So I enjoyed this piece by Clive Martin & Nathalie Olah about the weird, timeless lameness of Friends and how it’s influenced our culture. I particularly like the point about the profoundly unhip, achingly white New York City life these creative 20-something professionals live. It’s fun to look at pictures of the Friends cast now because their clothes are so impossibly hideous that it makes you doubt your own knowledge that styles change and clothes go in and out of fashion.

THE DENIM.

But as Olah and Martin point out, even though they helped determine what was cool in 90s hair and fashion, the Friends gang was spectacularly uncool, in a way that, as they say, seems very deliberate. (Almost ideological!) It’s a good piece.

However, one complaint: every time Martin and Olah say “Friends was the first to do this,” they’re wrong. They call Friends the first aspirational sitcom. But to pick just one example, look at The Cosby Show, which I grew up with. It was aspirational not just in the sense that it showcased a vision of black affluence that was not largely available to most black people, given the realities of the income and wealth gaps, but also aspirational in the sense that Americans watching it wanted to believe in an America where the new normal for black families was doctor fathers and lawyer mothers. (You can unpack a lot of problems with the Huxtable vision, and some people have; I’m simply too close to the show to make that argument.)

Similarly, they claim that Friends invented the coffee shop dick. But coffee shop culture was already spreading into the popular consciousness. It was skewered a year before Friends debuted, in the Mike Meyers vehicle So I Married an Axe Murderer. It was certainly already a part of the national understanding of “Seattle” when everybody got obsessed with “Seattle” in 1991. And when they say that Joey Tribbiani was the first pickup artist, I’m not quite sure even they can believe it. The pick up artist is a  stock figure that goes decades and decades back. (There was a movie called The Pick Up Artist in 1987!)

Just an odd, recurring issue in an otherwise fun piece.