Friends From College - General Discussion

[PepSinger]

On 1/14/2019 at 1:19 PM, sweetcookieface said:

I feel like a horrible person for saying this, but I can barely look at Nick with those teeth. I think slightly crooked teeth can be cute and give someone character, but his are pretty extreme.

Don't feel horrible. They are very distracting. Every time he speaks I'm looking at his teeth. Yikes.

I loved season two as well. Why is each season only 8 episodes??

[eXiled]

Why didn't Sam just text/call Nick or Marianne when she was stuck in the bathroom?

[shoregirl]

I think she was trying but she dropped the phone and it slid out of the closet and someone walking by kicked away from the area. 

[dubbel zout]

12 hours ago, Kel Varnsen said:

Nick's teeth are weird, especially with the more we learn about how he is not just rich but super socially elite rich. Still not sure I buy him going to Harvard. Then again I am not sure I buy Max and Ethan there either since neither of the 3 of them seem at all smart.

As with all elite schools, the hardest thing about Harvard is getting into Harvard. It's not all about brains, though of course that helps. Nick is likely a legacy, and a rich legacy at that.

[Kel Varnsen]

7 hours ago, dubbel zout said:

As with all elite schools, the hardest thing about Harvard is getting into Harvard. It's not all about brains, though of course that helps. Nick is likely a legacy, and a rich legacy at that.

How much of that is real though and how much of that is a tv thing though? I can see it being a thing in previous generations, but with things being so much more competitive, even during the time Nick went to school is a fancy Ivy league school going to pass up on someone smart for a rich dummy like Nick?

Plus the whole trope of the rich legacy getting into Harvard seems to conflict with the one where the only people who go to Harvard are super smart high school students who are crazy focused. I am curious since where I went to University admission was pretty much all based marks.

[dubbel zout]

Schools like Harvard set aside spots for various groups of students: geographical diversity, athletes, public and prep schools, legacies, students the school thinks will enhance its reputation (e.g., celebrity of any sort). Any school that says otherwise is lying.

[Irlandesa]

On 1/19/2019 at 6:33 PM, Readalot said:

Am I the only one that thinks Sam looks older than the rest of them? More than 3 years from Lisa.  - I want Sam’s personal shopper 

The actors' ages are Keegan-Michael Key (Ethan--47 years old).  Jae Suh Park (Marianne) is apparently 44.  Nat Faxton (Nick) and Annie Parisse (Sam) are both 43.  Fred Savage (Max) is 42.  So they're all in the right age range except Cobie is much younger and Keegan is older.

7 hours ago, Kel Varnsen said:

How much of that is real though and how much of that is a tv thing though? I can see it being a thing in previous generations, but with things being so much more competitive, even during the time Nick went to school is a fancy Ivy league school going to pass up on someone smart for a rich dummy like Nick?

Oh yeah, especially if they're donors. In addition, book smart people can be so dumb sometimes.

[DrSpaceman73]

The funeral was the highlight of the season for me. 

ALL these people are so incredibly flawed, even the ones that are "outside" the group. 

Calling EVERYONE in your wife's phone contacts with that message?  Even clients and business associates?  So petty.  Dating you kids teacher?  That's some Don Draper level scumminess there.  And after it all you want to get back together?  Get lost, creep.  She is better off by herself.   

Even Max's fiancé, you don't go behind his back and try to make a business deal like that on his behalf.  You ARE NOT Ray Donovan. 

Boy Horse.  And Max trying to write, very funny.  Very stupid of him to quit his job and do it too.  Maybe try to write first in your spare time, see how it goes? 

[Kel Varnsen]

23 hours ago, DrSpaceman73 said:

The funeral was the highlight of the season for me. 

Boy Horse.  And Max trying to write, very funny.  Very stupid of him to quit his job and do it too.  Maybe try to write first in your spare time, see how it goes? 

The funeral was good but I thought the bachelor party was the best one. As for the wedding I am surprised by how it was kind of a non event compared to other big gatherings. At least the ceremony was, we didn't even get to see Maryanne's officiating.

Agreed about Max and the book. Not sure why he had to quit his job.

