FRIENDS – “The One with Five Steaks and an Eggplant” (Season 2, Ep 5 / first aired Oct. 19, 1995) • aerial ardour

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FRIENDS – “The One with Five Steaks and an Eggplant” (Season 2, Ep 5 / first aired Oct. 19, 1995)

Whether you loved ‘Friends’ or hated it, check out my colorful caricatures of Chandler, Ross, Monica, Rachel, Phoebe, and Joey in our latest entry about Season 2’s “The One with Five Steaks and an Eggplant,” where we address the Friends’ capriciously depicted economic situations:

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art by Aireen Arellano (to view larger image, click here)

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Friends fans are legion and vocal, eager to belt the words to “Smelly Cat” or see if they can still name the Chandler Bing misnomer on his TV Guide subscription. But for every fan, it seems there’s someone in the vicinity just as vocal in their distaste for the sitcom, and their criticisms are many: that the show is just a parade of pretty people with problems, that it’s a paean to white middle-class heternormative homogeneity, that it’s the zenith of joke-punchline-laugh-track-gooey-sentiment hamminess. or that the characters’ lavish lifestyles are too incongruous with their purported incomes to reach any kind of authenticity. A chef and a waitress live in that Greenwich Village apartment with that wardrobe and those haircuts?!

The creative team behind Friends must have thought they were just making an entertaining show about people with charisma and chemistry, but throughout the show’s ten-year run, the six main characters became inadvertent talking points for the responsibilities the media has when it comes to stoking or abating the audience’s predilections for lifestyle wish-fulfillment. Since it’s an episode that throws focus on the characters’ jobs and incomes, “The One with Five Steaks and an Eggplant” seems poised to address the rampant criticisms regarding the show’s most improbable displays of socioeconomic delusions.

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