With the Friends Reunion episode coming out this week (on my birthday no less!), I’m reminded of the nostalgia of watching Friends every evening at 7pm with my family at dinner time. Followed by The Simpsons at 7:30, to my childhood dread. I wasn’t allowed to watch TV after school, and being the television addict that I still am today, that was the highlight of my day. Friends was probably my favorite show growing up until a was an older teen who discovered Buffy.
I still watch Friends in hotel rooms or in the background with love and warm fuzzies – that is until I hear a joke based in casual sexism. Or fat shaming. Or transphobia. And then I cringe and cringe hard. I LOVED this show… but as an adult I realized that it’s really inexcusably terrible. And then this debate inside me of whether or not I was allowed to like this show started.
I consider myself pretty progressive – I live in the Bay Area and am constantly griping about how ridiculously unequal and xenophobic our society is. I’m in the Yang Gang and wish Elizabeth Warren was president. And yet, I have a soft spot in my heart for Friends. So what do I do?
Well, the heart seems to love what it loves, and I do still get the warm and fuzzies about Friends. But, I hope that I can love something and be critical about it at the same time. I loved the real and true depictions of friendship and love, and their bonds were depicted on screen so authentically that I always strived to have a group that close. I hate that the humor was created at the expense of real, marginalized groups of people. I hope to use specific examples from the show to tell writers and producers how NOT to create a show, and hold people to higher standards.
This show aged badly. As did many from the 90s and early 2000s when I started watching television. But rather than pretending that they are fine, or turning our backs on them completely, let’s USE what we’ve learned about how they did wrong to hold ourselves to a better standard today.
