Note: This post is an Op-Ed and shares the author’s personal views.
Like a lot of people, I consider Friends one of my favorite TV shows of all time. When you grow up with a show, it’s highly likely it will always have a place in your heart, and that’s Friends for me.
I mean, I even had a Chandler Bing quote for myself in my senior high school yearbook.
Now, while Friends has stood the test of time for me as a comedy series that I think everyone should watch at least once, there are also a ton of other comedy shows from the ’90s and earlier that I missed and have been checking off my list.
And last year, I watched Living Single for the first time, and it completely changed my life because how was this perfect series not in my life before then?
Or maybe Living Single found me at the exact right moment: a then-28-year-old in need of a good laugh and a found family to cling to while trying to make sense of a sudden family tragedy. I think it found me just when I needed it the most.
Going into Living Single, I knew the absolute bare minimum about the show: Queen Latifah starred in it and many people say Friends is a “direct rip-off” of it.
Created by Yvette Denise Lee, Living Single ran for five seasons on Fox from 1993 to 1998. It follows six friends in their 20s living in Brooklyn as they try to figure out their personal and professional lives.
The series chronicled Khadijah (Latifah), Synclaire (Kim Coles), and Régine (Kim Fields), who live in the downstairs apartment in a brownstone vs. Kyle (T.C. Carson), and Overton (John Henton), who live upstairs.
Plus, there’s Khadijah’s college BFF Max (Erika Alexander), who lives in another building but practically lives at this one.
Sound familiar yet?
For even more context, Living Single premiered in August 1993, and Friends premiered on NBC in September 1994. Living Single would ultimately conclude its run after 118 episodes, while Friends lasted 236.
In the show’s five-season run, Living Single won three Image Awards in 1998 for Outstanding Comedy Series, Outstanding Actress in a Comedy Series for Alexander, and Outstanding Lead Actress in a Comedy Series for Coles.
Living Single was only ever nominated for two Emmys for Outstanding Lighting Direction.
Meanwhile, Friends was nominated for 67 Emmy Awards over the course of 10 seasons, and it won six, including Outstanding Comedy Series and awards for Lisa Kudrow and Jennifer Aniston.
So, in March 2024, I dove in. I pressed play on the first episode of Living Single and it was probably one of the best pilot episodes of TV I have ever watched. It was laugh-out-loud funny from the second it started. The characters were loveable and flawed. And as a single girl in her 20s, I was nodding my head at how relatable everything was.
If you’ve never seen Living Single, I really dare you to watch the pilot and try not to fall in love with this show immediately. In fact, I can pinpoint the exact moment I knew this show would become one of my favorites: eight minutes into the pilot when Alexander enters as Maxine “Max” Shaw.
Max Shaw, I’ve personally only had you in my life for a year, but you are one of the greatest TV characters of all time.
It was at this moment that I knew I was about to witness one of the funniest TV performances of all time. Alexander comes into the scene with so much charisma and natural-born comedic timing it’s hard not to say that Max is your favorite.
As I sat there watching Alexander give such a comedic tour de force performance over the course of seven seasons, I was baffled by the lack of awards season love for her in particular.
I got about five episodes in before I was truly baffled by the fact that I personally only knew Queen Latifah and Erika Alexander from the main cast. An entire brilliant ensemble never made it into my orbit.
It’s astounding that so many talented people were in this one cast.
As I sat there watching Living Single, the similarities between this show and Friends were striking. I mean, there is an entire episode in Season 1 where Kyle, Overton, and their friends play poker, and the girls are mad they aren’t invited…
The famous Friends Season 1 episode, “The One with All the Poker.”
…and there is a long-running storyline about Max and Kyle trying to hide the fact that they’ve secretly been sleeping together after they drunkenly hook up one night.
Chandler and Monica’s storyline.
The similarities between Friends and Living Single are so abundantly clear, and it’s even more apparent that at the time, the show that focused on an all-white group of friends simply got more promotion and love than the show with an all-Black group of friends. I’m the prime example of how the choices made in the ’90s to promote one show over the other continue to have lasting effects.
Alexander has spoken about this, saying in an interview with Today, “We can’t say that back in the day, when that Black cast was in that show, including myself, that we had the same amount of branding and promotion, and leverage that they were putting on all the other shows underneath the same umbrella. It was totally different.”
She continued, saying, “You can see where the budgets went, where you invest, and where you don’t invest — where you take out. That needs to have not only a conversation but an investigation. Because if we can see it, we don’t have to repeat it. We can also know how and why those budgets went that way.”
For context, both Living Single and Friends were produced by Warner Bros.
So now, having watched all of Living Single, I really want to implore every single Friends fan to watch it. I’m not saying you have to pick which one you like more. But I am saying that you can see how Living Single paved the way for Friends and how there is a whole 100+ episode show that has the same feeling as Friends that you can binge-watch for the first time right now.
If you’re looking for a show that is laugh-out-loud funny with a found family that is one of the best, Living Single is the show for you.
Plus, the leading women are so charismatic and strong that they should really be on every list when we talk about the best characters of all time. I think Living Single really paved the way for showing how three-dimensional sitcom characters can be. The character growth of every character on the show is astounding. The series showed every aspect of the human experience in such a funny way, too.
As someone who just watched Living Single for the first time in 2024, the humor and storylines on this show hold up so incredibly well, too.
So, as a lifelong Friends fan — like, I have so many episodes memorized — I think every single Friends fan should watch Living Single. It is, in fact, the blueprint for Friends, and it has become one of my favorite shows of all time.
