What If Frasier Became Friends With Seinfeld And They Began Making A Home Improvement For Better Northern Exposure In The West Wing?

The past couple of decades have certainly proven to be no "golden age" for television. In fact, it seems that every successive year has given us, the viewing public, ever worsening "new lows" in broadcast TV! Take this phenomenon of "Reality TV," for instance: what is that, if not an extremely cheap formula for producing "real crap." It is fairly sad when one realizes that the best written, best acted, and most amusing TV show of the last 20 years has probably been "Frasier," a spin-off from the older show, "Cheers."

There are certain people, I imagine, who might be inclined to nominate some other show, instead of "Frasier," for that honored position of "Best Show" of the past two decades: "The West Wing" is one show that comes to mind, as does "Seinfeld," and "The Cosby Show," and "Home Improvement," and "The Wonder Years," and "Northern Exposure," and "Married With Children," and "Star Trek: The Next Generation," and "E.R.," and "Everybody Loves Raymond," as does the show called, "Friends." Yet from among that group of a dozen more-or-less watchable TV shows, I suspect that it may well be the last title, "Friends," which has some of the most ardent supporters.

Now that nine of the ten seasons of "Friends" are available on DVD, with the final season coming soon I'd imagine, I have even heard rumors of people gathering together in groups, for the sole purpose of playing "Friends Trivia" games! This fact almost amazes me. I say "almost" because people frequently do far stranger things than that. Still, it seems to me, that in a show about the relatively unremarkable lives of six close friends who move, over the course of the entire series, from supposedly being in their mid- to late-twenties, to being in their mid- to late-thirties, that such a trivia game would be nearly impossible for anyone who actually had a real life of their own, to ever win! The ultimate winner of such a game would basically need to have memorized virtually every aspect from each and every one of the 238 (or so) episode of the series. That would be quite some task.

Even though my mind boggles at the thought of undertaking such a task-- considering that I've probably already seen only about 1/5th of the total number of episodes-- I am not usually a "party-pooper." So, in the fine spirit of participating in the current "Friends" trivia fad-- and in honor of Lisa Kudrow's birthday, today-- I have a couple of "Friends" trivia questions of my own, to be answered by anyone who'd like to respond, without looking up the answers before replying, that is! Easy questions these:

First, how old is Lisa Kudrow today? And, second, what is the age ranking of the cast: Who's the oldest member of the six main actors, and who is next oldest, and so on, down to the youngest of the six principals? Any takers?

--Spencer