. I was almost never able to catch any episodes on TV (not that I wanted to because again: The German version is horrible) except for the last 10 episodes. And I was crying in front of the TV when the last one aired.
It's mainly because of this show I started to get interested in the English language (and in sitcoms or good drama shows), got better grades in school in English and decided to major in English. And of course it's my all-time favourite comedy-show and I really love those characters. So this show will always have a special place in my heart and on my DVD shelf.

Current Mood: Nostalgic