With 'Friends' celebrating its 25th birthday in September, most people of a certain age have been enjoying reminiscing about the TV show they grew up binging, before distractions like the internet came along.
However, a savage takedown of the show has caused some controversy online.
Buzzfeed writer Scaachi Koul has declared the show 'absolute garbage' and says that it 'hasn't aged well.'
"There’s been some ongoing online discussion about the strange dissonance between Friends nostalgia and the reality of the show’s poor quality," she writes. "But still, overwhelmingly, audiences seem fine pretending that Friends was any good at all."
She adds that the show reportedly relied on obvious tropes, like Monica being fat as a teen, Ross's ex-wife being a lesbian and Chandler's dad being a drag queen, adding "Save for a few token characters of color that popped up every now and then, the show was so white that Phoebe, as the only blonde, could be considered a minority."
A surprising number of people have agreed with Kouli's unpopular take, however:
— molly ꗯ (@heymolly) August 29, 2019
Telling my normie classmates that Friends sucked was a large part of my personality in high school. I apologize to everyone who experienced me as a smug, condescending little shit, but for the record I was right https://t.co/1wfKDgl2cC
— Jordan Fraade (@schadenfraade) August 29, 2019
Totally agree with this take. Caught an episode of Friends the other day and it was beyond awful. The material is embarrassingly juvenile and dated. Seinfeld was and always has been far superior. https://t.co/Qca7h4vcNn
— Tara B (@tarabea80) August 29, 2019
Others stood their ground and defended the show:
Why I stopped reading Buzzfeed.
Actually, as a gay kid, Friends ACTUALLY showed me normal gay people and a transgendered character.
You think the punchlines were bad? They were more helpful than the hate insults I got in real life. https://t.co/VgkDkstGHS— Canadian eh (@MarcInTheCity) August 29, 2019
yes friends is bad but the real crime is the writer of that buzzfeed piece complaining about how ancient she is when she was born in the fucking 90s
— democracy diva (@democracydiva) August 30, 2019
And let us not forget the real reason for all of this kerfuffle...