Best Friends Forever, ep. 1: "Pilot"
Best Friends Forever is a CBS show about two best friends Jessica (character on the right in the above image) and Lennon (left). Jessica's whirlwind marriage has just ended in divorce, and she moves back in with her best friend and former college roommate Lennon. Their lives are complicated by the new presence of Lennon's steady boyfriend Joe who now lives in their house.
I found a review recommending the show on AfterEllen, so I decided to give it a shot and watched the first episode.
What I Liked
The theme that you can have more than one important person in your life, and that isn't a betrayal for any party. One conversation brought up in the documentary (A)sexual is David Jay's previous relationship with a couple that he is very close to. I think in society there is a tendency to idealise romantic relationships over friendships and rank romance with sex as being somehow superior and more intimate than romance without sex. Many asexuals I know (oddly enough, we just all sort of became friends and then came out as asexual. I guess birds of a feather flocking together can be true in some cases), express frustrations that people can't separate the idea of sex and love, and people think you can't love your partner if you don't want to sleep with them.
I really like that everyone in the show acknowledges that Jess and Lennon are inseparable, and there is nothing wrong with that. As one person says, 'You've been obsessed with each other since freshman year when you both realised you had Hugh Grant's haircut from Four Weddings and a Funeral.' I can really identify with this. My roommate (I will just call her Andrea) and I have lived together for four years, and I can absolutely see us living together after college if we are ever in the same vicinity again. (She's going for vet school, and I'm leaving for New England where they aren't fucking crazy. See my previous post about this.) There is also a wonderful Sherlock story about this where they have negotiate exactly what they are, because best friend is too casual but they aren't lovers, so maybe flatmate really is the best word they can conjure up. For me, it's family. Andrea's my family, the kind that I choose.
I really like that Jess can come back to live with Lennon and no one bats an eye or tells her that she has to move out because Lennon is in a 'real relationship' now. At no point is their relationship trivialised in contrast to Lennon's romantic relationship, and the first episode explores exactly how Jess and Joe come into conflict in their desire to be a part of Lennon's life. The episode ends (no real spoilers) with Jess and Joe accepting that they are both an important part of Lennon's life and the presence of one is not a threat to the other.
What I Disliked
I loved Lennon with Joe. They nerd out over Braveheart together, go to renaissance fairs, play pool and drink beer. I thought yes, this is the kind of amazing women I want to see more of on television. Andrea and I recently had a discussion over lunch about our problem with guys who seem to date women who are not interested in any of the same things they are. She talked frequently about guys on her sailing team who would date women who hated everything they did for a hobby, and most of the time the guys would complain about them. For example, they would make plans to go somewhere, and one of them would sigh and say that he had to go out to dinner with his girlfriend and some stupid thing that she likes, and the other dudes would express sympathy. In contrast, Andrea was interested in many of the same things they were, and they never even noticed her.
We wondered why this was and decided that perhaps it had something to do with the kind of guys they were. Maybe they liked being the know-it-all about certain subjects, and Andrea's presence meant that she could call them on their bullshit and perhaps know more than them. This is what happened to one of my ex-friends. I could call him on his bullshit: he stopped talking to me. He dated one of my close friends, and she broke up with him after a while because she was sick of him talking about shit he knew she didn't know about. But I'm getting off track.
I liked that they were so close as a couple and were so spectacularly nerdy about their hobbies. In contrast, I didn't like Lennon so much with Jess because it seemed that all they did was stereotypical things that people think women do: cook and watch chick flicks, which Joe oh so stereotypically complained about. I seriously counted, and while the show does pass the Bechdel test as many people have said, it does it by having the actresses cook or go shopping for food, rearrange furniture, discuss relationships, and watch Steel Magnolias. I am not implying that these things are somehow inferior to other topics, but it really does nothing to dispel notions that these things are the domain and main interests of women, and men are supposed to find these hobbies unappealing.
The show seemed to force their closeness whereas Lennon's relationship with Joe was a lot more natural. I hope this will change in later episodes, but I really wasn't feeling their relationship, which was supposed to have spanned 4+ years vs. Lennon and Joe's 11 months. I was also a little awkwarded out when Joe showed Lennon the video game character he had designed in her image, and it was an extremely standard female video game character (impossibly large breasts, unnatural body proportions, skimpy outfit), and she thanked him for giving her character larger breasts. I fully expected her to get angry at him for designing her in a way that was clearly not shaped the way she was and contributed to the unrealistic expectations of women propagated in the media.
On the subject of image, I really didn't like everyone in the episode telling Jess she needed to get back down to her 'fighting weight' to go back into the dating pool. Excuse me? I could go down alley #1 and say that the actress would look fine regardless of her weight gain or loss, I could go down alley #2 and say that the show trying to tell an average body type actress that she is fat is again promoting unrealistic expectations of how women think their bodies should look, but I think I'm going with alley #3 and saying that no one, absolutely no one has the right to pressure you to gain or lose weight, make you feel like you are unattractive because of your weight, or imply that you will not be loved if you do not change the way your body looks. I thought we were past this, and if the show thought it would get some cheap laughs out of me by bringing up the topic, they were sorely fucking mistaken. The only thing that amused me about this was the chipper tough-guy deli owner (really liked him) calling it 'fighting weight.'
I liked some aspects of the show and disliked others. I'm currently debating watching another episode to see if it gets better. Have you watched the tv show and what do you think of it?
You can watch the episode here on the official page