Every Sitcom from the ’90s and Early ’00s Is Secretly About Pizza

To me, every sitcom from the ’90s and early ’00s is about pizza. What happened on Friends? They got pizza and then they ate the pizza out of the box, standing up at the counter. What else happened on Friends? I could not tell you. What’s Seinfeld about? Ordering a pizza. Who was the mother on How I Met Your Mother? I have no idea, but I do know that those guys ordered pizza a lot. 

I was in middle school and then high school in the late heyday of basic cable primetime and Thursday night must-see TV, and I spent a lot of time doing homework (or pretending to do homework) or talking on the phone, with one popular half-hour comedy and then the next playing passively in the background. I’d look up from a paper for AP English Lit, having paid no attention to the last 15 minutes of sweaty plot machinations between the friends on Friends, and see that a character had walked into a room with a pizza box. I knew nothing about what else was happening, and didn’t care, but if I looked up and saw a pizza box arrive on screen, I would stop thinking about anything else for whatever duration the pizza was there in frame, and only be able to think about how badly I wanted a pizza. 

And there was a lot of pizza in these shows. Pizza provided a seemingly endless vein of weak but reliable humor. Maybe a character would need to call and order the pizza, and would get somehow nervous or confused. Maybe a character would arrive unexpectedly at the door, carrying a pizza box as a way to celebrate something, or apologize, or comfort a friend, or to provide fuel for some all-night brainstorm. That character might put the pizza box down on a counter or a table, and open its stiff cardboard jaws wide, and everyone would reach in and grab slices. Maybe these TV shows used real pizzas, or maybe they didn’t, but pizzas on television always looked real to me, in a way almost nothing else in the single-room sets of network sitcoms did otherwise. 

At the same time, TV pizza was perfect in a way it never quite was in real life, at least in my limited experience, as a teen in high school in California. Pizza in reality was Take ‘n’ Bake pizzas from Papa Murphy’s next to the 7/11 at the bottom of the hill near our house, or Domino’s at someone’s overcrowded birthday party. Even these pizzas still felt special, in the way pizza always makes a special occasion, and I looked forward to them, but they were nothing like the luscious, enormous, floppy-slice New York pies people brought home on television shows. When characters on TV dug into their pizza, the slices would come out neatly separate, strings of cheese singing upward beautifully but never becoming a problem. The grease never squirted down anyone’s arm, the cheese never awkwardly glopped to the floor. No one got tomato sauce all over their face. Everyone was able to eat a slice of pizza with one hand, from the tip of the triangle straight down to its base, even the crusts, consumed in a single gesture, that way that people in a sitcom can talk with their mouth full and still be, somehow, charming. 

The pizza was the star, and the pizza became my idea of what Friday night meant to an adult. It offered the same frictionless promise that these types of shows applied to real estate and economics, and adult friendship, and family holidays, and romantic love, and all the other things people out in the world beyond middle school and high school got to do, all represented by a pizza. 

If any other aspect of late ‘90s and early ‘00s television — for instance, the kind of enveloping, replacement-family, permanent-summer-camp friendships that shows set in New York in this era tacitly promised to a lonely preteen — produced a longing equal to the longing I felt when I saw a pizza. Wanting a pizza was the same as wanting a weird best friend who would crash uninvited into my living room at just the right time each day. Even as a teenager, I knew half-hour sitcoms about unlikely friend groups of overly attractive individuals in New York City who become one another’s replacement family and all live walking distance from one another somehow were stupid, and embarrassing, and unrealistic, but that didn’t stop that genuine yearning that rose up in me when I let my attention drift from my homework to the screen. Even the stupidest, corniest television was a promise that life got bigger from here, and every trivial object— a couch, a pizza, a cup of coffee — rang with the fullness of oncoming adult existence. I wanted a pizza every time I saw a pizza, but what I really wanted was the future. 

I figured soon I’d live on up into the larger world — with its couches wide enough to fit half a dozen friends at once, up-all-night apartments, newly invented holidays, and its pizza boxes — and get over wanting pizza whenever I saw pizza on television. One day I’d be able to order a pizza myself, or bring one home. I figured that once I was living on my own, and could have pizza whenever I wanted, I wouldn’t want pizza anymore whenever I saw a pizza on television, or at least not in this same yearning, irrational way, a want that felt so much bigger than being hungry.

I graduated from high school and then from college, and moved to the same big city where all the TV shows about pizza take place. I made and lost and remade friends, shared apartments with roommates, hosted Friendsgivings and awkwardly tried to call my friend groups my family. For a few years, most of my close friends and I lived a few blocks from one another in the same neighborhood, showing up unannounced at one another’s apartments, meeting up in the afternoon at the same bar. I dated people and broke up with people and tried to stay friends with them and sometimes succeeded. I introduced friends to other friends and sometimes they fell in love with each other. I fell in love and got married, and we bought a couch and a television and a year’s worth of cleaning supplies to store under the sink, and countless pizzas, celebrating when they arrived, and taking the boxes down the recycling the next day and grumbling about it. 

