Well, the thing is, they started as characters and morphed into caricatures. I think Bill Simmons summed up the series pretty nicely:
A lot of the series revolved around Rachel and Monica wearing body-hugging knit shirts in a 40-degree apartment.
Or Monica wearing a fatsuit, one of the most jaded, offensive, non-funny comedy shortcuts known to man.
did it make them look hot? (no not in the temperature sense)
Friends didn’t appeal to me because it was a rip-off of one of my most beloved TV programs: Living Single. LS, featuring an all-black cast, was canceled after five years while Friends was allowed to continue forever. And yet I believe LS was the superior product, go figure.
I could watch LS reruns till Kingdom Come. Can’t say I’ve ever watched a Friends rerun willingly, and I probably never will. The theme song is a HUGE turnoff, for one thing. It gets my gag reflex going like nothing else.
I hardly ever saw anything clever on a Friends episode. The Simpsons had the presence of mind to mock its use of catchphrases, but it seemed that the Friends writers thought that “Could it BE any more __________” was hysterical. It wasn’t very clever the first time.
Yes re: Anniston, but the underlying network manipulation was just too much. The girls were on display everywhere.
Yes, that was always painful.
I think it represents the Upper East Side accurately enough.
It was a funny enough show, but like all sitcoms it became incestuous. The fatal flaw of all sitocms or shows like the OC or 90210 is the fact that no romance can last longer than the three or four episodes a guest star will appear on. That works with Joey or the commitmentphobic Sienfield cast, but unless you want to introduce a brand new character permenantly or make your characters perpetually single, at some point they must date each other to have a long term relationship.
Actually, I beg to differ. The girls were not on display enough. 95% of the reason that I watched was to see what Jennifer Aniston was wearing. Far too often, nothing special.
Asking someone “why do you hate Friends?” seems a bit like asking someone “Why do you hate the sound of fingernails on a chalkboard?” Or “Why are loud cell phone conversations on the subway bothersome?” Or maybe “Why does Carrot Top make your skin crawl?”
Bad is bad.
Except, of course, the things you mentioned, Loopydude, are disliked by most people. Friends wasn’t, which is what makes it interesting that some people disliked it.
Lots of good reasons given here, but I have to agree with RickJay, too: Anything that is popular gets people who hate it simply because it is popular. The opposite is true, too: Anything that is popular gets people who love it simply because it is popular.
Aren’t people fun?
Y’know, I never disliked it because it was popular; to me it lacked appeal from the 1st episode on. I would have asked “What is appealing about Friends?” I thought Jennifer Aniston was way hot, but as soon as her character began speaking, I wanted to turn off the sound.
I guess it’s just me.
I felt the same way about Seinfeld. Never got it, never understood why others thought it was so funny. But I never ask people to explain what makes something funny. You can’t explain humor.
I enjoyed Friends up until the time Ross was getting married in England and accidentally said Rachael’s name at the altar instead of his fiancee’s. That’s when it jumped the shark for me.
I never did care much for Ross, thought he was a weenie of the grandest scale. And though I enjoyed looking at Jennifer Aniston, Rachael became as annoying as Ross to me after the wedding fiasco with the on again, off again romance. The only characters that were really funny to me were Joey and Chandler when they shared an apartment. As a previous poster mentioned, they were no longer as funny after Chandler moved in with Monica.
I stopped watching Friends for Survivor, only catching Friends on an occasional rerun. I did make it a point to see the final episode and like others, felt it was a mediocre ending.
I enjoyed the first few seasons of “Friends,” and I think my enjoyment started declining right around the time that Ross stopped being Charlie Brown and was given a bewildering array of psychoses and neuroses whenever the writers needed a third storyline to fill out an episode.
I seriously don’t think that’s true to a large extent with Friends. I like a bunch of popular TV shows, past and present, but Friends was just cringeworthy. But it’s not like I spent any spare time watching it for the purpose of hating it; I would just see it if people I was with were watching it.
It would have been more interesting if the writers went through with some of the episodes they talked about doing.