Friends and Corporate Spaces of Fandom (Abby S. Waysdorf, Utrecht University)

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Friends and Corporate Spaces of Fandom

presentation by Abby S. Waysdorf, Utrecht University

One of today’s most popular television shows is now nearly 30 years old. Friends, a massive success for its 10 years on the air, has found an afterlife as an anchor of reruns and streaming services, keeping its old audience while attracting many who weren’t born when it first aired. Decades later, the brand of Friends is seemingly stronger than ever. Friends’ continuing popularity has lead to the creation of several spaces to capitalize on it. The first, FriendsFest, is a touring “festival” organized by cable channel Comedy Central UK that originated in London six years ago as a pop-up and has since spread across the country and into Spain, Poland, Germany, and Russia. The second, the Friends pop-up in New York City, ran for a month in the fall of 2019 as part of the twenty-fifth anniversary of the show’s first airing. Both places feature re-creations of sets, photo opportunities, and other activities, run by professional experience marketing companies under the supervision of Warner Bros. and/or Comedy Central UK. They are fan places, designed with fans in mind—but deliberately created ones, rather than places appropriated by fans or even used in filming. What kind of fandom is encouraged by such corporate places of fandom? As fandom is increasingly commoditized and made mainstream, how can place be used to shape fandom? These are the questions that I look at in this paper, through an exploration of the FriendsFest and the New York Friends pop-up marketing in US and UK sources. Through this exploration, I show how place becomes part of official fan management strategies in the age of the “experience economy,” and what implications this has on fandom and film tourism into the future.
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Poland
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