Jennifer Aniston sparks debate on Friends and ‘younger generations’ finding it ‘offensive’

You know how many things can be true at the same time, but when it comes to online debates everyone seems to forget that? Yeah, well, the current Jennifer Aniston Friends debate absolutely falls into that unfortunate category.

While promoting her new Netflix movie with Adam Sandler, Aniston noted that people have mentioned that certain themes and episodes of Friends are problematic.

“There’s a whole generation of people, kids, who are now going back to episodes of ‘Friends’ and find them offensive,” Aniston told the Associated Foreign Press (via Yahoo!).

“There were things that were never intentional and others, well, we should have thought it through,” Aniston continued. “But I don’t think there was a sensitivity like there is now.”

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After her comments made the rounds online and on television, many people shared their thoughts—devoid of nuance, as can be expected on mediums like Twitter—about the actress seemingly acknowledging the non-existent “cancel culture” epidemic.

And people had thoughts.

Here’s the thing: You can love Friends for its place in popular culture (and as a fan of the show when it aired) while also acknowledging its shortcomings. Because saying things like “times were different” isn’t an excuse, it is a statement on how art for predominantly white, heterosexual, cisgender audiences was far more common in the 1990s and early 2000s compared to now (though to say we still have a long way to go in terms of diverse representation in media is an understatement, even in 2023).

I love Friends. I will always watch reruns of Friends. I will always laugh at “Ms. Chanandler Bong” and Joey attempting to learn French and pretty much any Thanksgiving episode of the show. I don’t feel shame or embarrassment about still loving the show. But I can also love the show while recognizing the show falls very, very short in many ways. There are episodes rife with homophobia, transphobia, there were barely any people of color on the show ever, the men on the show are terrible partners to women more than they’re not, and Ross is deeply problematic in many ways.

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I don’t think it’s that people find the show as a whole “offensive,” I think it’s that most television shows, movies, books and other pieces of entertainment do get dated. Because time moves on, political correctness is always expanding, we grow more educated as a society, and humor evolves as the decades do. No one would ever look at Married…With Children and say Al Bundy is a feminist hero, but we can still watch the show and be entertained while acknowledging the fact that constantly berating fat women isn’t something audiences would tolerate anymore.

See? This whole “kids today find things offensive” thing is more like “as we grow as a society we can find better ways to be funny.”