[dubbel zout]

2 hours ago, Kel Varnsen said:

Agreed about Max and the book. Not sure why he had to quit his job.

I think he thought he couldn't do both at the same time, which is really dumb coming from a LITERARY AGENT. 

[AllyB]

On 1/21/2019 at 7:26 AM, Irlandesa said:

The actors' ages are Keegan-Michael Key (Ethan--47 years old).  Jae Suh Park (Marianne) is apparently 44.  Nat Faxton (Nick) and Annie Parisse (Sam) are both 43.  Fred Savage (Max) is 42.  So they're all in the right age range except Cobie is much younger and Keegan is older.

I don't quite get the problem people are having with the casts' ages. 4 of the actors playing the friends from college are more or less the same age. And I think you can have a difference of a year or two between people in the same year at college, especially if people took a year off before starting college or were the oldest/youngest/skipped a year in their school class. Keegan is a few years older but can pass for early 40s. Smulders is the only one who is very obviously a different age to the rest of the group and she is meant to be younger than the others. When Fred quit his job the older agent said he was 40. Assuming he's the youngest of the group the others are meant to be 41-42 (which is totally believable) except for Lisa who is supposed to be maybe about 37. Greg Germain's age is about right too, as Sam married a man a lot older than her.

The writing plot really annoyed me. I know it was sold as Ethan walking all over Max, as was their college pattern. But if anything it was the opposite, with Max allowing his possible resentments about how Ethan may have treated him in college to create a huge problem from a normal part of the agent/author dynamic. Max is a successful literary agent, he has to know just how very, very, very common it is to get a great idea for a book and how very, very, very hard it is to both do the work of turning that idea into a real 100,000 words. And how much rarer still it is for those 100,000 words to be put together in a way that is pleasing to read. Max pushed Ethan to write commercially because they would both profit from it. He helped him come up with the ideas, not because Ethan was using him and taking him for granted but because it would be a massive boost to his own career. And no matter how helpful those ideas were, they were just a tiny, tiny fraction of the work that Ethan had to do to turn those ideas into an actual book. I don't think any agent would have wanted any more credit than a paragraph in the acknowledgments thanking him for his help making the book possible. (And his share of the profits depending on how his firm awards them to the agent.) No way would he expect his name on the cover, nor would he want it there as it could damage the 'brand' of Ethan. In fact, even if he writes the entire second part, he'd almost certainly be an uncredited ghost writer still writing under Ethan's name. (As people I genuinely like Max and can't stand Ethan but Max was 100% in the wrong here.)

Edited January 27, 2019 by AllyB

[DrSpaceman73]

Oh I agree about Max thinking he can write just because he can pitch ideas for a book and turning out to be so very wrong about it.  That would be like someone thinking they can come up with great movie ideas, so obviously they can write a script.  Should be obvious, especially for someone in the industry, those are two very different things

  That whole thing annoyed me with Max.  I think it was funny that Ethan pretty much said, "Ok, you try to write it then, I don't care".  And then it all imploded on him, pretty much as he deserved since he was trying to claim far more credit than he deserved. 

[STOPSHOUTING]

On 1/27/2019 at 6:59 AM, AllyB said:

I don't quite get the problem people are having with the casts' ages. 4 of the actors playing the friends from college are more or less the same age. And I think you can have a difference of a year or two between people in the same year at college, especially if people took a year off before starting college or were the oldest/youngest/skipped a year in their school class. Keegan is a few years older but can pass for early 40s. Smulders is the only one who is very obviously a different age to the rest of the group and she is meant to be younger than the others. When Fred quit his job the older agent said he was 40. Assuming he's the youngest of the group the others are meant to be 41-42 (which is totally believable) except for Lisa who is supposed to be maybe about 37. Greg Germain's age is about right too, as Sam married a man a lot older than her.

Except they're all supposed to be the same age/graduating class, except for Smulders, who is supposed to be two years younger (freshman when they rest were juniors). 

[AllyB]

2 hours ago, STOPSHOUTING said:

Except they're all supposed to be the same age/graduating class, except for Smulders, who is supposed to be two years younger (freshman when they rest were juniors). 

