Thanks, I Hate It: Friends

I detest sitcoms. The laugh tracks, the visual laziness, the saccharine Special Episodes, the endless deluge of casually hateful jokes -- to paraphrase Mad Men's Abe Drexler, their activities are offensive to my every waking moment. Of all the stupid sitcoms that have plopped wetly into popular culture over the last three decades, none is so odious to me as NBC's genre-defining smash hit Friends.

There's precious little to say about the show itself, a bland succession of jokes and relationship match-ups with a braying laugh track and dull, boxy sets. It succeeded because it offended no one with power and vaguely pleased vast swathes of people who dislike thinking, and reviewing it is like reviewing those flavorless water crackers they serve at fancy parties to improve the texture of expensive cheese without stifling its flavor. "It went into my mouth and it tasted, as its makers intended, like nothing," isn't exactly fertile ground for insightful writing. In the absence of any formal elements worth discussing, then, how do we grapple with Friends? Where do we sink our teeth into its papery skin such that the bite draws blood? There is only one way.

We must examine the very souls of the Friends themselves.

CHANDLER

He is as though the show itself were condensed to the size of a single human being, a nondescript chunk of biomass whose entire personality lives in the vaguely incredulous and sarcastic shape of its eyebrows. His job is some kind of Kafkaesque nightmare of gray walls and khaki pants, a squarecore hellscape where the human spirit goes to die. He seems at home there, as a vulture might be with its head in the gas-ruptured abdomen of a wildebeest's carcass. His eyes are hollow. He is in the straight version of love with Monica. 

JOEY

The stupid Friend. Joey's idiocy is boundless and all-encompassing. He comforts the viewer with his soulful eyes and complete inability to parse sentences. He is like a trained dog brought out to turn somersaults for the public. 

MONICA

Once, Monica was high-strung and fat. Now she is thin, high-strung, and a professional chef. Like a ping pong ball her personality rockets between these two facts at increasing speeds, generating with each moment of contact that same hollow thunk-ing sound of empty plastic against pressure board and rubber. Courtney Cox is nice to look at in that uncomfortably-hot-aunt way when she is not personally insulting me from within a terrible fat suit.

PHOEBE

The best and strongest Friend. Phoebe is strange, like me. She believes in shoplifting and in the arcane power of the moon. The other Friends pretend to scorn her eccentricities, but in reality they fear her. They know that she is unafraid of death.

RACHEL

I do not remember Rachel. I think she is an irresponsible and horny mess.

ROSS

The most terrible Friend. A whining, amorphous clot of neuroses as tedious as they are cloying. He is insecure not as people are but like a heavy piece of ship's tackle improperly secured, incapable of stopping himself from smashing everything around him into splinters and pulped meat with the sheer weight of his emotional uselessness and drippy self-pity. I believe that the audience's collective desire to see Ross brutally murdered is what drove the show to such giddy heights of success. For the entire duration of the series David Schwimmer had to sleep in a sealed and moving train compartment protected by holy seals and runes carved into the car's panels to ward off the Evil Eye.

Friends is over, but its legacy in television is a grotesque nine-lane highway aimed straight at mediocrity's horizon. It is a testament to the power of shooting for the middle, of unseasoned cooking, of elevator muzak. It is the triumph of everyone's third-favorite option to a storm of modestly enthused applause.