I watched the last episode of Friends tonight. I know it aired in America weeks ago, but we've only just caught up here in Britain.

And I must say, I was moved. Just what is it about that sitcom that captured our affection?

First of all, television characters tend to supplant those people that we know in real life, or they mirror the people we like, only in better, more sophisticated or suave fashion - soi-disant characters with soi-disant lives. Problems arise for these characters, but are easily solved. We connect with their lives with every episode, every year, every season of the show's run, because we wish we knew such suave people with such easily-solved problems.

The connection we felt for the show is hardly a new phenomenon. What happened with Friends is similar to what happened with Three's Company, when Janet got married. I am old enough to remember that episode and its impact on the ratings. Three's Company had always been a consistently successful show since its debut in 1977, but the wedding episode, which ended the show seven years later, captured the television-watching hearts of the nation. People actually wept over this - in happiness for Janet, in sorrow for the end of the show, and of the apartment that served as the scene for comic hijinks galore.

When the camera panned over the lonely apartment that served as lodging at one time for all the friends in Friends, the meaning was clear: The scene of a good chunk of our weekly laughter was now in a state of emptiness. The emptiness of their apartment echoed the emptiness we feel in our hearts to know we will never see it again. A place we have never known and have never stepped foot in left tears dropping from many eyes, simply because it hosted comic relief for a decade for many of us. (The lonely apartment tear-jerking technique was also used by the writers of Laverne and Shirley when the girls moved from Milwaukee to California.)

What it also marks though, just as with Three's Company, is the eventual maturation of characters through time. It's inevitable with comedy. They couldn't even get away with change in All in the Family, because as surely as Archie Bunker would never change, the lives of his daughter and son-in-law would - and most of us could feel Archie's heartbreak upon him walking into the house at the end of the series, calling "Meatball?", only to hear no response in return. He felt lonely. We felt his loneliness, connected with it.