Friendship

1985 · 7 Seasons · NBC · Comedy

The Golden Girls put four women over fifty in a Miami kitchen and produced one of the sharpest joke machines in sitcom history, a show that remains funnier line for line than most comedies made since. Bea Arthur's withering Dorothy, Betty White's serenely dim Rose, Rue McClanahan's man-eating Blanche, and Estelle Getty's purse-clutching assassin Sophia form television's perfect comic quartet, and the cheesecake-fueled friendship underneath gave the laughs their staying power. Some period jokes have aged badly and the plots recycle, and none of it matters at the kitchen table. Thank you for being a friend was a mission statement.

2025 · Action / Adventure · PC / Steam

Split Fiction is the co-op studio at the height of its powers, trapping a sci-fi writer and a fantasy writer inside simulations of their own unpublished stories and using the premise as a license to reinvent itself every fifteen minutes. Dragons, cyber-ninjas, hoverboards, a level where one player is a sentient pig with problems, the invention rate embarrasses games three times its length, and the finale's split-screen showpiece is an instant landmark. It requires exactly two players, hands a free copy to your partner, and asks only that you tolerate dialogue cheerier than its craft. Couch gaming's best argument continues.

1986 · Rob Reiner · 89 min · Drama, Coming-of-Age

Four boys walk along railroad tracks to find a dead body, and what they actually find is the end of their childhood, told with a tenderness and honesty that makes it the best coming-of-age film of its generation.

2010 · Dean DeBlois, Chris Sanders · 98 min · Animation, Adventure, Fantasy

How to Train Your Dragon is DreamWorks' masterpiece, a thrilling and emotionally rich adventure built on one of the great friendships in animated film.

1952 · E.B. White · 184 pages · Children's Literature

E.B. White's story of a pig and a spider is as close to a perfect children's novel as American literature has produced, handling friendship, mortality, and the passage of time with a grace that devastates adults even more than children.

1989 · John Irving · 543 pages · Literary Fiction

A Prayer for Owen Meany is John Irving's most emotionally devastating novel, a sprawling story about faith, friendship, and destiny that builds to one of the most powerful endings in modern American fiction.

1998 · Louis Sachar · 233 pages · Children's Literature

Louis Sachar's Newbery Medal winner about a boy sentenced to dig holes in the Texas desert is a masterclass in narrative structure, weaving past and present into a story that's simultaneously a comedy, a mystery, and a meditation on fate and justice.

2022 · 3 Seasons · HBO · Comedy-Drama

Somebody Somewhere is one of the most emotionally honest shows HBO has ever produced, a three-season portrait of grief, friendship, and finding your people in the last place you expected. Bridget Everett anchors the whole thing with a performance that never reaches for sentiment it hasn't earned, and her chemistry with Jeff Hiller as Joel gives the show its beating heart. The deliberate pace and low-stakes storytelling won't work for everyone, and a few plotlines across the run feel undercooked. But for anyone who has ever felt stuck, out of place, or uncertain about where they belong, this show lands with quiet, lasting force.

2019 · 2 Seasons · Hulu · Comedy / Drama

Two women in their thirties play themselves at thirteen, surrounded by actual teenagers, and somehow it becomes one of the most honest depictions of middle school ever put on screen. The concept sounds like a gimmick, but PEN15 earns every minute of its two-season run through fearless writing and performances that capture the full spectrum of adolescent humiliation, joy, and confusion. Its cringe factor will be too much for some viewers, and the show's willingness to go dark in its second season won't land for everyone. For those who can meet it where it lives, this is a show that understands something true about growing up and the friendships that get you through it.

2011 · Elena Ferrante · 331 pages · Literary Fiction

Ferrante's first Neapolitan novel captures the fierce, complicated bond between two girls growing up in 1950s Naples with a psychological intensity that has made it a modern classic of women's fiction.

2016 · 5 Seasons · HBO · Comedy-Drama

Insecure built something rare on television, a show about Black women navigating friendship, love, and self-doubt that felt honest rather than performative, and while its final stretch stumbled in places, the emotional core held strong enough to cement it as one of the defining comedies of its era.

2003 · Khaled Hosseini · 371 pages · Literary Fiction

The Kite Runner is the rare debut novel that hits with the force of a book an author spent a lifetime preparing to write. Hosseini's storytelling is direct and powerful, built on guilt, childhood loyalty, and the long shadow of a single unforgivable moment. The prose is simple in the best sense, the emotional punches land hard, and the portrait of Afghanistan before and after the Soviet invasion gives the story a sweep that elevates it beyond personal drama. Some readers find Amir difficult to root for, and the plot's coincidences can strain credulity, but the emotional core holds.

2007 · Khaled Hosseini · 384 pages · Literary Fiction

Khaled Hosseini's second novel centers two Afghan women across three decades of war, oppression, and an unlikely bond forged under impossible conditions. The emotional power is enormous, driven by characters so believable they feel biographical. Hosseini's direct prose generates real momentum, and the portrait of Afghanistan from the Soviet era through the Taliban years gives the personal story historical weight. The second half moves too fast for its own good, and some readers find the plotting heavy-handed, but the relationship between Mariam and Laila carries the book through its weaker moments.

