Still best of Friends: 90s sitcom is most streamed show

THEY sipped their last Central Perk latte 14 years ago – but it seems we still can’t resist hanging out with Friends Joey, Chandler, Monica, Rachel, Ross and Phoebe.

The classic American sitcom, added to Netflix this year, was Britain’s most streamed programme in the first quarter of the year, beating lavish costume dramas and new big-budget thrillers.

It came out on top despite the streaming service spending around £5.3billion this year on original programming, such as the £100million drama The Crown.

In fact, twice as many episodes of the New York-based sitcom, which ran from 1994 to 2004, were streamed in the first three months of 2018 than its nearest rival, Amazon’s The Grand Tour with Jeremy Clarkson.

The data, in TV watchdog Ofcom’s Media Nations report, was based on a survey of 2,500 viewers and ranked the most-watched programmes on subscription streaming services.

Netflix had eight of the top-streamed shows, with The Crown, its lavish story of the reign of Elizabeth II, in third place.

While Netflix and Amazon do not release audience figures, Ofcom said the royal drama had an average weekly reach of almost two million viewers in December 2017. Also among the top ten are Stranger Things, the Birmingham-based crime drama Peaky Blinders, and US shows The Big Bang Theory and Brooklyn Nine-Nine.

While many fans were delighted when Friends arrived on Netflix, it also opened the show up to a new audience of politically correct millennials – some of whom were less than impressed.

Journalist Rebecca Reid told BBC Radio 5 Live in January she ‘couldn’t believe how badly it has aged’. She said: ‘The homophobia is staggering. The sexism’s pretty rampant as well … [and] it’s the whitest show in the whole world.’