I got all the way up into adulthood, just like all the bad television shows on basic cable promised, and it turned out that every single time I saw a pizza on television, I still wanted a pizza, just as much, and in exactly the same way, as I had when I was twelve. I could have as much pizza as I wanted, and it was as close to the pizza I’d seen on television as reality would allow, and still, whenever any TV show put a pizza on screen, I would find myself once again overwhelmed with longing. 

By that time, the heyday of basic cable was over, and prestige TV had arrived. The kinds of shows in which one member of a friend group would walk into a bizarrely nice apartment with a pizza box and everyone would eat slices one-handed while bantering had given way to more serious-minded fare. The onslaught of the prestige television era, however, didn’t change the relationship between television and pizza. On occasion, in an episode of The Americans or Friday Night Lights or even The Sopranos, a character would bring home a pizza for their family, or walk into a party or a work meeting carrying a pizza, and I would forget about whatever serious moral quandary or thesis on American decay the show wanted me to consider. If a pizza was on screen, all television was a 22-minute primetime comedy in 1998. An episode of Six Feet Under might have made me weep real tears one scene earlier, but if a pizza showed up in the next scene, it wasn’t HBO anymore, it was just television. 

Pizza on TV represented adulthood, but once I’d arrived in adulthood, my feelings about pizza on TV didn’t change. They still haven’t; no matter what I’m watching, if a character shows up with a pizza, all I can feel is a very specific longing that I once understood as the longing for an adult world that didn’t yet include me. Now that it does, I’ve tried to puzzle out what exactly, in the relationship between comforting, hokey, formulaic television, and a pizza fresh out of a cardboard box, grabs at a hook installed somewhere behind my heart and pulls. 

I often use pizza as a shorthand for a sort of comfort in failure. I don’t know where or when it started, but I know that the refrain was already in the back of my mind by the first time I ever attempted to cook something elaborate: If it goes wrong, we’ll just order a pizza. Pizza is a way to lower the stakes: The worst thing that happens is we throw this away and order a pizza.

Whenever anyone’s given me that assurance, or whenever I’ve given that assurance to anyone, I’ve always had to fight off the overwhelming desire to sabotage their cooking or my own, so that we could order the pizza. Pizza is one of the very few things that celebrates not a triumph but a failed attempt, that admits that failure also comes with its own very real rewards, and that those rewards are delicious. Pizza is the opposite of a fancy or elaborate meal. A pizza isn’t special at all, but that’s what makes it special.

None of the people on the TV shows I associate with pizza are interesting, or good, or heroic, or special in any way. In the prestige TV era that followed, television tried to elevate its characters into thorny, literary complexity, but the characters in sitcoms weren’t supposed to be complicated, or even particularly memorable. The friends on Seinfeld were vaguely abrasive, and the friends on Friends were vaguely neurotic, and the friends on How I Met Your Mother were vaguely collegiate or affable or something, and all of them were actually terrible, but none of them were meant to be much of anything at all. The friend-group sitcom created characters who were almost anti-characters, who had no reason for being the main character of anything, except that cameras happened to be trained on them. 

Perhaps at the heart of what made those shows so comforting, of what made them feel like a pizza, and why a pizza on screen turns every TV show into a network sitcom is the truth that most people, in real life, aren’t particularly interesting. The miracle of friendship is that we convince ourselves that each of our friends are exceptional somehow, that some extraordinary quality is what compels our continued interest in, and loyalty to, them. Terrible and outdated as almost all old sitcoms are, they also might seem to say that any unremarkable group of people you might see on any unremarkable day is, if you focus on them, interesting enough to sustain seven seasons of television. The unspectacular is in fact what is spectacular in our lives. To long for a pizza when you see a pizza on TV is to admit we can aspire not just to grand achievements, but to ordinary days, and the unremarkable small warm rooms in which they take place. 

Certainly, fancy pizza exists, experimental pizza, critically lauded and wildly expensive pizza exists and much of it is wonderful. The pizza on the kind of television shows I associate with pizza, however, is only ever a standard large cheese pie, maybe topped with pepperoni. The occasions with which I, and other people I know, normally associate pizza are the most mundane of holidays: Moving into a new apartment or out of an old one, a Friday night that you want to make feel a little special but not enough to actually leave the house and go anywhere, a meeting that runs long enough that the company has to feed everybody dinner. The sitcoms that made me long for a pizza as a teenager were in almost every way wildly, mortifyingly inaccurate and unrealistic.

Pizza-television had nothing at all to do with what adulthood is really like, except in this one way: The moments in life worth longing for, the things that are most worth celebrating, the truly good parts, aren’t the grand, public achievements but the unremarkable and unnoticed passing days. What makes all the slog of adulthood worth it is in the mundane and the achievable, something as simple and obvious as ordering a large cheese pizza and bringing it home in a cardboard box, and actually getting to eat an actual pizza, just like on TV.