Why we’re secretly bingeing comfort TV
We live in complicated times. There you are, naively walking around thinking that anything from dressing as a witch on Hallowe’en to the lingerie brand Victoria’s Secret are all well and good, then boom – a scandal hits, and you find out how offensive such things really are. My friend Michael has an acronym for this: TINOTL, or Things It’s Not OK To Like.
At the current rate, we see about five new TINOTLs a day.
Still, it was a big deal when the woke police turned even the (once) innocent pleasure that is the Nineties sitcom Friends into a TINOTL. Suddenly it was “too white”, “too heteronormative” and therefore verboten. Everyone over a certain age secretly panicked. But it seems a revolution is afoot. We are tossing PC orthodoxy to the wind and… watching the heck out of Friends and its ilk.
It is the second most streamed show on Netflix. Last week, it was reported that a former employee of Robert De Niro’s production company allegedly watched 55 episodes in four days. I know for a fact that certain harried chums of mine conduct regular Friends binges on the sly. Netflix is thought to have paid £85 million to license the show for 2019 and it is worth every penny. Also high on the streaming list are the likes of Frasier and Gilmore Girls.
This taste for comfort TV, diversity optics be damned, is cheering. It shows that however much lip service we pay to the ideology of political correctness, at the end of the day, the heart knows what it wants. And that, apparently, is still Ross, Rachel, and friends.