Memo to.... ah, FUCK the memo. No memos. No warnings. No quarter given.
Just when we're starting to let the LAST great American narcissistic grief-fest fade (at least until the Republican National Convention), we have to go through an entirely new set of histrionics, complete with weeping, wailing, ashes, sackcloth, self-flagellation, and black armbands with Jennifer Aniston's picture on them.
You may have heard that Friends is done after tonight. If you haven't, I would like to welcome you to the fabulous world of the future, and can only hope that scientists are able to determine the process by which you were held in stasis.
Fuck the Friends. Fuck Joey, fuck Rachel, fuck Phoebe, fuck Hawkeye, fuck... Sneezy, fuck the rest of 'em. Fuck any animals, children, or Tom Sellecks they may have added to the cast over the years to boost ratings. Fuck it all. It's going, and good riddance.
If Friends going off the air makes you sad, fuck you. You had ten years to get sick of it. If that wasn't enough time, tough. You can get in line with the stinky guys from HEAT, they've been wasting the last decade, too.
If you're planning on watching the Joey spinoff, have the common decency to take a vegetable peeler to your corneas instead. If that strikes you as a bit harsh, then at least lie on your Nielsen diary or unplug your people meter or something. It's taken us 22 years to eliminate the last vestiges of Cheers from the universe, and I'd still wanna check the sub-basement of the NBC studios in case Bebe Neuwirth laid any eggs in the boiler room.
Fuck the media, who fuel the whole thing with stories like "Cheers, Friends - Loose parallels exist between TV faves and area coffee lovers." In FLINT, MICHIGAN. The show's dying of natural causes. It's not like it rammed into a bridge support or something. Last week of Friends! Last month of Friends! They taped the last-ever Friends! You don't need to tell us some people cried once they finished filming. If they'd all flipped each other off and walked out without saying a word, that'd be worth telling us about. OF COURSE they cried. People cry at high school graduations, and that's only four years, and nobody'll buy it for strip syndication.
Fuck the syndicated reruns, fuck the DVD's. Especially the "Friends Party Pack". This is a "Best of Friends" DVD, some Friends trivia, some coffee, and some other shit that will guarantee you will have the second-worst party in the history of our species. * If youi've bought, and used, the Friends Party Pack, well, I simply cannot Google up an image of a building tall enough for you to jump off of. I'm sorry. Perhaps you could finagle your way onto the International Space Station and sort of... push off.
The only way a Friends Party Pack could even be remotely useful is if it contained Kool-Aid and strychnine. Or if it was some kind of Deluxe Party Pack that included a monkey JUST LIKE ROSS'S, only this one runs around and humps the futon and flings poop into the Central Perk Instant Coffee and finally knocks the 17" combo TV/VCR onto the DVD player, and the sparks light the box of wine on fire and it explodes and they find the charred corpses being violated by the monkey who miraculously survived due to the processing required to keep him fresh on Target's shelves.
I'm not trying to be some cultural elitist, some kind of snob. Friends was perfectly mediocre. Not "Love Boat" bad or something. It's just that it going away shouln't cause such a case of national schadenfr... THE THEME SONG. I forgot to say FUCK THE THEME SONG. Fuck the Rembrandts. If Rembrandt had drawn one thing in crayon, and it got used in the front of every book in Amsterdam until about 1650, then maybe you'd be justified in naming your band after him. But he didn't, so fuck you, too.
I'm off to the boiler room with a flashlight and a motion tracker. I swear I saw David Arquette cocooned to the wall.
* The worst party in the history of the species being, of course, the 'all the spoo you can eat' B5: Legend Of The Rangers premiere party.