You can’t just watch friends for the first time in 2025, it’s a bad show. You can maybe rewatch for the nostalgia but the show was clever at its time and paved a lot of way for another sitcoms.
It’s similar to breaking bad, if you are just watching for the first time you may not find it appealing, but it was great in 2008 and new shows took inspiration from Gillian’s direction
So it was great in 2008 and now it’s bad.
Because?
I’ve seen friends back then. It’s a simple show, it’s funny if you like the humor, and it’s altogether very well done. That rang true in 2008, and it still does because the show doesn’t change, society has. You may mag about certain jokes now being oh so offensive, bit it’s all pretty tame.
If you’re really into fast cars, and you’ve gone to like Speedways and driven state-of-the-art race cars and muscle cars and all that stuff, then you go and drive a Model T it ain’t going to hit the same. You’re not going to appreciate it because it’s not really the thing you’re into it’s the thing what you’re into evolved from. You can like it from a historical perspective, but it isn’t going to give you the same thrill driving it as a car that can go 250 mph.
It’s the same thing with a lot of visual mediums like television. Things that were groundbreaking and amazing in their day can still be enjoyed from historical context but don’t always work for people who are fans of the modern product. Not I Love Lucy though that still works fine.
I saw it back then and didn’t think it was funny. The laugh track felt forced and I found the characters obnoxious. Watching Friends felt like being around someone who thinks purposely misunderstanding things is funny, so they keep doing it, and people keep giving them pity laughs. Meanwhile, you have to just stand there and tolerate it, even though you’re getting more and more irritated every time it happens.
It made me cringe in the 90s, and I’m not touching it with a 10-foot pole today.
I saw some clips of Friends in which the laugh track had been edited out. Let me just say that this meme is well-justified.
It’s a live audience, not a laugh track.
It’s a live audience and a laugh track.
Yes, The majority of Friends was filmed in front of a live audience, with the exception of a few shots filmed on location here and there. I saw a recent interview with Lisa Kudrow where she talks about being frustrated on stage because of all the pauses for audience laughter, where the actors would have to pause and do some idle animation. That a television show taped before a live audience is expected to be different than a stage play.
I’ve also seen a “behind the scenes” video, I think as a special feature of the DVD releases, where they would swap out audience reactions. Because, for example, the take where Monica pops out from under the sheets with Chandler, revealing the two were sleeping together, the live audience went nuts for several solid minutes. For the broadcast version, they inserted an uproarious but brief cheer to keep the pacing up.
Compared to MASH or the Flintstones (!!?!), Friends’ laugh track is a lot more genuine but it was at least somewhat engineered.
I’ve mentioned this before and faced fierce pushback from friends fans. The laugh track causes such pacing issues it’s so distracting.
I hate laugh tracks - but most of the show (as far as I can tell) is in front of a studio audience
Ah yeah, I believe they have a light that goes on that tells them when to laugh since the material isn’t funny enough on its own 😂
That’s brutal. Not having known about the ‘applause’ light, I can see that because some of Phoebe’s jokes were so bad and the audience just cracks up…
That said, it’s still way better than ‘big bang theory’ with pre-recorded laugh that they drop whenever… like nails down a chalkboard
I’m not convinced that’s the case for Friends. I’ll again refer to the DVD special features, there’s one where they show how the studio audience helps rewrite the final cut of the show.
The example given is, they’re in Vegas, Chandler and Monica are thinking about getting married, to the point Monica is wearing a “borrowed” blue sweatshirt, when Ross and Rachel barge in, faces covered in marker, having just gotten spur of the moment drunk Vegas married.
In the script, Chandler’s line is “I think they’re drunk.” This got a cool reaction from the audience; in this moment Monica would deliver a straight line and Chandler would quip off of it. So they did another take where Matthew Perry improvised the line “I think they’re two bottles of vodka in human form.” which got a larger audience reaction, and that’s the take that was broadcast.
It’s acceptable background noise, not painful garbage that hurts my soul to hear like big bang theory
TBBT normalises autistic people being assholes and thinking they are exempt from choosing to try to better themselves.
Sorry ill always love it, the writing is clever and hilarious.
Not sure why its polarizing. Its just a feel good show. Letterkenny is probably more polarizing but I also enjoy that.
I think it’s polarizing, just like Seinfeld and other generational TV shows, for reasons that are very intrinsic to the sitcom genre.
First, every sitcom is an acquired taste. Because its humor is based on saturation (with tropes, characters, situations), you have to let it percolate a bit before it starts hitting. It is extremely rare for a show like that to be funny right from the start of episode 1 (even when they frontload a lot of the humor in the pilot to sell the pitch). It’s a known issue when you’re writing fiction of any kind : if you want to hit deep, you need to take some time to expose your characters, motivations, situations etc… But you run the risk of losing the reader before the payoff. If you skip that and hit early, then your payoffs will be more vague and shallow because they’re not backed by a solid foundation. It’s a balancing act, but with this genre in particular, which can get to large season counts, you have to have at least a bit of expo.
Traditionally you often hear that you need 1 season to get into a sitcom (also because that’s a reasonable timeframe for the writers to hit their stride), but a lot of people aren’t ready to sink that kind of time into a show they’re not certain about so they’ll watch a couple episodes, miss the entirety of the whole point of it, and ditch it.
Secondly, Friends in particular is in a sub-genre of sitcom : the “group of young people having mundane adventures in the big city”. The appeal of that sub-genre is kind of like a para-social relationship, where over time it feels like those people are part of your friends group and that makes everything deeper, more significant, and funnier. Obviously this only works if you are tightly packed with the characters group, in terms of age, culture, life experiences etc…
When somebody under 30 watches Friends they’ll feel that gap and, unless they develop a personal affinity to the setting, it will all fall flat. On average each given generation cringes at the previous generation’s foundational sitcom.
This but The Office
Friends isn’t funny, the office is like
Just dumb levels of cringe. Like so cringey no one would actually do that kind of thing, and I’m autistic. So it’s so cringe I wouldn’t do it. It’s not even shitpost funny it’s just
Humans being stupid?
Good god that show sucks so much. Glad somebody finally said it. I thought the whole world had gone crazy. Their other show, Parks and Rec, was considerably more entertaining.
I like how Steve Carell plays out Michael, and I enjoy Dwight as well. But the rest really is nothing special. The whole Jim and Pam story arc was more annoying than anything.
It is crazy how good Parcs & Rec is compared to the office.
Especially after they get married and they have to keep inventing Jim and Pam conflict to keep their arc “interesting”
I love parks and rec, because every character is interesting. The office has like 3 and a half good characters
Every single character in The Office is unique and interesting and has a great development arc. I don’t get your take.
I always found it immersion breaking that they lived in the massive place they did, and that was before I released it was set in New York of all cities. Like all sitcoms tended to gloss over money but Friends was just a step to far for me.
It’s been addressed in the show. Ross and Chandler have good jobs. Joey eventually gets a stable acting job but is usually short on cash. Monica’s apartment is illegally occupied and rent controlled from when her grandmother lived there.
That does not explain it at all, a “good” job?! It was like a 3000 sq feet apartment in new York, where they astronaut stripper day trading porn stars?!
Also many of the plot directions don’t work if they have access to money (hell you did not even touch on Phoebe). I get that it was TV and they needed good shots but at least Fraser made some sense with it.
you clearly didn’t watch the show. they riff on this all the time. there are multiple episodes on this topic.
