Ben Kronengold

Rebecca Shaw and Ben Kronengold graduated from college in 2018. At commencement, they gave a speech in which they talked about moving on from Yale. As the speech went on, it appeared that Shaw was also moving on from Kronengold. A video clip of the speech went viral, not least because Hillary Clinton, that year’s speaker, can be seen giggling at a joke about Yale’s endowment.Shaw and Kronengold were briefly famous. Days later, jobless, they moved back in with their respective parents. She returned to the Upper West Side. He was back on Long Island.“All of my autonomy and independence and this beautiful sense of self I’d cultivated, no one cared about it anymore,” Kronengold said.Shaw and Kronengold were still together — the breakup had been a comic bit — but separated by the L.I.R.R. They missed school, they missed their friends, they missed having a schedule and a sense of purpose. Adulthood, it turned out, was kind of a bummer.Bored and isolated, they began to sketch out a show about five housemates living together, clumsily, in Queens, New York, a “Friends” remade for an extremely online, acutely self-conscious Gen Z crowd.“We were clearly lonely and, like, imagining this fantasy where all our friends lived with us,” Kronengold said.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More