So No One Told You

Okay, look. Since Friends was put on Netflix, I keep reading articles and comments about how the show is, and always has been, dreadful. The generation below me just cannot understand how we ever enjoyed it.

Well let me tell you a thing.

Yes, Friends - by today's standards - has a lot of very questionable content. There are moments of sexism, there are moments of transphobia, there are moments of fat-shaming, there are several hundred moments of cringey toxic masculinity. There was barely a black face to be seen until Charlie appeared in Season Nine, and some of the sexual "shenanigans" that went on need some serious looking at (see: Chandler tricks a heartbroken girl into sleeping with him, Monica takes the virginity of a 17 year old when she is 26, Ross sleeps with a student, Joey has sex with a casting director to get an acting role, and Ross lusts after his actual cousin. And these are just the ones I can remember off the top of my head).

I'll get back to the above... but first I'd like to tell you about the things that Friends got right.

When Ross' girlfriend Julie was introduced, I believe it was the first time that a Chinese-American character had appeared on mainstream TV who wasn't a maid, and who didn't have a dubious 'comedy' accent. Friends was also the first mainstream TV show to feature a Lesbian couple raising a child. (Sidenote: this was in a period of time when my Year 7 form tutor told us, in a girls' school, that Lesbians are "disgusting". No one complained, she didn't get fired. #the90s)

I also truly believe that Friends is the reason why straight men of my generation feel comfortable touching each other. The 90s was a very 'no-homo' kind of place, and I remember when my teenage male friends started feeling like they could hug each other. Chandler and Joey did, so they could as well. That might sound trivial and weird, but it's true, and it was important.

Okay, back to the bad bits.

I think we need to take a look at the Friends writing team. According to our good friend Google, there are twenty five people credited with writing at least one episode. Of those twenty five, only seven of them are women, they are all white, and most were born before 1975.

So we can deduce that their perspective of young New Yorkers may not have been entirely accurate, and their take on current issues might have been slightly off. Possibly.

I doubt there was one person in that room who would have noticed that there was something unsavoury about a lot of the "jokes", and even if they had, they probably wouldn't have dared say anything.

The prime time shows on a Friday night used to be Friends, Cybill, Ellen, Caroline in the City, and Frasier. I watched them all. And I'm desperately trying to picture one single regular character of colour. When you're young, you just accept things until someone points out that it's wrong. The Cosby Show and the Fresh Prince were on as well, and I loved them too. It didn't occur to me that it was weird to have black shows and white shows. We all just sort of went with it cause that's what was happening.

It was also a time when fat characters were always the comic relief, and heteronormativity was everyone's default setting.

There was a lot of ignorance surrounding gender and sexuality. It wasn't the sort of thing you sat round talking about with the family, and you couldn't covertly educate yourself by looking it up on your phone, because guess what? We didn't have our own smart phones or our own laptops. So Chandler's dad was a drag queen and now he's a transvestite? Who actually knew what was going on there? We certainly weren't savvy enough to question it, or wonder why everyone was still using male pronouns if she's now a woman. We just laughed and enjoyed Kathleen Turner's performance.

I'm not excusing any of this. I'm just trying to illustrate that people weren't being pulled up on stuff in the way they are these days.

It's also worth remembering that expectations of character arcs and consistency were not as stringent. Tumblr and twitter were not things. The creators of Friends were not subjected daily to keyboard critics. They could do what they wanted, and first and foremost Friends was a comedy. So the laughs were what they wanted above anything. Never mind realism when there's a one-liner to throw in.

And, apologies to the B99 generation, but we didn't mind. We didn't know any better. Compared to previous sitcoms, Friends was better, and Friends was progressive.

It's easy for my generation to look back at Rising Damp, for example, and call it racist and sexist. But if you weren't there in the 70s, you can't authentically imagine the cultural atmosphere. Equally if you weren't there in the 90s, it's easy to judge Friends and its contemporaries by the standards to which we hold today's TV shows.

Everything is more intently scrutinised now, and I do think that's a good thing. Script writers and casting directors seem to be much more aware of the message(s) they are sending, and trying extremely hard not to upset anyone. (Sidenote: I don't think creatives shoud have to pander to twitter outrage, but that's another blog).

When I went to New York by myself in 2005, I was scared and alone in a hotel room, and I turned on the TV. Friends was on, and it honestly made me feel much better. I knew those people, so I didn't feel lonely any more. So yes, maybe I am biased because of how much it meant to me growing up.

But the truth is that Friends had a huge global cultural impact, and honestly I think more of it was good than bad. Unfortunately the bad parts are so unacceptable that they have somewhat tainted the rest.

So, my dear Gen Z and younger Millenials - we get it, Friends hasn't aged well. But please don't judge us for the time we loved it. Guess you just had to be there.