1937 · John Steinbeck · 112 pages · Literary Fiction

Of Mice and Men is a short book that hits harder than most novels twice its length. Steinbeck strips away everything except what matters and leaves you with a story about friendship, impossible dreams, and the cruelty of circumstance. It's not a comfortable read, but it's an honest one. The ending stays with you far longer than the reading time would suggest.

1908 · Kenneth Grahame · 258 pages · Children's Literature

The Wind in the Willows is a gentle masterpiece of English pastoral writing, a book about friendship, home, and the beauty of quiet living that has lost none of its charm in over a century.

2025 · Adventure / Party · PC / Steam

Peak is a climbing game about four scouts, one mountain, and the thousand hilarious ways gravity wins, born from a month-long game jam between two studios and sold at a snack-food price that turned it into the summer's inescapable co-op hit. Every run up the island's rotating biomes is a physics negotiation, stamina bars, rope economies, a friend dangling from your last piton screaming about mushrooms, and the falls generate better stories than most scripted games. Solo it's a modest roguelike climb. With three friends and voice chat it's a comedy engine, and the difference explains every review it has.

1999 · Stephen Chbosky · 213 pages · Literary Fiction

Chbosky's epistolary coming-of-age novel captures the raw intensity of adolescence with startling honesty, building quietly toward revelations that reframe everything that came before.

2024 · Hisham Matar · 352 pages · Literary Fiction

A quiet, devastating novel about three Libyan students in London whose lives are shaped by political violence both at home and abroad, exploring how exile hollows out friendships and how history reaches across oceans to claim its debts.

1992 · Donna Tartt · 524 pages · Literary Fiction

The Secret History is a dark academia touchstone that earns its reputation through atmosphere, prose, and an unforgettable cast of morally bankrupt intellectuals. Pacing stumbles in the second half and some readers will find the characters too cold to care about, but Tartt's command of tension and her skill with an unreliable narrator make this one of those rare books that people either love deeply or argue about for years. That kind of polarization usually means the book is doing something right.

2021 · Enrico Casarosa · 95 min · Animation, Comedy, Adventure

A breezy, sun-drenched celebration of childhood friendship that trades Pixar's usual emotional complexity for simple warmth and charm, and mostly gets away with it.

2020 · David Petrie · 494 pages · LitRPG

Pixel Dust delivers one of the more character-driven LitRPG experiences on the market, pairing a creative virtual world premise with strong friendships and genuine humor, even when its pacing stumbles in the final stretch.

2023 · 2 Seasons · Apple TV+ · Comedy

A buddy comedy about platonic friendship between a man and a woman that refreshingly refuses to turn into a romance. Rose Byrne and Seth Rogen have the kind of natural, combustible chemistry that makes every scene together feel effortless, and their dynamic as two friends navigating separate midlife crises provides the show with a reliable comic engine across two seasons. The supporting cast gets pushed to the margins by the central pairing's dominance, and the show sometimes chooses gentle amusement over genuine insight into the midlife anxieties it raises. But the second season tightened up considerably, and when Platonic commits to being a hangout comedy about two people who make each other's lives simultaneously better and worse, it's one of the most purely enjoyable shows on streaming.

2020 · RavensDagger · 316 pages · LitRPG / Comedy

Cinnamon Bun is a deliberate antidote to grimdark LitRPG, offering a protagonist whose superpower is genuine kindness in a genre that usually rewards ruthlessness. It won't convert anyone who finds the premise saccharine, but for readers burned out on cynical power fantasies, Broccoli Bunch's adventures provide something increasingly rare in web fiction: a story that makes you feel good without making you feel dumb.

2023 · Caroline O'Donoghue · 304 pages · Literary Fiction

A warm, sharp, and frequently hilarious novel about a young woman's intense friendship and messy romantic entanglements in recession-era Cork, Ireland. It nails the energy of being in your early twenties even when the plot runs out of places to go.

2021 · Sally Rooney · 356 pages · Literary Fiction

Sally Rooney's third novel captures the anxieties and contradictions of being young, educated, and politically aware in a world that feels like it's falling apart, while also being a story about four people trying to figure out love. The email chapters between Alice and Eileen are the book's most distinctive and rewarding feature, offering a kind of intellectual intimacy that feels rare in contemporary fiction. The plot itself is thin, and some readers will find the philosophical digressions more frustrating than illuminating. But for readers who connected with Rooney's earlier work, this is a deeper and more ambitious extension of the same territory.

2011 · 7 Seasons · Comedy Central · Comedy

Workaholics thrives on the real-life friendship between its three leads and a willingness to push humor into wildly absurd territory, but its narrow formula wears thin over seven seasons and its crude streaks will test the patience of anyone not already tuned into its wavelength.