Cassie Sheridan |
Netflix is steadily bringing back classic series that allow us all to time warp back to our simpler days.
“Friends,” “Gilmore Girls” and many more old, heavily quoted favorites are being added (to our glee) but are also bringing up very revealing responses about how much TV and our attitudes have altered over the years.
I feel like once a day as I’m perusing my various internet destinations there’s another article about “Rewatching ‘Friends’ in 2015.” I absolutely agree it’s fascinating and essential to critique these “classic” shows and rewatch them with a critical eye:
“Why is the cast so white?” “How did they afford those apartments?” “Why was ‘The Rachel’ a cultural phenomenon?”
Bringing these classics back forces us to reevaluate them, and why we enjoyed them in the first place.
Yet there’s something all of these critiques are missing, and that is the element of revisiting our past selves while rewatching these shows. I was struck by this recently when I watched an episode of one of the original reality hits, “Laguna Beach.”
I obviously laughed at how superficial, shallow, fake and frankly ridiculous the entire show during the rewatch. However, it also served as an extraordinary way of evaluating how much I had personally grown.
(Full disclosure: Laguna Beach used to be my top guilty pleasure show, and for good reason - I grew up in a small Alaskan town. Nothing seemed more glamorous, chic and distant from my own experience than the idea of very attractive people living by the beach.)
Thank god my life experiences have taught me there are millions of things more glamorous, more chic and more awesome than superficial people talking about each other behind closed doors.
Through revisiting our favorite television or movies, many years later, we are able to be nostalgic and also get in touch with a former version of ourselves. Just like music we listened to in middle school, that quite literally takes you back to a moment, a TV series does the same. It forces you to explore your growth and evolution as a human being.
We must critique these shows, but we also must examine ourselves through them. Some series are timeless and others fleeting, meant to be enjoyed at a specific moment in our life. And we can’t reserve our analysis to critiquing “How Chandler Bing is actually really offensive.” We also must self-reflect on our growth as a result of observing these things now, many years later.
Next time you submerge yourself into a classic show from your past, don’t only do surface analysis and critiques. Expand introspectively and think critically about the person you’ve become.