Yes I know all of that, and as I outlined in the quoted post, people in the same graduating class can vary by several years in age for numerous reasons. There is no reason that Max couldn't have started college at 17 while Marianne, Nick and Sam were 18 and Ethan 19. And Lisa isn't meant to be two years younger, she just started college 2 years after. She could easily be 4-5 years younger than the oldest of the others.

[NeenerNeener]

I see I have a comment on page one about how much I hate this show . I must have stopped watching right after that comment, because I'd completely forgotten this show existed and that I'd ever watched any of it until somebody liked my old comment today. I really remember nothing about it at all and I usually have an frighteningly good memory for trivia. This show must be realllllly bad.

[Sader87]

Just started watching, I thought both seasons were pretty funny....don't get all the hate for S1.

Tremendous soundtrack for both seasons....the characters are a little younger than myself, but having gone to college in Massachusetts in the late 1980s and being close still with a fair amount of friends from school then, the show resonates.

[juno]

Netflix continues the carnage and has just cancelled FFC.

https://deadline.com/2019/02/friends-from-college-canceled-netfllix-nicholas-stoller-keegan-michael-ley-cobie-smulders-francesca-delbanco-1202559898/

[Irlandesa]

So typical, it was greenlit for a second season when it probably shouldn't have been--and cancelled after it showed improvement. 

[Sader87]

Too bad....although it was kind of hard to see where else this group could go without repeating story-lines (and I know, you could say this for a vast majority of shows)

[Garden Wafers]

I ignored this show based on the terrible season 1 reviews, but ended up watching the second season because I saw a clip of Fred Savage doing body rolls. Overall, I thought it was fine. I can definitely see why the series got such a critical drubbing, but it wasn't nearly as terrible as reviews made it out to be. The fact that I saw season 2 before season 1 might've made a difference too. I thought Max was by far the most likable character (followed by Marianne) and the one who best captured the series' premise (i.e. adults reverting to immature behavior when surrounded by friends from an earlier period in life). Otherwise, I never really get the sense that the other people in the friend group would've acted any differently if they hadn't been surrounded by their old Harvard mates.

[MajorNelson]

On 8/22/2017 at 8:42 PM, Kel Varnsen said:

That is sort of where I am at. Some of the characters are super annoying but there were some (really) funny moments. 

And the characters are loathsome, and unrealistic and....

I never saw much reason for attraction between Ethan and Lisa, and little for Ethan and Sam.  

The ending could have had so many potential endings, and the writing was choppy, with Nick's proposal to raise Lisa and Ethan's baby dropped quick.

Was the fact that the original spouses were back together supposed to be a "big statement"? Perhaps, that this group of self-absorbed children are finally growing up and the old values were "right"?  

[GoldaVining]

I watched both seasons in two days while doing all of my christmas baking. Somehow I had never heard anything about this series, nothing in the press or on Twitter, and so I had no expectations or spoilers going in. I had resisted watching it previously because I dislike some of the cast members. Anything I decide to watch is based on cast, almost never about theme or plot. That said, I really hated that the whole plot of the show seemed to be based around affairs. That was the worst part for me, it was gross. Are grown up people with careers and children this driven by sex? Aren't people tired? Don't they find they barely have time for their own spouses and children, let alone other people's spouses and children?

For me, the most surprising and best part of this series was the Max/Felix relationship. I knew that Fred Savage had been a very famous child actor but I had never watched his show and I thought I was not interested in watching Fred Savage do anything. Also, I had zero knowledge of or interest in Billy Eichner and could not have picked him out of a line up. However, Max and Felix turned out to be my favourite part of the show and honestly, the only characters I enjoyed. I thought Fred and Billy were fantastic in their roles as Max and Felix and I would love to watch a show just about them.

 

Edited January 2, 2020 by GoldaVining
clarity

[ElectricBoogaloo]

According to this announcement, PBS will be airing Present Laughter (2017) with Kevin Kline, Burton, Kristine Nielsen, and Cobie Smulders on 7/31.