Which is why Friends Thanksgiving episodes are also what I first think of when I think about Thanksgiving television. Friends did many more of them than most other long-running shows, which tend to eschew Thanksgiving for the more dramatic Halloween and/or Christmas holiday episode. Thanksgiving also became the excuse for some of the show’s funniest set-pieces, its flashbacks, its guest stars, and its outright silliness. Some of the better moments:

Ugly naked guy:

Of the several Thanksgiving episodes, the first one is really not my favorite. I’ve got nothing against the “we got locked out of the apartment” plotline (that’s standard, and Friends uses it at least a few more times), and there’s certainly no use trying to fight the “we all want to be somewhere else, but circumstances conspire against us and we end up together on Thanksgiving” premise – that’s just a classic. No, the biggest problem with “The One Where Underdog Gets Away” is that everyone spends most of the episode in individual plotlines, and Ross’ is really stupid (he discovers that Carol’s been talking to the baby in the womb, and he gets jealous). In the end, though, they all gather around the window to watch ugly naked guy celebrate Thanksgiving.

Brad Pitt:

This is the first episode of television I remember watching and thinking as much or more about the actors than I thought about the actual show. Brad and Jen were married, and the entire episode is built around the hilarity of Brad Pitt’s character absolutely despising Rachel in high school. And sure, he’s rocking a pretty unbeatable clean-cut preppy Brad Pitt look in this episode, so Phoebe gets to be the audience stand-in and just drools over him the entire episode.

Phoebe thinks Brad Pitt is hot

Phoebe remembers a past life:

This is a ten-second joke from “The One With All the Thanksgivings,” which is a Friends flashback episode detailing the events that lead up to Monica getting skinny and accidentally cutting off Chandler’s toe. Briefly, though, while the other cast members recall their worst Thanksgivings from the past, Phoebe remembers a Thanksgiving from one of her previous lives, which features her bandaging a soldier in the Civil War.

And my favorite, the trifle:

“The One Where Ross Gets High” will always rate as my favorite Friends Thanksgiving. The stakes are not that high, and there’s no plot that really pulls any of the cast members away (in fact, one of the plotlines is that Ross and Joey desperately want to get away, and aren’t allowed). In the end, the biggest laugh lines are about something so stupid that the show almost shifts out of its usual “waaa waaa” trumpet humor and into a full-on farce. Monica’s parents don’t really like Chandler, and Ross used to lie, but none of it matters because Rachel makes an English trifle with the pages in her cookbook stuck together (lady fingers, jam, custard, lady fingers, beef cooked with peas and onions, whipped cream, and bananas). The entire episode culminates in seven people sitting around a table trying to pretend they like a disgusting dessert. It’s absurd.

The Thanksgiving episodes of Friends are hardly bottle episodes – there’s always a guest star or multiple flashbacks or something else that will ring up the episode’s cost – but nevertheless, there’s something similar about them. The Thanksgiving premise means all of the cast members spend most of the episode together in Monica’s apartment, which minimizes the potential for a stupid Joey-related side plot, and lets everyone play off of each other. And look, this was not a high-brow show. At its best, Friends managed to seem like a much sillier, stupider, higher-pitched version of recognizable scenarios from everyday gatherings (provided your everyday scenarios didn’t involve black people, gay people, or actual tragedy), and Thanksgiving reliably delivered Friends’ best version of itself.

The couple: Ross Geller and Emily Waltham. After Ross’s disastrous marriage to his ex-wife Susan (now out of the closet), he hopes to move forward with his life by marrying Emily.

Ross and Emily and their eerie, crypt-like ceremony site

The premise: Doomed wedding combined with classic sitcom vacation episode. Rachel suddenly realizes she can’t let Ross marry another woman, and their friends have hilarious clichéd adventures in Jolly Old England. Monica and Chandler sleep together for the first time.

The inevitable sequence of mishaps: The wedding ceremony location gets torn down, squabbles ensue and Emily wants to cancel the wedding. After some discussion, Emily agrees to hold the wedding in the partially destroyed building anyway, which makes the whole thing look like a funeral service held during the Blitz, but to each her own. Emily’s parents try to get Ross’s parents to pay for home renovations by calling them wedding expenses, and Ross has to broker a contract between them. Meanwhile! Rachel realizes that she loves Ross and hops on a plane to try to catch him before the wedding begins. She arrives in time, but decides to let the wedding go forward without saying anything. Everything looks like it’ll work out until they get to the vows, where instead of Emily’s name, Ross says “I, Ross, take thee Rachel.” The minister asks whether he should continue, and – cliffhanger!

The clichés: We actually get double the clichés thanks to the potent wedding/vacation special combo. Sequence of wedding vendor catastrophes (changed menu, missing cellist), acceptance of alternate wedding plan, fighting amongst the in-laws, groomsmen hooks up with bridesmaid, things go awry at the last possible moment. Absurd tourism, homesickness, wacky guest stars, mockery of foreign customs, vacation hook-up.

