The reasons I watched Doll & Em with increasing enthusiasm, joy and anticipation are many. It’s a funny show; the writing is tight and subtle; it’s set primarily in Los Angeles which is sunny, and I live in Scotland and can always do with a little vicarious warm weather; and there is a John Cusack cameo, but mainly I enjoyed it because it is an honest and recognisable depiction of friendship, and this is a rare thing in tv comedy.
Dolly Wells and Emily Mortimer, who wrote, produced and star in Doll & Em have been friends for over three decades, and the characters they’ve written are based on themselves – Emily is, indeed, an actor who has found success in Hollywood while Doll is the unknown quantity (yet also a talented actor, both in and out of character). The storyline that has been manufactured is that Doll, in need of an escape from London and her failed relationship, is hired by Emily to work as her assistant while she makes a film (‘the female Godfather’) in LA.
That the two women have a real-life longterm friendship which is mirrored, and made somewhat monstrous, in the show, is a cute gimmick, and one which probably sold the series. But, for me at least, the fact that a friendship between a couple of women in their forties is portrayed as important and vital is the truly unique aspect of Doll & Em.
So often, when television features friendship, it suggests it is a childish phase, something to be outgrown, probably in your twenties, and certainly by the time you make a family. Even in those sitcom where it is the raison d’etre, friendship tends to exist quite apart from nuclear or extended family. Parents, siblings, cousins, aunts may make cameo appearances, bobbing up as comic relief at a wedding, or highlighting the absurdity or vulnerability of a main character, but friends are presented as merely the first step towards displacing family ties. ‘You can’t choose your family, but you can choose your friends’. And then you can dump your friends when you get married and have kids, which is the next step.
Friends ended when Monica and Chandler had their babies and moved to a sensible, grown up suburb. How I Met Your Mother ended – well, OK, I’m a few episodes behind in this one, so haven’t seen the finale, but wasn’t the whole premise of the show that the friendship leads up to the main event, to a nuclear family? The women in Sex and the City were able to accommodate a couple of marriages and a baby or two, but not for long, and mainly as, again, a denouement. Will and Grace didn’t see each other for eighteen years after their babies were born – well doesn’t life get in the way?
No! It doesn’t, or it shouldn’t. Life is about embracing, and expanding all the relationships that spring up, it is about balancing them where necessary, and shaking them up together when possible.
It’s tempting to make this piece solely autobiographical. I could write about my mother’s friends, who formed my childhood, or my aunt’s best friend, who she has known for about sixty years. They have the same first name, so call each other ‘mate’, and they see each other at least once a week, still. I could write about my own friends – it takes a village to raise a child, and when you’re a single parent it takes a village of tequila shots and emergency babysitters, of unbiased child-rearing advice and welcome distractions. However, I don’t think my experience is unique; and I don’t think the friendship on Doll & Em is unique. Rather, it is this insistence of the separation of the church of the family with the state of friendship which is as artificial as any laugh track or faux documentary style.
Look what happens when friends make forays into family based sitcoms. Modern Family, which I love, is formed in a universe where siblings and in-laws fill the slots most of us keep for friendship. When a friend shows up, it is to highlight the previous, devil-may-care attitude of the pre-familied; friends are drunk and feckless, they are desperate and jealous, they cause havoc and their departure is cause for a deep sigh, and a welcome return to the reliability, and stability, of the slightly extended nuclear family.
Perhaps I am just sceptical about the permanence of the family unit. I can think of nothing more catastrophic than putting all your eggs in the basket of your marriage, only to find yourself alone and friendless when it fails. (I’m quite the hit at weddings, let me tell you. My cross stitch samplers are coveted.) Or perhaps I am just greedy. More is always better, so I do my best to hang onto old friends and make new ones, and I throw in cousins and nieces, a sister, a mother, aunts, uncles, and partners of any or all of these.
Doll & Em, reflects, more truly, this messy and co-dependent reality. Here is a friendship that has lasted through childhood and adolescence, through the tides of the twenties and the compromises of the thirties; it has survived marriage and children, it has survived fame, fortune and distance. True, the friendship falters when it is forced into the ill-fitting shoe of an employer/employee relationship; and Wells and Mortimer have spoken about their desire to explore the reality of jealousy between friends; that it is something honest, and common, and that it should be recognised rather than repressed.
Jealousy is quite a necessary by-product of long term friendship. Unless you have some form of witchcraft at your disposal and can ensure that you are always the more successful person in every one of your relationships, the only alternative to occasional bouts of jealousy is to systematically rid yourself of all but your most calamitous acquaintances. Or, of course, you could take the shortcut, and only form situational friendships. These are the friendships which come and go as convenience and circumstance dictates, which can end without blood, tears, and regrettable emails. I have lost touch with friends from university, with friends whose babies were born at the same time as mine, with mothers from the gates of the primary school, with former colleagues in past jobs, and I don’t feel guilt or loss, just a pleasant recollection of a specific time period.
In my experience, friendships forged in childhood, and clung to over disastrous decades have none of the boundaries and necessary compartmentalisation which tend to make the grown up friendships I have chosen so much less stormy, so much more sensible, so much more disposable. When I’m with my best friend, who I’ve known since we were three, we have over three decades worth of accusatory memories to hurl at one another if an argument needs won, but we are also able to communicate in single syllables, facial expressions, and fragments of made up language, so on balance I plan to keep her.
Doll & Em illuminates the mess and the shame and the sheer, indulgent necessity of long term friendship, even for grown-ups. The truth is, we need each other.
