We don’t have to apologise for Friends

This weekend became The One Where We All Lost A Friend: Matthew Perry, Friends actor, addiction spokesperson and rehabilitation advocate, who died aged 54. He played the sweetly acerbic, chronically insecure Chandler Bing. Perry’s comic genius and impeccable timing meant he created a particular style of delivery and physicality that was uniquely his but endlessly imitable, epitomised by the smart-alec cadence of his immortal catchphrase, ‘Could I be any more…’

Friends, like everything, is a product of its time and should be contextualised as such

Yet among the grief and love is an insidious need to caveat how supposedly ‘problematic’ Friends is: that before you acknowledge Perry’s death as a ‘tragedy’, you have to throw in a disclaimer that it has ‘aged horribly’ or that some of the jokes are ‘dated’. When the show re-aired on Netflix in 2017 and gained a much younger audience, there were plenty of accusations that Friends was too white, too homophobic, too transphobic, too fatphobic, too crammed with outdated cultural politics, as if the first episode aired 30 days ago and not 30 years.