I was a dumb kid. Friends came out when I was 14, I bought the soundtrack randomly because the theme song was a big hit commercially, I loved it (I even argued about how it was played to my music teacher learning to play it on trumpet - I think they thought if you taught people pop songs it'll motivate them more, so yeah, I could technically play Tequila as well) and it also had audio clips from the first season between the tracks, so I knew lines from the show before I ever saw the fucking show. And we all thought they were soooo fuckin hilarious.
It wasn't. It wasn't a great show, it was popular and different, it diverted from the usual nuclear family based sitcom, or the wacky couple sitcom. But the humour was horribly 90's. You'd cringe from it, it was so progressive having a lesbian couple on the show, only they were secondary characters and the crux of a joke regarding Ross, haha he's so pathetic his wife left him for another woman. It's a sexist show despite all the "feminist" jokes. It's racist and homophobic, because, sorry, all shows were. All shows from the 90's were. You could find that shit in Seventh Heaven. I digress.
I see clips from it now, with the laughter (which sounds canned), and I don't laugh. Someone showed a clip of Ross's mother joking about him tugging his testicles as a stress response to not getting enough attention. That's not funny, it's a stress response boys can have, it's damaging. Joey running around trying to find "that hot girl" is so disgustingly creepy in retrospect, he's a lech. Chandler isn't that funny, he's still technically the comedy guy but people made more fun of his schitch of pausing rewatching it made you realise it wasn't hilarious at all. Monica is easily the most annoying character, Ross being the other one, the pair of them insufferable. Phoebe's okay, but she could just be annoying. And Rachel was a nothing character who existed to be the love interest of Ross, she tries to exist as an ex-rich girl, and their relationship is an iconic joke, it's basically a meme. I thought them getting back together at the end was great, but I honestly wasn't watching the show regularly by then, I think it ended after I moved out. And when I rewatched that clip recently, I cringed more. It was bad.
I don't think I could watch this, it'd annoy me. Monica and Chandler getting together was actually the funniest part of the show, Ross losing his shit was pathetic. Ross losing his shit over anything was pathetic. Somehow, them screaming a lot seemed to be the height of hilarity too. I have such a vivid memory of a Behind the Scenes episode they aired once that was shot during the Vegas episodes where Chandler and Monica got married, and Phoebe mentions Vegas weddings are only legal there, and Monica's like no, they're legal everywhere, and Phoebe has a moment where she's like, oooohhhh.... obviously realising she's made a mistake on a personal level and then she's like eh, and they move on. And it cut to a writer walking through the audience with the script calling out, "Okay, so you all got that right? You get the joke Phoebe got married in Vegas, right? You all got that?" Which is the point I went, okay the writers think I'm genuinely fucking stupid and they're so amazingly subtle they have to double check people got a joke, like any organic laughter they got wasn't proof. (I think this happened to Dan Harmon and he wound up using the same joke in Rick and Morty and I still got it, when the team giving him notes on the original script said they didn't get it, so OF COURSE your audience won't.) Four or five people on a committee decide now what you should and shouldn't, or will and won't, find funny.
I'm not saying if I watched a few eps that I wouldn't chuckle at some things, but I wouldn't laugh laugh. I would not LOL.
People who write these shows think they're smarter than you. They think they're so fucking funny, this was like the pinnacle of prime time comedies. Meanwhile, News Radio came out and that was, and still is, fucking funny. Yes, it's full of sexist, racist, homophobic jokes. It will make you cringe. But it was a better show. Comedy shows exploded in the 90's off the back off the success of the 20 something ensemble. You couldn't write this show now and have it be the same. All token minorities would have to be represented, as they should be, but it would be with a huge amount of ignorance if handled by the same writers. Marta Kauffman went on to do Veronica's Closet, which I watched regularly but wouldn't be funny now, because it wasn't that funny then. Just seeing this clip recently, it hit me enough how unfunny Friends really was I had to write it down. Drew Gooden ran an experiment on how much time the laugh track took up on Friends in relation to the jokes themselves, it's egregious. The audience clips of laughter were edited to seem like people laughed harder at one joke than they did. The manipulative nature of a laugh track now is so grating shows have just progressed from that format and let the show be funny or not funny on its own.
If you took out the laugh tracks on Friends, it'd be more painful. Friends wasn't funny.
Case in point I'm watching a younger kid who was born after the pilot experiencing it for the first time and he didn't laugh much at all, not even at Chandler, Rachel's apparently more hilarious, so is Phoebe. They're all in Monica's apartment for the pilot so now he thinks they all lived in there, pilots tend to be pretty limited in scenery. Oh, and he knows nothing about Ross and Rachel. This is so fucking adorable. And he's still not finding it funny, even if he liked it it's proved my point it's not hilariously funny, the jokes weren't even that blue and still sounded sexual to them. The acting wasn't so over the top. The "Billy Don't Be a Hero" joke annoys me, so Ross hasn't had sex since he was six? Cool, funny. I get it's being hyperbolic, oh yeah that song's super old in 1994. Still, dumb. Plus this kid watched Friends once but I don't think he recorded any other episodes but this one. Evidence that show would be a hard fucking sell in this era.
