They haven't aged well (picture from Pinterest)

Friends was seen at the time as a genuinely funny sitcom that for my generation became must see viewing on a Friday night before going out. During the original run I did for a time actually watch it with a group of friends (with a small f) which I think is how it should have been watched. How many people remember doing the clap-clap-clap-clap during the opening credits? What ruined the show for me was overkill, one week after Channel 4 showed the final episode for the first time, they broadcast the very first episode and started the loop again. When Channel 4 had grown tired of it they showed it on E4 every day of the week, several times a day so that eventually the ten year lifespan seemed to come around so much quicker and we saw the six characters walk off into the sunset and by the time we had partaken of the ad-break making of a cup of tea we were back at the beginning with different hair. Despite the endless repeats on television we bought the full DVD box set a few years ago and demolished that at a rate of three or four episodes a day. Now I wouldn't care if I never saw an episode of Friends again.

Looking at the series in retrospect and checking out a myriad of fan theory articles, you realise what an unpleasant bunch of people they were. Selfish, egomaniac, faux-neurotic arseholes who you wouldn't want to spend a second of your time with. Perhaps the person who dreamed up the plot finale in which the whole thing was Phoebe's crystal meth induced imagination had the best idea but of course fan theories are easy to find which attempt to explain away the behavioural traits of the cast. 

A new generation of viewers are discovering Friends for the first time thanks to the entire series being made available on Netflix. I wasn't expecting to read about this, but it appears that the 'millennial' generation (which I assume is everybody born after January 1st 2000) are finding Friends offensive. On the whole it shouldn't surprise me because these days people seem to enjoy finding things to get offended by, but how offensive was Friends? Accusations of homophobia, transphobia (which I wasn't even aware of at the time), fat-shaming (it wasn't an expression back then) and racism have been thrown at what at the time seemed fairly harmless. It is worth noting that the first episode aired in the UK in 1995, 23 years ago, and two decades is a long time in terms of what was once acceptable in entertainment and what isn't anymore. I suppose the surprise to me is that something has changed in relation to standards within my lifetime. Obviously there are a lot of sitcoms from the 1970s that won't get shown now, and I don't just mean the racist offenders such as Love Thy Neighbour, Curry and Chips or It Ain't Half Hot Mum. Fawlty Towers would have parts of it cut out now, in the episode The Germans everyone remembers the Hitler-walk performed by John Cleese but within that episode Basil Fawlty recoils in shock when he is greeted by a black doctor. Open All Hours once included a joke about a black man 'looking pale' and the veritable national treasure that is Only Fools and Horses had content that now get edited out of repeat showings. 

Randomly watching a handful of scenes and episodes on YouTube to see what the fuss was about, I couldn't find anything terrible yet I can see how today's sensitive generation would take umbrage. Okay so it wasn't ethnically diverse but no sitcom is really, the homophobic accusation comes from Chandler's dad being a drag artist in a Las Vegas revue, which is where the transphobia came from too. However the humour was a defence because Chandler had hang ups about relationships stemmed from his parents splitting up when he was a young child. The story line involving Ross and Rachel hiring a male nanny would have to be handled slightly differently now but shouldn't they claw back some points for having a same-sex marriage in the first series?

The solution is pretty obvious, don't watch it if you find it offensive. Is that too easy? Perhaps that was the Millennium Bug that everybody was worried about. It wasn't ever going to mess with our computers, it was a curse that meant that newborn babies would grow up being offended by everything.

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