Friends was remarkably prescient when it came to Chandler Bing's job

The Atlantic

Thanks to Matthew Perry's character, Friends anticipated a time that would both romanticize and mistrust the culture of work, says Megan Garber. "Friends cared deeply, in its earnestly sardonic way, about the careers it had bequeathed to its protagonists," she says. "Its plots nourished and complicated and questioned the friends’ jobs with an intensity that would anticipate other NBC shows—among them 2005’s The Office and 2009’s Parks and Recreation—and that would embrace extremely 21st-century assumptions about professions that double as identities. This was one of the fantasies Friends was selling: The show created a world whose denizens were able to take advantage of their work, rather than the other way around. Except, that is, when it came to Chandler. Chandler, who is so indifferent about what he does that he is unable to pay his job even the small courtesy of hating it—Chandler, besuited and bedraggled, whose work in computer-something-or-other summons the amorphous anxieties of the coming digital age. (Maybe he is a transponster. Does it matter? Could he be less passionate about it?) It is through Chandler, in the end, that Reality Bites finds its way into Friends’ otherwise chipper cosmology. His work is simply there, looming, draining, tautological."