Weirdly since I made this assertion more evidence has come to light. I tend to forget certain cringe things about shows but yeah, there was a whole episode where Ross tries to justify sleeping with a cousin (Denise Richards), and it transpired Monica was passed out at a party in college and Ross basically made out with her (???). That was the biggest problem with 90s shows, anything was hilarious that we'd now find excruciatingly uncomfortable, including incest. Seeing guys dressed as women and that's the joke, whether it's drag or an actual transgender character, it's just a joke. Lesbians, automatic joke, and they're punching bags as well as the man-hating variety. Monica in a fat suit because fat suits were just an easy joke, fat people were a joke. That one lech of a character who was actually way more rapey than people remembered (it wasn't just Joey, I'm finding this stuff on a stupid Buzzfeed list, but they neglected to mention this, and the responses are viewer written so I don't know how people literally get paid for compiling someone else's responses. It's particularly gross they recycle responses too.*). But at least their audience responses are finally seeing how fucking awful and gross Ross is as a character, I'd personally forgotten how shitty he and manipulative he was and you're supposed to be on his side. That's the shit thing about it. Least Always Sunny is aware of how garbage their characters are. Hell, AP Bio has a garbage main character who actually evolves over time, Ross progressively gets worse. Far as I see it now, he was a mouthpiece for the views of the writers, who had to have been that way inclined. He shouldn't have profited from his shitiness. I'm also amazed Joey didn't get more complaints so were people just, oh he's just a silly goofball perve with a heart of gold?
Just put a millennial audience in front of a 90s show they'll rip it to shreds and while I used to shrug it off, I'm here for it now. Even if they wanted to bag on News Radio I'd let them go off. Especially when they realise who Joe Rogan was...
I chanced checking out a channel I've never watched because they broke down all the episodes through the lense of a Gen Z guy who'd never seen the show back in the day. (I also didn't realise how good looking John Favreau was back in the day). The best part is seeing the kids identify how toxic Ross is and how awful Ross and Rachel were overall. They're so incompatible but they hitched their wagon to them being the It couple when Monica and Chandler were the better couple you wanted to root for, (even with all the hiding shit, which I thought was okay, it probably is tedious to watch now, the way the Nanny played off the near-death kiss made the show watchable, and I'll be fair I liked the Nanny, I don't think binging with Fran Drescher's voice is good for your brain, however.) whereas Ross and Rachel, we're kind of forced to by way of the show insisting they're meant to be. All of Ross's other relationships are set to fail since all the women are "wrong", including the one who was hot but messy and the one who was nice but decided to shave her head. Monica standing in the way of Ross and Rachel is a good thing, and she'd be viewed as combative, suddenly Rachel loses interest because Ross is a perpetual divorcée despite dating one previously. Rachel is also more cringe than I remember. I'm glad this guy also hates that one Thanksgiving episode with the flashbacks and the fat suit. I don't know if it's the same one where Monica puts a turkey on her head to amuse Chandler, which I despised. I think so much of this would be cringe for me. This guy is jokingly a Ross apologist too, because he's good looking, but no amount of swagger and leather pants can fix Ross, even if he has an alter-ego called Russ. Can't buy it.
At least this guy sees the good character dynamics outside of the romantic relationships. It's been interesting finding out which actors were on the show, like Paget Brewster, who assumed she was too frumpy for the role. Jennifer Saunders plays Emily's mother, I think Ab Fab was still a big hit in the US because it was slapsticky enough. The girl who played Emily called the show out for being constrictive and insulting to Brits, agreed. Sherilyn Fenn plays another girlfriend of Chandler. Kristen Davis plays another of Joey's girlfriends. Bruce Willis played a part and I guess that's where the budget went that season, only for the show to make a Die Hard joke on top of a "not gay" joke between Ross and Joey. I like this guy isn't a Phoebe a fan and doesn't think Smelly Cat and the rest of the songs are funny, because they're not (there was a random unlicensed shirt that had a cartoon smelly cat on it a friend bought because that's how much Friends permeated pop culture before memes and the internet). Paul Rudd was the best on the show, he's always awesome. One good point to make is, a lot of kids are seeing this in binge mode, not weekly mode, like we did. I don't think the show needed as many seasons as it did, but we got them, and I know I stopped watching once I moved out. I wouldn't go back to even watch good episodes, I like random scenes and you can see some that pop on tiktok until those accounts get flagged. If I really wanted to watch it all by now, I could have. News Radio will remain the easiest sitcom for me to binge since it's awesome and enjoyable, and I missed most of it on TV when it was on anyway.
*This might as well turn into a rant about BuzzFeed and the fact they wanted to be considered a legitimate news source. There's a reason it failed completely over here.
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