As Netflix UK announced yesterday that all ten seasons of Friends are now available on the streaming service, questions of how the series looks in the cold, harsh light of 2018 abound.
Friends is a quintessentially Nineties sitcom, and it has dated fast. On the hour-long SRSLY podcast devoted to Friends’ legacy, New Statesman writers pick apart Chandler’s homophobia and transphobia, everything that sucked about Ross, those expensive apartments, whitewashing, the problems with the presentation of Janice, and the strange punchline that is “Fat Monica”. None of these things make much sense in the current cultural landscape.
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