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June 25, 2025, 1:06pm
The “friends in the city” yarn has a long lineage, spanning every time-bound medium I can think of. Its classic structure follows three to five pals out of a fiercely bonded adolescence into floppier, fractured adult life.
Between the covers, tonal mileage can vary. But Hanya Yanagihara’s A Little Life, Meg Wolitzer’s The Interestings, Mary McCarthy’s The Group, Claire Messud’s The Emperor’s Children, and Angela Flournoy’s forthcoming The Wilderness have crucial DNA in common.
In most of these books, we find polyphony. Chapters pivot perspective as we watch certain friends rise to the challenges of adulthood while others flounder. (Some more than others. Poor Jude.)
Sometimes the friends in the city structure abets a marriage plot, where friends become lovers. Other times, we see the reverse. Former lovers rearrange to form bold new family structures. Take Torrey Peters’ Detransition, Baby.
Typically, complacency is a theme. And The City Itself! is a character. The City Itself! being a place with plenty of insufferable hometown pride. Most often per my research, this place is New York, London, Dublin, San Francisco, or Los Angeles.
In a friends in the city yarn, onscreen or in print, a loose frame can abet episodic story-telling. Those friends have distinct psychological profiles to represent. They have games to play, and lessons to repeatedly avoid. Sometimes, the action is tightly focused on one perfect season of life. Typically? Adolescence.
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My favorite sub-genre of this sub-genre finds a fresh descendant in a new sitcom, previously praised in our Friday “Nice Things” column: FX’s Adults. Following a set of recent college grads sharing a house in suburban Queens, this latest entry into the genre puts a Gen Z spin on the formula. (She said, hitching up her reading glasses.) We meet these friends at the end of an arrested development. Presumably, the series can conclude when our nominal adults finally do get grown.
I cosign my colleague McKayla Coyle’s endorsement of this show. It’s witty, drinkable froth, and its timing feels divine for those of us still inclined to mourn the active desecration of the Sex and the City franchise. But I love it it especially because, judging by its first half-season, Adults has all the ingredients I seek for scratching this particular narrative itch.
There’s a motley crew doing hijinks. Romantic tension between two “just friends.” And contrived occasions to hash out opposing worldviews, usually over brunch.
Adults is also gleefully un-sentimental, in the Seinfeld way. Its striving-but-hapless subjects are not exactly fools, but they do get to hoist themselves aplenty on their own petards. And then ease the blade out slow, because that’s what friends do.
But all jollies aside, when binging Adults I couldn’t help but clock familiar stations of this narrative cross. On tv in particular, friends in the city yarns are obliged to hit certain tableaux. I dare you to find a friends in the city yarn lacking, for instance, a scene where the friends chat through an exercise class. Or a scene that takes place in a bathroom, as one friend navigates a toilet crisis.
If you want to keep that Bingo card raised, there is also, always, a dumb hottie that one friend is counseling the other against. And there’s always a Maverick fifth wheel, designed to make the regulars look cool. A Phoebe Buffay, for your troubles.
I don’t mind a formula. In fiction or onscreen. But this one is pretty relentless. If those friends and that city are so predictable, I wondered—why do I need so many versions?
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I sit down to defend my addiction. Why is this narrative container so attractive? Strong senses of place and character, check. Wonder year nostalgia, that’s also in the mix. Better angels would say my love for this form is political. For I’d like to believe that friendship is society’s best bet for a structuring force.
On the other hand, the urge to return and return to a certain recognizable life experience—like adolescence—is probably not a coincidence. Lately I sense myself to be in the last chapters of one sort of friends in the city yarn. Where Broad City and its cool older sister, Difficult People, used to feel like funny mirrors, now they resemble rear views. Mostly because my specific friends keep moving to Los Angeles and having adorable kids.
To put it in literary terms? I’m halfway through The Interestings, and well on my way to Lisa Ko’s Memory Piece. But I begin to worry about these future (prophetic?) depictions. If I will become the friend at brunch who has gotten “it’ together, or the too-long-at-the-fair type, determined to burn rent forever in this wicked little town, fueling the narrative engine for failing to change.
Of course, the best fictions run the gamut from complacency to catastrophe. Ask any human made of blood, not ink, and you’ll see a lot of space between accepting some soul-crushing heteronormative corporate “adult” fate and crashing out like a Roman candle in the Village flophouse of your teenage daydreams.
Maybe that’s why I keep coming back to the structure, at the end of the day. Art can show you how to live, and I’m still looking for the perfect template. The most particular way to be an adult, in this city, with these friends.
When you feel yourself edging towards an archetype? There’s no better time to binge. I’ll leave you with some friends in the city screen and page recommendations, if you’re swimming in the same waters.
If you love The Bold Type, consider Rona Jaffe’s The Best of Everything. (For love of publishing, and work wives.)
If you love Broad City, consider Armistead Maupin’s Tales of the City. (For love of kooky capers in the urban jungle.)
If you love Seinfeld, consider Tony Tulathimutte’s Private Citizens. (For love of distressing people doing distressing things.)
If you love Insecure, consider Torrey Peters’ Detransition, Baby. (For love of chaotic attachment styles.)
If you love St. Elmo’s Fire, consider Claire Messud’s The Emperor’s Children. (For accurate depictions of envy.)
If you love Girls, consider Gary Indiana’s Do Everything in the Dark. (For all of the above.)
And for a more thorough unpacking of related sub-categories re: literary friendship, check out this old chestnut.
Image via NYPL
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