World TV

I personally think that Friends was annoying juvenile crap.

Wow, I thought I was the only one who felt that way. It wasn't bad when it started, but when they started playing musical beds it strained credulity. I'm not making a value judgement, I just think it's unrealistic to think they could all remain friends.

(by the time I count to 40 someone will inform me that Friends is an exact duplicate of themselves and 5 of their closest friends, and it's completely normal unless you are an inhibited uptight Whacko that is afraid of sex)

Well, that's me to a T.

Aren't we all?

I think the effect of Friends on "the WORLD" might be, for many people, to make them throw up a little into their mouth.

Some of the people I work with are like that.

Yes, the floating orgy that everyone participates in and where your office mates spend their free time. I stopped going when they stopped playing calypso music. Booooo ring

Anyone familiar with British TV, even the 'soaps', is likely to agree with you !

The Whole World??
I have not even heard about it.

I don't believe i ever watched an entire episode, and what i did see i saw because i was visiting a friend who was watching it, or whose main squeeze was watching it. I found it implausible and all too predictable. In the 1980s, everybody who talked teevee at work was gaga about the Bill Cosby show. So i watched an episode. It was all too predictable. It seems to me that The Honeymooners defined in the 1950s all the basic situations upon which situation comedies depend. Since then, sitcoms have just recycled those situations with a different set of characters. This applies to britcoms, too. Every once in a while, a program will come along like Taxi, or Barney Miller or To the Manor Born to break the mold--but if they run for any length of time, they fall back the predictable situations. It seems success and longevity are the bane of good television comedies. Friends sucked from the day one.

I loved Barney Miller.

And I love Taxi - it's still being shown on one of the Freeview channels.

You forget one of the greatest shows of them all, I Love Lucy. To this day I can still watch that show and laugh even though I have seen all of them at least 3 times.

You're absolutely right about I Love Lucy, and i did think about that, but after i had already gone back upstairs. I wasn't going to come back down and turn on the computer just to post that. So i will revise my statement--I Love Lucy and The Honeymooners created all the situations in the 1950s that situation comedies have used ever since. (With a few, a very few, notable exceptions.)

Friends has not aged well at all. It really jumped the shark maybe 3 seasons from the end. NBC really got into a bind as the cast (good agents, but bad for business all around) had big, fat, long-term contracts, and the show was still doing very well. The smartest thing that cast ever did was negotiate as a team, and use their onscreen chemistry for salary leverage. It was enough of an ensemble show that NBC had to go along with it or risk slaying the cash cow.

Between a lousy season of Friends and an okay season of a new show, NBC took lousy seasons of Friends every time, as their financial hands were essentially tied. Per Wikipedia, the cast of the show each made $1 million/episode in seasons 9 and 10.

Probably Aniston, Cox, and Kudrow have done the best since the finale. Aniston makes movies, Cox had her own series, and Kudrow's made some cable shows and the likes. I'd put Schwimmer and Perry in kind of the middle; Schwimmer directs. Perry's done some smaller stuff (in all fairness, Perry was in rehab a couple of times) and is going into his second season on The Odd Couple. Odd man out is LeBlanc, who was the guy with the spinoff.

I had a job once in a finance office where we were given transparent plastic desk mats and folks used to put photos of family, pets, etc under them. One guy had one picture only, a huge image of Jennifer Aniston showing a gigantic amount of cleavage. An eye-watering amount. You might wonder how he got away with it, and the answer is he was the boss. One person called it (out of his hearing) "the valley of death".

I think the world show
it's the X factor
it is watched all over the world

I agree, this is a very interesting show, which is recognized worldwide.

Yes but Friends DID change the WORLD
Go into town, how many coffee shops ala Central Perk
are there , before friends there were just greasy café`s
It is relected in the language people use, Oh My God - that is SO.
Things are SO !!!
The BIG coffee cups ...
Need I show more examples of how the show changed the WORLD !!