‘You’re a prig and bore’
Claims that 90s sitcom Friends is a racist, homophobic, transphobic and fatphobic show reflects desperation to see a flaw in anything, says Hugo Rifkind.
IT feels redundant to the point of lunacy to explain what the 1990s sitcom Friends was about, much like wasting space in a column to define trees, or to tell you that there’s a country called France.
Still, if I’m going to write a column about Friends then convention probably dictates it be done. So, there were six young people living in New York, and they dated and had jobs, and that was it.
There was Rachel, with the hair and the nose job, who all men fancied, even Brad Pitt, albeit only for a bit. There was Monica, the neurotic one, who you’d sometimes fancy to give yourself a break from Rachel. Then there was Phoebe, who all the women you knew expected you to fancy, but you only rarely did, because if this had been The Young Ones (kids, ask a parent) she’d have been Neil.
Menwise, there was Joey who was stupid and good-looking and wanted sex all the time. Basically, he was a big dog. Then there was Chandler with his peculiar speech patterns - could they be any more affected? - and Ross, a whiny, needy wimp of a man who, by virtue of the fact that if you were a man watching Friends, he was probably the man in Friends that you were most like.
It doesn’t feel so long ago, the 1990s. I still have clothes from then and weird bottles of booze and a hairstyle and, indeed, a wife. Over the past week, however, it has been impressed upon me that the 1990s were, in fact, a very long time ago indeed. For Friends has arrived on Netflix and people who apparently never saw it before are going nuts over how offensive it is.
To be honest, I wasn’t initially convinced by that “apparently”. I read about this in The Independent
(could it be any more 1990s?) and I was doubtful. For one thing, it has been on normal telly constantly for the past 20 years. Who never saw it before?
For another, reading the list of reasons why Friends is apparently so offensive, I quickly realised that this was a list you could only compile if you had watched a hell of a lot of Friends, which is an odd thing to do if you hate it so much. I mean, perhaps Married
With Children was just as bad, but who is ever going to know?
It’s true, though. I looked online and among the perennially offended the latest thing to be offended by is this. Which is unsettling. For the generation at whom it was aimed - peak Xennial; basically me - it is hard to overstate how culturally important
Friends was. More mainstream than either Seinfeld or Frasier, probably its closest peers, it was every bit as funny. No, it was. Don’t get all comedy hipster about this, just watch Ross getting stuck in his leather trousers again and agree that I’m right.
It is also probably helpful to remember it as one of the last big TV hits before the multichannel age, and also before the social revolution of the internet. Once, long ago, I remember visiting the flat of a lonely girl and noticing that her bookshelves contained five seasons of Friends on VHS and nothing else. In the late 1990s, this wasn’t even all that weird. If you had no friends, then the friends of
Friends were your friends.
For this show to be declared problematic then is itself problematic. So soon? Our thing?
Us? Friends, it seems, is racist because there are hardly any black characters. It is homophobic because of jokes about Ross’ fear of gay men, and Chandler’s fear of being taken for one. It is transphobic, because of Chandler’s issues with the person he once knew as his father, who is now played by Kathleen Turner. Finally, it is fatphobic, because Monica, now stick thin and neurotic, is still mocked, routinely, for being much, much larger in her teens.
The easiest conclusion to come to about all of this would be to shrug that times have simply changed and attitudes with them. In the case of Friends though, the odd thing is that they haven’t, much. For example, while the lack of black people in this vision of New York is bizarre, I’m pretty sure I remember people noticing that in 1994, too. I also remember people saying it, rightly, about Lena Dunham’s Girls, barely five years ago.
For fatphobia, I’d likewise refer you to Zooey Deschanel’s New Girl, now on its fifth series, where the character of Schmidt basically is Monica, fat-suit backstory and all. For homophobia, the tone may have aged, but I’m pretty sure it’s the gay fear itself we were laughing at, rather than the gays, which is much the same gag James Corden dredged up not
1000 years ago for Comic Relief with George Michael. There’s certainly little of the campery you’d find in, say, Modern Family.
On its tackling of transsexuality, meanwhile, one could better marvel at the way this show foretold the exact dynamic of Amazon’s hipster hit
Transparent, and with no less honesty and perhaps quite a lot more warmth.
Doubtless there are bits I’m forgetting, because I have better things to do than loll around rewatching the whole of Friends. (All of a sudden, actually, the
1990s feel like ages ago.) In the main, though, no, I’m not having it. Pick your confected semi-Oedipal fights if you must, but not over this.
There is a hunger today to find the flaw, to be the one who says “that thing you think is fine is not fine, and I am a better person than you for noticing it”. You aren’t. You’re a prig and bore. Yes, maybe there’s a mote in my eye. Some eyes have those. No need to gouge them out.