“Some girl “ate” Monica”, “Why is my son playing with Barbie?”, “Are you a man who works as a nanny?”. These are just some of the lines heard on the hit sitcom “Friendswhich aired on the US network NBC from 1994 to 2004.

And if at the time, phrases like the above put Friends at the top of the TV audience’s preferences, today they are considered problematic and disturbing. The series, created by Martha Kaufman and David Crane, became available for viewing and streaming a few years ago, having gained a “second life”.

In a short time, Friends has found a new audience thanks to the addition of the series to Netflix. Indeed, as social media comments soon became clear, viewers are mostly Millennials, but Gen Z as well. That is, people who were young or not even born when the episodes began airing. But this led the younger generation to discover problems with the script and called the content sexists, homophobes and transphobes. And it shows that this TV will not “pass” in 2023 with the change of society and the emergence of concepts such as #cancelculture and political correctness.

phenomenon recognized Jennifer Aniston, one of the series’ stars, who recently stated in an interview that “comedy as a television genre has evolved so much that it’s hard to be funny these days.” He added: “There is a whole generation of people, mostly younger, who are watching Friends today and find the story offensive. The script included lines that should never have been spoken and others that we should have thought about a bit, but I don’t think it was tactful today.”

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Series that would be cut today

It is a fact that the television texts of the past decades are today subjected to harsh criticism and reaction. And this applies not only to “Friends”, where homosexuality and obesity were ridiculed, but also to other beloved series. For example, “Office(2005-2013), where we encountered homophobic and stereotypical comments in episodes such as the Jamaican vacation with Michael “turning” into a Jamaican citizen. Even in “Donson Creek(1998-2003), in which an inappropriate love affair takes place between 15-year-old student Pacey and his 36-year-old teacher. In the fourth season episode “Sex in the city(1998-2004), Samantha’s character gets into a fight with three transgender people outside her apartment, and then Carrie calls them “half female, half male…very embarrassing”.

“These series come and go back to the screens. The question is how the programs of the past temporarily land in texts where there are other conditions of television permissibility. That is, what was good then, is not present in our time. The second question is what expectations can we have today from texts that were written 20 and 30 years ago and which are still circulating in the public sphere,” says K. Spyros HairetisDoctor of Cultural Studies at the University of Oxford, specializing in visual/pop culture.

With the trend of abolishing culture in television and film (which has become more prominent in 2020 due to the temporary abandonment of the classic film “gone With the Windfrom the HBO Max platform due to protests in America over police brutality and systemic racism after the death of George Floyd) there was a big debate about whether we can change the products of the past. “Personally, I remain skeptical about this trend of changing or abolishing the products of the past, because it can only lead to historical amnesia,” explains Mr. Hayretis.

Despite the reaction, he himself emphasizes that we need texts like this to bother us. “To look at them and see where we’ve been as a society, as spectators, and where we want to go.”

When it comes to sitcoms, they often deal with issues of gender and sexuality in a rather stereotypical way. “They use these stereotypes to generate laughter, but these days they function as forms of violence by high status groups against lower status groups.” Of course, the question arises whether such stereotypes and humor should be completely condemned. “This is important, especially when you consider that genres such as sitcoms or sitcoms invest in stereotypical characters, and these traits are the main foundation on which the jokes themselves are built,” says Mr. Hairetis.

In Greece

In addition to abroad, in Greece there were also programs that caused laughter at the time of airing, and now viewers could feel uncomfortable in reruns. For example, “You are my soul mate“and satirizing obesity or”Unacceptable“Where apart from that part of John’s homosexuality, which for some is analyzed through a painless / nostalgic prism and seems logical, for some others it reproduces endemic stereotypes,” notes Mr. Hayretis.

Series from earlier decades may have different vocabulary and different meanings. The question is whether we can evaluate them and how. “Reading the series will always be a kaleidoscope: each person brings their own ideologies, typing and analyzing them in different ways. So it’s important to hear all these voices, what people are saying.”