"Friends, a show about white people being thin and having the pointiest nipples in the continental Americas — and a show that I, at one time, watched and enjoyed — is absolute garbage," writes Buzzfeed's Scaachi Koul, who grew up watching Friends. She adds: "There’s been some ongoing online discussion about the strange dissonance between Friends nostalgia and the reality of the show’s poor quality. But still, overwhelmingly, audiences seem fine pretending that Friends was any good at all. Likely contributing to this wrong conclusion is how easy it is to access the show’s back catalog, which is readily available to stream and which the teens love binging en masse. It just seems odd that the show that the most marketable generation is, for some reason, watching is also the least relevant show still on the market. (Here is where I freely admit that BuzzFeed has provided a nonstop stream of Friends content to impressionable youths, which might have something to do with it.) Plenty of shows age badly but are still handy for a rewatch now and then. But unlike other shows of its ilk that inspire nostalgic streaming marathons — Seinfeld, The Office, 30 Rock, Parks and Recreation, or Cheers — Friends doesn’t have the benefit of actually being good."
TOPICS: Friends, Netflix, Retro TV