Heres my theory: despite what they may claim, nobody loves Friends. Nobody on the entire planet has ever felt a genuine whoosh of love when they realised it was on. Maybe they felt a warm tingle of familiarity. Maybe a fizzle of nostalgia. Maybe resignation because the remote was too far away to reach. But love? Hardly.
Friends was is too mass-produced for that. It was a fast-food sitcom that prized lukewarm consistency over wit or invention. If Seinfeld was a show about nothing, Friends was a show about nothing interesting. It was about six white twentysomething haircuts relying on tired old cadences for laughs. Friends never changed, it never evolved. Watch any episode now and it could realistically come from anywhere in the series. The only way you can accurately date an episode is by scrutinising Matthew Perrys face for the ravages of drug-related exhaustion.
Even though it ended 12 years ago, Friends inexplicably refuses to die. It was repeated into the dirt on E4 for years, and now its repeated into the dirt on Comedy Central. When Netflix bought the US broadcast rights, over a decade after the final episode aired, it paid almost $120m. This is a bewilderingly vast sum of money, because Friends isnt anywhere near as good as people say it is. I had to watch Friends in the 1990s because I was young and we only had four channels. But now, with all the choice available, you can do better. Friends is wallpaper. Its slop, mashed down and processed for easy consumption. Friends is hospital food. Could it be any blander?