Friends

“Friends punches down on every marginalized identity in sight.”

Title: Friends
Episodes Reviewed: All (Seasons 1-10)
Creators: David Krane 👨🏼🇺🇸🌈 and Marta Kauffman 👩🏼🇺🇸
Writers: David Krane 👨🏼🇺🇸🌈 (234 eps), Marta Kauffman 👩🏼🇺🇸 (234 eps), Scott Silveri 👨🏼🇺🇸 (25 eps), Shana Goldberg-Meehan 👩🏼🇺🇸 (25 eps), Adam Chase 👨🏼🇺🇸 (23 eps), Alexa Junge 👩🏼🇺🇸 (23 eps), and various

Reviewed by Ishmeet Nagpal 👩🏾🇮🇳🌈♿

Technical: 3.5/5

David Crane and Marta Kauffman’s Friends (1994–2004) might be one of the most popular sitcoms to date and yet, it’s also a prime example of a beloved show that has not aged well. The appeal of following six young adults as they navigate love, friendship, and careers in Manhattan is undeniable, and the global popularity of main characters Rachel (Jennifer Aniston), Monica (Courtney Cox), Phoebe (Lisa Kudrow), Ross (David Schwimmer), Chandler (Matthew Perry), and Joey (Matt LeBlanc) can be measured by the endless Reddit threads discussing their tiniest details, or through Friends-themed trivia quizzes that still take place decades after the series’ end. YouTube channels even use the show to teach English, with BTS band member RM saying “my English teacher was the sitcom Friends.” For many around the world, the banter-filled comedy introduces viewers to American life and its concepts of dating, sexuality, and gender roles.

The iconic show stays true to the sitcom genre, engaging in fast-paced and low stakes fun, while adding an addictive sense of familiarity by spending 10 years developing character quirks and romantic pairings. But while it’s well produced and filled with punchlines, sarcasm, and physical comedy, Friends starts to feel desperately contrived in later seasons and a certain fatigue sets in, the jokes relying more and more on slapstick. And one only has to watch clips of the show without its laugh track to grasp how unamusing and sinister its messaging can actually be. In a way, the laugh track is the seventh “friend” that keeps the audience lulled into complacency, while any peeks beneath the jovial surface will only reveal dead air.

Gender: 3.5/5
Does it pass the Bechdel Test? YES, but barely

Three of the six main characters are women, but that doesn’t mean they’re treated fairly. Misogyny, sometimes espoused by female characters, runs rampant: The show opens with Rachel being presented as a ditzy rich girl, Monica obsessed with cleaning and getting married, and Phoebe as what can only be described as a “vegetarian hippie.” In early seasons, the three women obsess over men and have many arguments about whether they would put romance above friendship. There’s a feeble attempt at understanding feminism in Season 2’s “The One Where Eddie Won't Go,” when the three main women read a self-help book together. But their actions fail to reflect any solidarity. In one case, Rachel and Monica even get into a physical brawl over wanting to date the same man. Though the women grow closer over time and demonstrate their love for each other, they also continue to perpetuate toxic ideas around gender roles, leveraging gay panic and straight men’s supposed lesbian fetish for power. Furthermore, Monica, Rachel, and Phoebe treat women outside their social circle with contempt, and Monica even joins in transphobic behavior towards Chandler’s father.

Women in smaller roles get the shortest end of the stick, made into caricatures. Janice (Maggie Wheeler) is “annoying,” Kathy (Paget Brewster) is a cheater, Bonnie (Christine Taylor) is portrayed as undateable when she shaves her head—the list is endless. Joey’s trysts with a barrage of women he never calls again, the frequent shaming and objectification of “strippers” by all characters, Joey and Chandler’s porn habits and juvenile interests in the scantily clad characters of Baywatch all pile up over 10 seasons, leaving little room for any real sense of female empowerment.

Race: 1/5

For a show set in Manhattan, one of the most diverse neighborhoods in the world, Friends is glaringly centered from a white perspective. For starters, it takes nine seasons before we meet the show’s only Black recurring character, Charlie Wheeler (Aisha Tyler), who even then only exists to date Joey and Ross. The series’ whitewashing is so incongruous with reality—in 2000, 15% of Manhattan residents were Black and almost a third were Hispanic—that a Buzzfeed article counted all the Black actors to ever appear in Friends’ 236 episodes and came up with the paltry number of 27.

