A few years ago, I was at a wedding and assigned to the “others” table, that ragtag collection of colleagues, school friends and neighbours.
This is how I was sat next to the girlfriend of someone in the wedding party, who I had never met before and I had been tapped to look after. She turned up late and after brief introductions, the first thing she said was, “Have you ever seen the TV show Friends? I’m obsessed.”
I knew straightaway that we would not be, excuse me, friends.
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This was a couple of years before the pandemic, so about 15 years after the sitcom had ended, and this stranger had signalled that her continued love for a perfectly amiable, old TV show was how she wanted to be defined. First impressions matter.
OK, before you judge me for immediately discounting someone just because they declared themselves a Friends obsessive (again, in 2018), there were other reasons I avoided that woman for the rest of the night. She was also a proper dum-dum.
But almost a decade on from that otherwise very fun, very opulent wedding (the rest of the table were good people), Friends is still EVERYWHERE.
It must stop. We need to move on. People love Friends as if no other TV has been made in the past 30 years and it’s getting really embarrassing.
Don’t be this person. Credit: Reddit
A week ago, McDonald’s launched what it called an adult happy meal, a souped up, higher-caloried version but the real draw is the toy, designed especially for nostalgic grown-ups.
There are six figurines to collect; one each of Chandler, Monica, Rachel, Joey, Phoebe and Ross. Friends.
It’s not the first time Maccas has done an adult’s happy meal but the previous promotions have been its own branded “toys”, and, yes, it’s clever for the fast food multinational and Warner Bros, the TV studio behind Friends, to team up on this because there is obviously demand out there.
The better question is why.
Why are seemingly functional adults still so attached to a sitcom that ended two decades ago, that has no ongoing continuity like, say, Star Wars, and which was always just a good enough series.
(I know this is an old argument too, but, obviously, Seinfeld and Frasier were better sitcoms from that era, there’s really no debate.)
Friends memes are embedded in our cultural consciousness. You can’t go a week on the internet without seeing Monica dancing with a turkey on her head, Joey wearing 17 layers of clothes or Phoebe talking about lobsters.
Even the word “pivot” only has two enduring references now – the corporate wankery of COVID times, and Ross’s shouting when the couch refuses to go up the stairs.
You could blame segments of audiences for being basic bitches that make rewatching Friends for the 12th time one of the core tenets of their personality, or maybe the answer lies in the fact we don’t have a monoculture anymore, so we hang on to past ones, frozen in time.
Friends ended more than two decades ago. Let it go. Credit: Getty Images/Getty Images
There are upsides to the fracturing of audiences – and therefore, pop culture – across so many platforms. It is, in theory, a good thing as everyone’s individual tastes are catered to and for, so that whatever niche thing they’re into exists somewhere, allowing them to connect to like-minded fans, and feel less alone.
It’s a good thing that no one is forced into following the mainstream, because then we’d all be cursed into endless loops of Emily in Paris, which, by the way, had an episode in the most recent season where Emily, homesick, ends up at an American bar where they’re holding a trivia night about, you guessed it, Friends. A double whammy of cringe.
But the lack of a monoculture also isolates us into these cultural silos where we’re all watching, reading and listening to different things, creating even more barriers to collective connection.
Some things spike, such as Adolescence did last year or Barbenheimer in 2023, but they don’t endure. Game of Thrones was the last TV show with ongoing seasons that really became a proper, monoculture flashpoint.
And it was brilliant – the show was great, but the discourse was even better.
You can blame streaming – and you should and Netflix specifically – for creating and reinforcing bingeing behaviours that ensures everyone moves on from the latest release with rapid speed, and also for making offensively forgettable shows.
But the audience must shoulder some of the blame, because there is so much really amazing stuff out there that great swathes of people aren’t watching because Friends is still sucking up all the oxygen in the room.
We should be seeking it out and becoming advocates for them. Tell everyone about the next great thing you see, and keep hassling them until they watch it.
Then we could be meme-ing, quoting and talking about them instead. We could all delight in the shared, collective experience of being like, “Haha, yes, I get that reference”, because culture is a shorthand for how we bond.
We could bring back the monoculture, not as it was, but an evolution of it. One that is actually more inclusive and diverse, but with great shows and films we could all rally around so that we’re talking with each other instead of at each other.
One that reflects and speaks to who we are now, even though, yes, the fact that so many people are still obsessed with Friends also reveals something about us in 2026, but it’s not a flattering portrait.
We don’t want to only be rolling out the same, tired nods to Friends every day, as if the only thing that could all relate to are six 1990s New Yorkers who got up to some mundane hijinks and an occasional bout of gay panic.
That show was funny the first time, OK the second and boring as hell now.
Friends don’t let friends rewatch Friends.
