Let's Talk About Friends: The Most Overrated TV Show Ever
I know. I know what I'm doing.
But I've been thinking about this for a while and I think it needs to be said: Friends is the most overrated television show ever made.
Not bad. Not unwatchable. Overrated. There's a difference.
What Friends Is
Friends is a show about six attractive people in New York City who spend an improbable amount of time in the same coffee shop and apartment, have relationships that cycle through each other like a slow-moving carousel, and say things that were funny in the nineties and have aged with varying degrees of grace.
It ran for ten seasons. Ten. It made its cast some of the highest-paid television actors in history. It is still, somehow, in 2025, being watched and defended with a fervour that I find genuinely baffling.
The Actual Problems
The humour is often cruelty wearing the costume of warmth. Fat Monica is the joke, repeatedly, across multiple seasons. Chandler's gender is a punchline so many times I stopped counting. Ross is presented as sympathetic while being, by any reasonable measure, a deeply exhausting person to be around.
The friendships themselves, when you actually look at them, are not particularly kind. These people needle each other constantly. They compete. They belittle. The show frames this as the comfortable intimacy of old friends, and sometimes it is, but often it's just unkindness that everyone agrees to call love because they've known each other a long time.
The relationships are worse. Ross and Rachel's dynamic - the central gravitational pull of the entire series - is built on obsession and possession dressed up as romance. He is jealous to a degree that the show never adequately examines. She orbits him for ten years not because he's particularly good for her but because the show needs them together at the end.
What It Does Well
Here's the thing: I'm not saying it's unwatchable. The chemistry between the cast is genuinely remarkable. There are episodes that are legitimately, classically funny. The Thanksgiving episodes are a highlight of the entire sitcom genre.
And there's a specific comfort to it - a familiarity that comes from having seen it so many times that the jokes land before they arrive, the way a song you know too well still hits the same places.
That comfort is real. I'm not dismissing it.
I'm saying comfort and quality are not the same thing.
Why This Matters
It matters because Friends gets held up as the standard. The gold. The thing all sitcoms are measured against.
And when you hold it up as the gold standard, you inevitably compare everything else to it - and everything else looks different, not worse, just different, and different in a way that's often more interesting, more honest, more willing to let its characters be complex.
There are better shows. Shows that have the warmth without the cruelty. Shows where the humour doesn't require someone to be the butt of it. Shows where the central relationships are actually compelling rather than just inevitable.
The Verdict
Friends is comfortable. It's familiar. It has moments of genuine brilliance buried inside a structure that is, at its core, fairly mean.
It is not the best thing on television. It is not the gold standard.
It is a very successful product that became nostalgia before it finished airing, and nostalgia is the most powerful force in entertainment because it makes people defend things they would never forgive in something they encountered fresh.
I watched Friends. I kept watching it. I'll probably watch it again.
But I'm not going to pretend it's what people say it is.
It's fine. Good in parts. Historically significant.
And very, very overrated.