Brown characters fare even worse. Carlos Gómez, an American actor of Cuban descent, portrays an exoticized character named Julio in Season 3, Episode 12, who dates Monica and tells her that all American women are empty inside. Pakistani actor Iqbal Theba plays a doctor in Season 3’s “The One with Frank Jr.,” pronouncing “kidney stones” in a wonky accent. No other noteworthy examples come to mind, unless we count a glimpse of a falafel cart owner.

The show’s only East Asian character in a recurring role does get a little bit more to work with. Season 2’s Julie, played by Lauren Tom who’s Chinese American, is portrayed as smart, friendly, and wholesome, but even then the first joke surrounding her relies on the fact of her looking “foreign.” In her initial scene, she’s greeted by Rachel who over-enunciates, “Welcome to our country!” to which Julie responds “Thank you, I’m from New York!”

All the while, Friends ignores the rest of the world or worse, uses them as punchlines. Why else would going to Yemen be presented as the only way to get rid of a clingy girlfriend? And in “The One Where Ross and Rachel Take a Break” (Season 3, Episode 15), Phoebe struggles to pronounce the name of a foreign diplomat’s country: “Ichnech … Traian … Istan ... There’s a ‘G’ in there somewhere.” It can be no accident that the name of the fictional country sounds vaguely Middle Eastern, presented only to be Othered and trivialized simultaneously.

LGBTQ: 1/5

Given the immense disservice Friends does to LGBTQ people, many are surprised to find out that one of the series creators, Krane, is himself an out gay man. When questioned about the show’s ceaseless queer jokes, in particular through the character of Chandler who frequently indulges in gay panic, Krane states, “[Chandler] has his own anxieties and issues, but I don’t think the character was homophobic in the least.” But this assertion wildly contradicts what viewers see on screen, where nearly every episode heavily leans on throwaway insults to queer people, played for laughs. Any man expressing femininity is ridiculed and called “gay” in a derogatory tone.

The treatment of Chandler’s father, Helena Handbasket (Kathleen Turner), is particularly cringe-inducing. While series co-creator Kauffman has said that Chandler’s father is a trans woman, the show never treats her as one. Characters refer to her with he/him pronouns. Granted, Kauffman has since admitted, “Pronouns were not yet something that I understood. So we didn’t refer to that character as ‘she.’ That was a mistake.” But the fact remains that in this series, still watched by plenty of people today, Helena is essentially portrayed as a gay man in drag and characters make transphobic jokes about her “penis” and her being “gay for the houseboy.”

Lesbian women are also fetishized. Ross’ first wife, Carol (Jane Sibbett), and her wife Susan (Jessica Hecht), face unrelenting homophobic remarks while also being sexualized. It comes to a breaking point when writers dedicate an entire episode to Ross foisting a GI Joe on his toddler out of the fear that his son will grow up to be gay. Because being raised by two lesbians who buy him a Barbie has the power to “make him gay,” I guess?

All that said, the show did portray a beautiful lesbian wedding that was unusual for its time. This introduced the concept of a modern family to mainstream audiences, where two moms and a dad could parent a child together. But is that blip across the series’ decade of normalized homophobia enough to offset the widespread damage it causes to queer people? I’d argue “no,” and I’m hardly the only one.

Deduction for Body Diversity: -1.00

Not only does the show put multiple characters into fat suits, the most notorious being Monica, her past as a fat teenager is constantly played for laughs. A huge amount of fatphobia is espoused by herself. In addition, the main characters relentlessly shame a neighbor they call “ugly naked guy.” (A flashback reveals that when this neighbor was thin, the friends referred to him as “cute naked guy.”)

Mediaversity Grade: D 2.00/5

Homophobia, transphobia, fatphobia, misogyny—in its 10 seasons, this show about straight, thin white people punches down on every marginalized identity in sight. By leaving out Black people almost entirely, it discriminates by omission. While the show’s popularity continues unabated, decades after it ended in 2004, it’s the responsibility of the audience to contextualize why certain jokes that may have seemed funny at the time are actually harmful. The burden of education has passed to us. We cannot change the show but we can challenge its stereotypes.

Like Friends? Try these other long-running or revived sitcoms.

Grade: DLiFebruary 11, 2024Female/Nonbinary Creator