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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]This was before "prestige TV." Before Sopranos and Arrested Development and Mad Men and Veep and all of it. Television used to be called the boob tube. You didn't stream it, you couldn't even record it unless you have a VCR and many people didn't, or didn't know how to program them, or couldn't be bothered to buy the blank tapes to record shows.

So you just sat down to watch TV at the appointed time listed in the newspaper or TV guid (yes, newspapers used to print weekly or nightly TV schedules). There were four broadcast networks, so you had 4 choices.

Shows that came on in the first hour of prime time (8pm EST, 7pm Mtn and Pacific) had to be palatable to an entire family, from a 5 year old to an 80 year old. So you got a lot of family sitcoms this way -- Family Matters, Cosby, Growing Pains, etc. After that, the youngest would often go to bed, so then you could put on shows like Friends or Seinfeld, with more adult themes (people had sex, though not on camera, they had more caustic humor, but never used bad words). It was actually controversial and there would be debates about whether these shows were appropriate even for teenagers because they shows things like premarital sexual relationships, people drinking and smoking cigarettes, people being rude to strangers or even breaking the law. Seinfeld was particularly controversial in this regard. Then the final hours of television would be given to more adult programming, but the sitcoms would give way to 1 hour dramas like ER or thirtysomething.

Fox upended a lot of this. It put a show like the Simpsons, which was billed as a family show but had a lot of more adult and transgressive themes, on at 7pm. A lot of it's dramas were aimed at HS students, like Beverly Hills 90210 and Dawson's Creek (Melrose Place was also very controversial). Fox had a reputation for pushing the limits and what themes you could put on evening television and there was a LOT of hand wringing about it.

In that context, Friends was actually pretty sophisticated for the era. It showed young people dating and having sex outside of marriage, pursuing various careers in sometimes non-traditional ways (like Phoebe being a masseuse or Chandler leaving his corporate job to go into advertising -- things people did in real life but that were considered outside the norm by middle America). And it did this in a comedy sitcom, not a "serious" drama. So Friends actually felt really fresh and cutting edge at the time. It had more DNA in common with Laverne & Shirley, Taxi, or Mary Tyler Moore than with the family sitcoms that populated most of 80s television. Even though it was filmed on a soundstage in LA, merely setting it in downtown Manhattan felt gritty in comparison. Similar with Seinfeld, also not filmed in NYC.

Friends is not a 2023 sitcom. Of course it feels old-fashioned and silly to you now. Things change.[/quote]

Spot. On.[/quote]

Yep. And people get it down on it now for homophobic comments but Friends was groundbreaking in featuring same-sex couples, like Ross's ex-wife who got married on TV. Also, while they made a joke of Chandler's trans mom, they still featured a trans character, which had never been done. You can't judge entertainment by current day attitudes. Progress is made in small steps.[/quote]

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