By Caryn JamesFeatures correspondent

After endless hype, the sitcom stars are finally together again. It's event TV that is warm, breezy fun – but still only hints at the real personalities involved, writes Caryn James.

The stars from Friends are all in their 50s now, but in many ways these six actors will always be twenty-somethings, paradoxically relics from a time when the phrase twenty-something was new, yet endlessly ready for rediscovery by new generations. Friends: The Reunion brings them together again to look back at the show that became a pop-culture phenomenon, dominating television from 1994 to 2004, with an afterlife that continues even now.

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Recorded in April, this skilfully packaged reunion is designed to perpetuate that afterlife. (HBO Max, which commissioned the special, carries Friends and reportedly paid each cast member $2.5-$3 million (£1.7-£2.1 million) to show up for the reunion.) The special is not a new episode, but a look back from various angles. It is framed by segments with James Corden interviewing the cast outdoors in front of the iconic fountain from the opening credits. With his feel-good questions, including one about whether any of them ever hooked up during the series, he's just the right host for a celebratory show.

In other scenes, the cast talks together on the recreated set or wanders through Monica and Rachel's apartment with its purple wall, Chandler and Joey's place with its reclining chairs and foosball table, and Central Perk coffee house where they all gathered. Guest stars as different as David Beckham and Malala Yousafzai talk about what the series meant to them. They also take part in a table read of some of their best scenes, replaying some familiar moments. Phoebe catches Monica and Chandler having sex and screams, "My eyes!"

There is nothing especially new or spontaneous here, but the special captures the spirit of the show in all its warmth, energy and breeziness, with clips that remind us what amazing comic timing this cast had. Beneath that fuzzy surface, it also suggests why the series worked and has endured, and unintentionally reveals how it stereotyped the actors, ultimately constraining their future careers.  

In a taped segment, one of the Friends co-creators, David Crane, talks about casting and says, "We didn't want stars," but a true ensemble of equals. They chose actors who at best had had small roles on previous sitcoms. And from the first season, Friends brought them the kind of fame that can become a trap. Today Jennifer Aniston is the most famous among them, and in the Corden segment is the most practiced at telling an anecdote. She recalls a producer warning her against signing onto Friends: "That show is not going to make you a star". Of course, it made such stars of all of them that Courtney Cox, Lisa Kudrow, David Schwimmer, Matt LeBlanc, Matthew Perry, and even Aniston herself will always be Friends first in the public mind. There is a sitcom phenomenon in which actors play variations of themselves on shows like Roseanne and Seinfeld, but Friends did the reverse, taking unknown actors who then became attached, forever it seems, to their on-screen personalities.

The reunion special only hints, intriguingly, at how different their real personalities might be. Kudrow, far from the ditsy Phoebe, seems like the most level-headed among them. LeBlanc is not dim-witted Joey but the wittiest and most irreverent. Schwimmer does have some of the seriousness he brought to Ross's character, while Cox and Perry almost disappear into the background. The nature of fame means that we'll never know who these people really are, and the special doesn't try to go behind that curtain.

And no one reflects on how strange it is to start your career with a show so successful that there is probably nowhere to go but down. All of them are still working actors, but no one has had a dazzling post-Friends career. Aniston had made some middling comedies and is currently doing the series The Morning Show on Apple TV+, but she is most present in commercials for Aveeno moisturiser, which seem to be everywhere all the time. And of course, she remains the subject of tabloid frenzy. When the cast names some guest stars who appeared on Friends, Schwimmer says "Brad," and Aniston adds "Pitt," as if we didn't know.

Schwimmer has written and directed television. Kudrow has made edgy, ahead-of-their-time series, including the cult-favourite about lost fame, The Comeback (which started in 2005) and Web Therapy (which premiered in 2011), in which she played a therapist meeting patients online by way of the video-conferencing so common today. LeBlanc has had mainstream network series, including the short-lived spinoff Joey, and was a presenter on the BBC's car programme Top Gear. But it says a lot that his best post-Friends role relied on Friends: on the sharp comic series Episodes, he starred as a fictional Matt LeBlanc, an actor who played Joey on a hit comedy.

The reunion ignores all that as it veers between funny and sentimental. In two surprising moments – HBO considers them spoilers, so be prepared - Lady Gaga walks onto the Central Perk set and duets with Kudrow on Phoebe's famous song Smelly Cat. Then, during a fashion show of Friends costumes, Justin Bieber is dressed as a potato the way Ross was at a Halloween party. But there is much more of sappy comments like "We became best friends," (Cox) "We're a family," (Schwimmer), and "I love you" (a teary Aniston). That emotion is both the talking point and the essence of the show. As Crane says here, in a line he and his co-creators have used about Friends often over the years, "It's about that time in your life when your friends are your family." That may be the simple secret of the show's appeal and longevity, that these characters who come to love each other are ordinary people with their flaws on full display, ready-made to identify with.

Ross is a brainiac but terrible at relationships. Monica is a talented chef but a control freak. Rachel dithers her way through her life and career with no real purpose. Chandler, for all his sarcasm, is a bit of a cipher. They really could be anyone. The friends as family trope – a staple of earlier sitcoms like The Mary Tyler Moore Show and subsequent ones like The Office – creates a hyperreal situation that was and still is easy to escape into. That helps explain the series' global reach, into more than 100 countries. On the reunion special, members of the Korean pop group BTS say Friends helped them learn English. Ordinary fans from Ghana, India, Japan and Russia talk about how the show has inspired them or helped them get through dark times.

In its first run, Friends arrived alongside other NBC hits including Seinfeld and Will & Grace, during the last gasp of network television's dominance over cable, long before streaming and binge watching. Yet the show has been rediscovered again and again, first in televised reruns, then on Netflix from 2015-2020.

It became a timeless fantasy by not trying to be timely. The show was created at a vastly different and sometimes volatile period in society and politics, but largely ignored the changes going on outside its bubble, from the Clinton impeachment and the 9/11 terror attacks to the birth of Google search and the rise of the internet and mobile phones.

Marta Kauffman, one of the series creators, explains on the reunion special why new episodes catching up with the characters would be a terrible idea. "If the show is about that time in your life when your friends are your family, once you have a family of your own it's no longer that time." Kudrow sanely says that being a ditsy Phoebe at her age would just be sad. Maybe so. But as the existence of this reunion suggests, the popularity of Friends persists, and where there's money, there's always the possibility of a television afterlife.

Friends: the Reunion is available now on HBO Max in the US and Now TV in the UK.

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