The special guests: Richard Branson as a street vendor! Hugh Laurie as the annoyed guy on Rachel’s flight! Plus, a completely awesome Jennifer Saunders as Emily’s mother.

The first dance song: Alas, it never got that far.

The bridesmaid dresses: Things could be much worse.

And in the end….: Obviously, this marriage was not to be. Although Ross and Emily are technically married at the end, the marriage is swiftly annulled and Ross’s divorce count rises.

The verdict: While the wedding itself may not have ended well, this episode is probably most important for being the inciting force behind Chandler and Monica’s relationship, which later leads to one of the other major Friends weddings. Even if you didn’t know that Ross and Emily’s marriage would be doomed, the basic set-up of this episode (another typical two-parter) should have been enough to tip you off. The focus is clearly not on the wedding or the couple – stitching the wedding episode together with a vacation episode is already enough of a distraction from what should have been the main event. By the time you see Chandler and Monica sleep together, it’s clear that this wedding is going to be a sideshow for other relationships (Ross and Rachel, Chandler and Monica) rather than an end in itself.

The first is an op-ed by Porochista Khakpour that came out a few days ago in The New York Times. Written while working on her second novel at Yaddo, the writer’s colony in Saratoga Springs, NY, Khakpour describes obsessively watching the show Thirtysomething rather than working on her book. She writes first about watching it as a child and holding it up as a symbol of American adulthood, something she actively strove for in her own life as a child of immigrants. Now, watching it again as a thirty-one year old, Khakpour feels a “stew” of mixed emotions: “it is true, it is real, it is me, it is not me, it is horrible, and I love it.” Despite the show’s obvious distance from the world she sees around her, Khakpour sees Thirtysomething’s “devotion to the naturalism of everyday details and all the microcosms of absolute, roller-coaster intimacy” as “the real reality TV, every bit as boring and dazzling as the real ‘real life.’”

The other piece I found particularly engrossing was a blog post by Josh Friedman, the showrunner of the now-defunct show The Sarah Conner Chronicles. Friedman’s piece was written as a part of io9.com’s weeklong “TV that ate my brain” coverage (for which they made an awesome banner), and he writes about the role television has had in his experiences with therapy. Not only has television created unreasonable expectations for the therapeutic process, (“I want each session to be a closed-ended episode of CSI, and in truth it’s closer to a badly written soap opera that’s been stripped of the sex and the betrayals and the evil twins and replaced with a meandering, repetitive monologue”), the television Friedman writes plays an important role for his therapist. “When she watches Sarah Conner she doesn’t seen robots and Skynet and John Connor, she sees cancer dreams and death fetishes and the psychological damage done by the absent and perfect father.”

Khakpour and Friedman are essentially enacting the same process while watching and creating television. For Khakpour, something made for mass audiences and viewed by millions of people becomes a personal object, relevant to her life in specific ways and available for study and interpretation. For Friedman, the process is much more fully integrated in his life – like Khakpour, he uses television as a tool to interpret himself, but those personal revelations are re-embedded into television and produced for mass consumption. Television shows are simultaneously accessible for an audience of millions and for an incredibly personal audience of one. Of course literature can do that same thing, and has been doing it for centuries. But the idea that television can play the same role in shaping our identities and perspective of the world is something we haven’t thought about as much.

For me, I wish I could say the show most closely equivalent in my own life to Khakpour’s Thirtysomething was Sex in the City, but I really didn’t watch it until college, when my perception of adulthood was much clearer. Alas, the show that signified adulthood and forbidden topics of discussion was that other show about young Manhattanites searching for love and success. Yes, when I was twelve, I thought life as an adult meant a life like the one on Friends. I vividly remember my babysitter debating with herself about whether it would be okay to watch it in front of me, and then hurriedly changing the channel when Ross and Rachel had sex on the floor of an exhibit in the Museum of Natural History. I remember her looking at me guiltily, as if she’d exposed me to something I was not yet ready to see. It never became something I went out of my way to watch, or anxiously looked forward to (unlike Babylon 5, to which I was passionately devoted), but whenever I happened across a rerun, I would store away ideas and vocabulary for future consumption. Rent control. Lesbian life partner. Spray-on tanning. Coffee shops. Blind dates. Being “on a break.”

Watching Friends now, it is hopelessly absurd and unreal. For one thing, apparently everyone in Manhattan is white (until Joey dates Charlie near the end, but that’s about it). The stupid jokes that come at carefully spaced intervals, the characters that quickly become caricatures, the absence of any problem that lasts more than 22 minutes – the entire sitcom format is antithetical to realism. But I remember watching it and thinking “one day I’ll live in an apartment!” So I sit now in my apartment and am glad to find people writing about television as a personal medium. It always has been for me.