* Apparently, Friends‘s worst sin is the fact that Chandler was hyper-upset and paranoid whenever people accused him of being gay. Apparently, being upset for being confused as gay isn’t allowed, since, according to the left, gays aren’t any less “manly” than straights, and there isn’t anything wrong with them, don’t you imply otherwise!!!
N.B. One writerly in-joke of the show was that Chandler was originally written as a gay man. Then they scrapped the idea before the pilot, but left in much of his characterization, and thus having him freak out about being less manly/gay was the a call back to his actual original demeanor.
* Friends used to be the ur-SWPL show. The characters were more or less my generation, though, so I watched it obsessively and occasionally still do.
* I remember Friends as being fairly PC in a 90s sort of way, that is to say with a sense of humour still. The characters were clearly meant to be the happy-progressive wing of Gen X and showed it, but I recognized them as an attempt to depict the non-rich Manhattan wing of my generational tribe.
I don’t remember them going out of their way to be diverse, nor to suggest any criticism of diversity. Much like normals in that decade would have been. I don’t recall any noteworthy gay or tranny humour, but then I probably wouldn’t have thought it memorable if there had been. [It’s coming back to me now- there was the whole Chandler/Joey ‘are they secretly gay’ gag that popped up now and again, but back then such humour was not assumed to be anti-gay, and it certainly was not presented as such. That must be it.]
If it’s not the Chandler/Joey thing, I expect [I am not about to read the WaPo article] we are now to regard it as racist, sexist and cissexist on the grounds the characters were all white and seemed to have few interactions with non-whites [Jews were overrepresented- both Gellers and Rachel Green for sure], the women were on the ditzy side [the men were also losers, of course], and all 6 were straight.
I guess I’ll have to go out and buy the whole series now and binge-watch while waving a Confederate flag and knocking back rye and cokes and reading heartiste.
* At the rate things are going, all recordings of TV dramas and sitcoms will have to be destroyed once they’re five years old, lest any sensitive person stumble upon them and be offended.
* If “Friends” is offensive for its lack of mandatory diversity, then I wonder how long Disney will be operating the Jungle Book Cruise at Disney World for its insensitive portrayal of the tropical natives as cannibals? I guess that is a little too much diversity for this day and age.
* One of the greatest videos on Youtube is the Watergate tape of Nixon recounting a new show he saw, All in the Family.
“So there’s this average Joe, conservative blue collar guy, works hard, Abert or something. And he’s got this hippy son, a fag, who’s always berating him about his terrible ideas. And they present the whole thing like the old guy’s a laughable buffoon for what he believes. Pure propaganda.”
Something like that. Then they talk about the episode meant to deal with homosexuality where of course Archie’s oldest friend, the high school football star who looks like Arnold Schwarzenegger on a particularly masculine day, turns out to be gay.
* I hated that show with a passion because it was so PC and the characters were so self absorbed. What does that make me now that it is viewed as being unPC? Oh yeah, an iSteve fan.
Funny, but the other day I was thinking about how much I hated the show and googled the number of children the cast members have. The average child per cast member is .66. My guess is that real world equivalents to the characters (PC and self-absorbed) have about the same fertility rate. Good riddance.
* I don’t like political correctness any more than the next guy but I’d really love to see the cast of Friends put on trial for their crimes. We need a neo-Maoist reality TV trial of the bunch of them. The hostesses of the show should be some mocha-coloured girls with difficult hair. Ideally it would be university undergrads who can really get themselves worked up. Does anyone know where we could find some?
