Eros
I think it’s safe to say that FRIENDS didn’t age well. But it’s still a hit among people of all ages. The first time you watch FRIENDS you may like the TV series – it’s funny, hilarious, and relatable too, until you start thinking.
Many who are anti-FRIENDS now liked the series when they first watched it, which includes me. I loved it the first time I watched it; I finished all 10 seasons in almost a week. But now when I look back, the series and its characters make me cringe.
In a wide-ranging interview with The Hollywood Reporter, series creators Marta Kauffman and David Crane, and director and executive producer Kevin Bright, acknowledged that if the series were made today, the racial makeup of its six main stars would be different.
“If we did Friends today, no, I don’t imagine they would probably end up being an all-white cast,” Kevin Bright said in the piece, which came on the heels of the Friends reunion special on HBO Max.
“We would be so aware,” he added. “So much would change, but to get them to behave realistically within this time, there would be a lot that would change about them. And the racial makeup of them would change because of that.”
While these statements are all very nice, in the last few years, show-makers have been using ‘diversity’ as a means of capitalism. There seems to be an uprising of woke people among critics and viewers, and in order to appease them, show-makers use at least one cent of diversity to make their shows popular. That’s why I’m skeptical whether the show-makers of FRIENDS would have changed the racial makeup for getting a higher rating or for actual humanitarian reasons.
In this day and age, everything is political. Every movie and series that is being made has an agenda behind it, and most of it revolves around making money. While I’m a money-loving person, I don’t endorse forsaking humanity for it.
Now, let’s get back to our discussion. FRIENDS is a very problematic show, especially considering the world we are living in now. It promotes toxicity, homophobia, body-shaming, lechery and insensitivity.
There’s homophobia in almost all the characters. Not to mention, the show-makers sometimes used homosexuality as a gag, like when Rachel said Phoebe was gay when Tag wanted to date her, or when Ross set up Chandler’s university profile saying Chandler was gay.
Chandler’s father is a gay, drag performer. Growing up, Chandler developed an aversion toward being associated with his father or his sexuality. It was never addressed why that happened. Why was Chandler so afraid of being thought of as gay? More than that, why did people mistake his sexuality? What was it about him that made him seem gay? Because he had a “quality”?
I guess the scriptwriter wanted to portray that having certain so-called girly habits doesn’t make you any less of a man also that gay people are also just like any other person they don’t have any labels attached!
This is from an answer on Quora where somebody asked why people thought Chandler was gay.
I’d have liked to believe the same, but in order for it to be true, we needed to see this being addressed clearly. Instead, all of the “unmanly” traits of his character were made to be kept hidden, like how he could pluck eyebrows. That’s why, if I want to give the scriptwriters any credit regarding this, I’d say they wanted to show that the “girlish” behaviors of boys should be kept hidden. None of the other characters ever said it was okay to do those things.
Then there is the whole girl-on-girl fetish. While Joey’s playboy nature is problematic, his fetish for girl-on-girl sex is obnoxious. He doesn’t even leave his close friends out of this fetish, and Chandler does it too. None of the girls in the group ever condemns them for it. If anything, they took advantage of it when Monica and Rachel had to get back their apartment from Chandler and Joey.
A lot of straight, homophobic men have this fetish, and that’s where the problem lies. They think girls can have sex with girls as long as they, the men, are getting something out of it.
Here, Ross is a special category. His wife divorced him because she found out she was a lesbian, and that’s why Ross developed this dislike for Carol and Susan’s relationship, and possessiveness toward his relationship with Rachel and Emily, and on top of all that, had a girl-on-girl fetish as well, that so involving Rachel and Phoebe. The last part was shown when Rachel and Phoebe tried to prove who was the best candidate to be Monica’s bridesmaid and Ross and Joey judged it.
Let’s talk about Chandler’s father. It seemed like he was never aware of how he affected Chandler. He was a supportive father who always went to Chandler’s sports events at his school. But what he should have done, objectively speaking, was try to understand what young Chandler was going through. You’d expect a queer person to be more aware of their kids’ childhood experiences, given how many of us have nothing but trauma to remember.
The showrunners messed the character up further, in my opinion, by giving a straight, cis-woman to play the role because she had a husky voice. When I first saw her in FRIENDS, I was glad that they hired an actual drag queen. But when I looked it up, I was very disappointed.
On the surface, FRIENDS seems like a very queer-friendly TV show. But it used LGBTQIA+ characters only as a stepping stone for other characters to develop on, laugh, and tease about.
I have seen a lot of sitcoms after FRIENDS, and some of them, while being very suitable for their time, will definitely be equally suitable in the future as well. Like, Schitt’s Creek, Brooklyn 99, Orange is the New Black, Working Moms, The Bold Type, Grace and Frankie, The Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt, etc. These shows didn’t use queerness as a means of redeeming themselves, but really tried to explore the characters’ depth. There’s also a new genre on the rise – Asian BL dramas. Many of the older ones are very ill-developed, and the characters are very shallow. But the newer ones are comparatively better, like I Told Sunset About You, Until We Meet Again, Moonlight Chicken, A Tale of Thousand Stars, etc. I will write a review on them in future.
Reference:
https://www.quora.com/Why-did-the-girls-in-Friends-assume-that-Chandler-was-gay
Sannoy Bangladesh 