After Friends premiered on NBC on September 26, 1994, Jennifer Aniston's popularity skyrocketed. Although she was already known in Hollywood, Rachel Green was and will always be the role of her life. Created by David Crane and Marta Kauffman, the series had an incredible reception in the nineties, reaching almost 53 million viewers in front of the screen.
Almost a decade after its last chapter, in an interview granted to promote the premiere of her new film, Criminals in Sight, Jennifer Aniston has declared that the series includes certain jokes "that could have been thought better".
Rachel, Ross, Monica, Chandler, Joey, and Phoebe took over TVs around the world for ten long seasons. The six protagonists went down in history as the highest paid actors on television, in addition to having an excessive popularity internationally.
The new generations have also had the opportunity to laugh with Friends, the series is available on Netflix and has been re-broadcast on television on more than one occasion. However, to the surprise of many, young people do not fawn over the series as older generations did in the past.
Aniston confessed during the interview that now "there's a whole generation of teenage people who watch episodes of Friends and find them offensive." The actress explains that many of these mistakes were not made intentionally, while others could have been "thought out better, but there wasn't a sensitivity like there is now."
A group of users comments in an open conversation on the Quora social network the reasons why we should not laugh at all thanks to the series. "Why don't young people like the Friends series?" Asks a user to open a debate.
Another user responds that they found many reasons, "starting with Ross's ex and his girlfriend, a radical feminist who hates men, to Chandler's transgender father, the show made the LGBTQ community its punching bag." Also, he explains that there's an episode "where Chandler is terrified because people think he's gay."
Racial diversity is non-existent in the series and this issue has also been highly commented by its modern viewers. "It's a show that takes place in New York, one of the most diverse cities in the world, and basically doesn't include non-white characters," he says.
The user ends his comment by assuring that Friends is "superficial and unrealistic. Perhaps the white twenty-somethings of the 90s could identify with the series... but now it is totally implausible."
To these criticisms could be added many others that the series has received over the years, related to sexist stereotypes, a clear fatphobia in Monica's flashbacks and the presence of toxicity in the relationships between its characters.
Criticizing all of this, Aniston acknowledges that the world has changed and "comedies have evolved, now it's a bit complicated because you have to be very careful." The actress says that this complicates the work of comedians and adds that "the beauty of comedy is that we make fun of ourselves and of life."
