Listen Up...American Sitcom 'Friends' Is Objectively Terrible

Far Out Magazine ^ | FRI 6TH MAY 2022 | Mick McStarkey

[Lurkinanloomin]

The Beverly Hillbillies had the highest TV rating of all time until the late 70’s when a Superbowl eclipsed their 1962 numbers.

[Gaffer]

It was a catchy, kitschy song. Frivolous and pretty meaninglessly playful, IMO.....it really wasn’t annoying to me.

Of all the sitcoms I could have had a problem with, “Mad About You” would have been the one. That witch (Helen Hunt) who starred in it is one of the biggest frigging leftists you can imagine. Paul Reiser’s comedic humor wasn’t a joy, either......

[mass55th]

Like most of the crap they are bringing back, even temporarily, I never watched it when it was originally on. Never watched Seinfeld or Cheers. I don’t like sit-coms at all.

[x]

Sounds like Mick is an Irishman who's more into music than television. I don't know which US TV shows they got over there and when. Maybe there's a massive Friends cult in Ireland. In terms of television and popular culture, though, nothing is "of all time." You know the shows and trends that were around when you were watching television or following trends and can't speak for the whole sweep of television history without doing a lot of research. I think of 60s shows as iconic. For other people, it's another decade.

[Leaning Right]

> Friends is perhaps the most iconic TV show of all time. <

That’s crazy talk. Everyone knows that Seinfeld is the most iconic TV show of all time.

[dangus]

Well, I could have written this 25 years ago... For the first year, it was funny. For instance, Pheobe’s line. “Oops, did I share too much?” is actually hysterical the first time it pointed out that there is such a thing as sharing too much. But then that was Pheobe’s entire character: someone who emerged from a shocking past clueless about how shocking it was. Ten years of sharing too much does not generate ten years of laughter.

The first season of Cheers consisted chiefly of character expositions of each main character, circling around to most of them a second time, to see how they interact with each other. Seriously, go back and watch and you can see, “Okay, this is the Diane episode.” The cast was large enough that there were endless permutations. (Diane, Diane and Sam, Diane and Coach, Diane and Carla, ...) And when at last it ran out, new characters came in to give new insight or evolve the characters (Frasier, Frasier and Diane, Frasier and Sam, Frasier and Sam and Diane...). But there was always a fresh character exposition.

Not so with Friends. It was always the same characters treating the same other characters in the same way. New characters didn’t add to complexity of existing characters; they just added shock for the existing characters (Monica and Tom Selleck was never about Tom Selleck’s character, just about Phoebe or Ross’s reaction to Monica and Tom Selleck, so therefore was really about Monica and Phoebe and Monica and Ross, yet again.

It couldn’t be about Monica and Tom Selleck, because that was so vile it couldn’t be funny. They didn’t fail to make Tom Selleck’s character a three-dimensional character; they didn’t DARE. And so rather than peripheral characters growing into their own roles, like Frasier Crane, or Lillith, or even Harry Anderson or Nick Tortelli, they just remained gags. Sick, disgusting, vile, decadent gags about how amoral and meaningless young adults were supposedly in the 1990s.

[seowulf]

...it’s the comedy element which has always left me confounded. Of course, there are parts in which you can’t help but smile due, but these, on reflection, are very rare. The type of comedy it employs is stupid, obvious, and just not very funny.

There are very few that sitcoms where this is not true. It seems like people only laugh when the laugh track tells them to, there's little humor to it.

[Varsity Flight]

Andy Griffith

Gunsmoke

Big Valley

Dragnet

Highway Patrol in b&w

[who_would_fardels_bear]

Seinfeld is still funny to watch, even though it is a show about nothing.

The King of Queens is another show where the main characters are really quite horrible and selfish and outright mean and nasty to each other. Don't see how that ever got so popular.

[kaktuskid]

Seinfeld is still funny even though the first episode is over 30 years old.

[SgtHooper]

Never cared for the show. Was simply too sophomoric. Nothing even close to Seinfeld or Cheers! :-)

[simpson96]

I’ll take It’s Always Sunny In Philadelphia over Friends, any day.

[dangus]

I’d also point out that Pheobe is a rip-off of Woody from Cheers and/or Rose from Golden Girls. But there was never any extra layer of humor, like Diane’s horror or Blanche’s baffled disbelief. And minus that, she comes off as ridiculous, ... which is amazing in comparison given that for crying out loud, Rose’s gym teacher was actually Adolf Hitler.

[lizma2]

When I was in the 4th grade, The Monkeys!

[dangus]

... and Dear God, Betty White pulled it off.

[SaveFerris]

(do not be deceived into thinking that it is a good or even great TV show. As far as quality goes, it’s simply terrible.)

Yeah on that part 👍

[MayflowerMadam]

I never watched even one episode. It looked insipid.

[BradyLS]

I’ll see your Friends and raise you a Gilligan’s Island.

[MayflowerMadam]

“I would say Lisa Kudrow definitely had the best comedy chops”

Never saw her on “Friends”, but she was funny with Mira Sorvino in “Romy And Michele’s High School Reunion”. Silly, really. Mindless.

[Gay State Conservative]

I must be the only English speaking person on earth who's never seen Friends. What little I've seen of Seinfeld suggests to me that he wasn't particularly funny.