Friends

I enjoyed the tv show Friends.  All someone has to do to make me smile is say "Pivot, piv-utt, PIV-UTT!" or "Seven!  Seven!  Seven!", the memories of one of my favorite sitcoms doing the rest.

Not everyone feels the way I do, though.  Some find Friends to be all that's wrong in the world.  And this author is having none of it:

It doesn’t feel so long ago, the 1990s. I still have clothes from then and weird bottles of booze and a hairstyle and, indeed, a wife. Over the past week, however, it has been impressed upon me that the 1990s were, in fact, a very long time ago indeed. For Friends has arrived on Netflix and people who apparently never saw it before are going nuts over how offensive it is.

To be honest, I wasn’t initially convinced by that “apparently”. I read about this in The Independent (could it BE any more 1990s?) and I was doubtful. For one thing, it has been on normal telly constantly for the past 20 years. Who never saw it before? For another, reading the list of reasons why Friends is apparently so offensive, I quickly realised that this was a list you could only compile if you had watched a hell of a lot of Friends, which is an odd thing to do if you hate it so much. I mean, perhaps Married With Children was just as bad, but who is ever going to know...

For this show to be declared problematic then is itself problematic. So soon? Our thing? Us? Friends, it seems, is racist because there are hardly any black characters. It is homophobic because of jokes about Ross’s fear of gay men, and Chandler’s fear of being taken for one. It is transphobic, because of Chandler’s issues with the person he once knew as his father, who is now played by Kathleen Turner. Finally, it is fatphobic, because Monica, now stick thin and neurotic, is still mocked, routinely, for being much, much larger in her teens...

There is a hunger today to find the flaw, to be the one who says “that thing you think is fine is not fine, and I am a better person than you for noticing it”. You aren’t. You’re a prig and bore. Yes, maybe there’s a mote in my eye. Some eyes have those. No need to gouge them out.  (boldface mine--Darren)

Hear, hear!