And if you’re a big fan of the series, there’s no substitute for having that ability to watch or rewatch it at your leisure. Just as I was thankful for those DVD sets years ago after the show went off the air, owning Friends-either on Digital, Blu-ray, or DVD-is the only way to get the show right now. And while the show is planned to be streaming as part of Warner Bros.’ upcoming streaming service HBO Max, the relatively short window of time that Friends was streaming in the first place is a reminder that there’s no substitute for owning the show outright.
TV was over, and all of a sudden Friends wasn’t available to stream anywhere. The licensing agreement with Warner Bros. Friends was almost as popular now, in the 2010s, as it was in the 90s and early 2000s when it absolutely dominated the pop culture discourse.īut in January 2020, Friends disappeared from Netflix.
Suddenly teens and pre-teens were now discovering a series that had brought myself joy at the same age, and Millennials were using the newfound streaming availability as an excuse to rewatch Friends over and over.
In 2015, the show made its streaming debut on Netflix, and it started to reach an entirely new audience. The show also navigated life as a sexually active twentysomething with surprising frankness, although as the show wore on the characters would begin to put down relationship roots, leading to some of the best arcs of the series (Monica and Richard, my heart).Īnd you know what, for the most part, Friends still holds up remarkably well. Through 10 seasons, Friends pushed boundaries of what was “normal” on television at the time, and while some of the jokes and subject matter haven’t aged all that well, in the 90s Friends was unique for simply having LGBTQ characters who weren’t only there to be the butt of jokes. And Phoebe was dealing with the trauma of her mother having died at such a young age (in Phoebe’s own way, of course). Ross was having a baby with his ex-wife who was now an out lesbian. The first season alone found Rachel leaving her husband at the altar and cutting up her credit cards determined to be financially independent for the first time. We watched as Rachel, Monica, Phoebe, Joey, Chandler, and Ross navigated life in their 20s (and eventually 30s), but instead of zeroing in on the mundane, Friends delighted in the complicated. Yes it was the traditional three-camera sitcom format, but instead of focusing on a family or adults or a romantic couple, it instead focused on six very good friends-as the title suggests. It’s kind of hard to remember now, but when Friends premiered in 1994, it was kind of groundbreaking.
What The Office is to so many Netflix users right now? Friends was to me, back in the day when you had to get up and change each individual DVD disc out to continue on to the next episode. Something to watch in bed while winding down, or to revisit with friends (real ones, IRL!) on the weekends. Friends had become a balm with which to end the day. By the time I was in college a few years later, these DVD sets were already falling apart. When the iconic NBC sitcom wrapped up its 10-season run in 2004, I had already started buying up the individual DVD sets.
Before “binge-watching” was a publicly acceptable term, and before Netflix and Amazon and Hulu and countless other streaming services made full libraries of films and TV shows available on demand, Friends was my comfort watch.