Central Perk memories

There is a coffee house in Beijing's Chaowai SOHO that looks as if it was teleported from the Friends set. In fact, China Daily has videos on its website showing the American sitcom fans scrambling to get there for a piece of action, dreaming of meeting their versions of Monica, Rachel, Phoebe, Joey, Ross and Chandler.

I wouldn't call it an exact replica. It has the Central Perk sign alright, but the dcor is at best a vague or approximate imitation.

To experience the real Central Perk, you'll have to travel to - no, not New York, but Burbank in Southern California.

Tucked inside rows of nondescript hangar-like soundstages is the drapery department of the Warner Brothers studio. The windows are blocked from the inside by thick curtains. But if you do look out from the inside, you'll see not the facade of a soundstage, but a typical New York building across the narrow street.

Ah, the magic of the dream factory!

The Central Perk set has been preserved intact, although the sitcom has since become television history, and is now on display purely for the tourists. According to my guide, the Smithsonian Museum wanted the couch for posterity, but was rejected. Isn't it strange they only have one couch in the 10 years Friends ran from 1994 to 2004? The couch in my sitting room didn't last that long, and I don't have six family members. I would have thought they'd have duplicates.

Anyway, during my tour of the Warner Brothers Studio, I spent a few minutes in the fake caf where the donuts never get stale although they never see the inside of a refrigerator.

By metropolitan Chinese standards, this caf cannot be called hip. It has a retro feel. Yes, there is an open notebook computer on one of the tables, but it's kind of bulky. And there is no flat-screen TV as in the Beijing's copy.

The way the couch is placed for the gang of six is definitely for the camera. It should face the other side if it's a real caf. The kind of stuff it sells probably won't fly off the shelf here in Beijing. I didn't see any 76-yuan Haagen-Dazs cone. Anyway, in the US you can get enough Haagen-Dazs for a party of six with that money.

You'll be surprised to know that the NBC executives, who wanted a diner instead, once considered the caf "too hip".

The shared apartment is truly too big for a typical twenty-something New Yorker who drifts from job to job. But too cramped a space is hard for the cameras to move around and so that's why people want to be in movies. Even a basement can look posh.

Everything used to be in Stage 24, now called The Friends Stage, where the long-running serial was shot nine out of its 10 seasons. Season One was made in Stage 5, and the opening sequence of the group frolicking around a fountain was done on the Warner Brothers Ranch.

Friends is only one of numerous hit shows in the US, but to a Chinese fan it is about the only American sitcom that has garnered a wide following. It was also not the first. That honor belonged to Growing Pains.

There are many local Friends imitations since, but none comes close. If Warner executives want to cultivate goodwill in China, perhaps they can bring the Friends sets to China and let China's youth get a vicarious taste of friendship, New York-style.

China Daily

(China Daily 08/15/2010 page16)