Friends and the Golden Age of the Sitcom

British podcaster Hagan traces a brief history of the development of television’s situation comedies before homing in on the American shows of the ’90s, from Seinfeld to Frasier to Scrubs, with a focus on the decade-long run of Friends (1994–2004) and its influence on the entertainment landscape. Hagan asserts the show’s continued popularity 20 years after its last episode aired is due to the adaptability of the writers to allow the characters to change and grow while providing new opportunities from babies to weddings to apartment-swapping. Hagan does a good job of tackling the problematic issues of the show. This includes an almost total lack of diversity, its often cruel humor aimed at physical attributes of characters (namely ongoing references to “Fat Monica”), its simplification of the queer experience, and adolescent jokes surrounding Chandler’s transgender father, played by a cisgender actress. Hagen avoids the off-putting nature of the characters themselves, tiptoeing around the outright selfishness, misogyny, jealousy, and unhealthy possessiveness that drove the primary romantic relationship of Ross and Rachel.