Friends Redux
Readers may recall that I am not a fan of "Friends" (see "Friends and the Decline of Western Civilization").
I have been pleased to find that I am not alone.
Bob Hirschfeld "reports":
Rumsfeld Apologizes For Subjecting Iraqi Prisoners To Final "Friends" Episode
A humbled Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld told the Senate Armed Services Committee that he offered his "deepest apology" for subjecting Iraqi prisoners to the final episode of the sit-com "Friends."
"Frankly I though all the abuse had come to a halt at the Abu Ghraib prison and now I found out that prisoners were rounded up and forced to endure a showing of this TV show that doesn't reflect the America I know. Frankly no one should have to suffer such indignity," Rumsfeld said in a solemn tone.
Several senators who had been resisting calls for Rumsfeld's resignation thought this crossed the line. "Mr. Secretary this despicable incident happened on your watch and there will be hell to pay," said Senator Bowlen Badger of Louisiana.
Rumsfeld told the senators he has already formed a "Friends" commission to investigate how this incident occurred and who was involved. Photographs of horror-stricken prisoners reacting to the broadcast were secretly released by someone at the prison to the media. There are concerns of wide-spread protest marches in Iraq as a result.
[via Buzzflash]
Could anything humanize the prisoners in Abu Ghraib more in our minds than that story?
Then there's this week's roundup from Baltimore's City Paper:
Friends Finale
After 10 years, Friends - the sitcom where a bunch of twentynothing pals had these wonderfully ample and not-pest-infested Manhattan apartments in the early 1990s despite not having, you know, real jobs; the show that made it OK for full-grown women to have bangs; the show that propelled that horrible title song by the Rembrandts onto pop charts; the show that kept a generation of already slack twentysomethings in a state of giddy adolescence well into their thirtysomethings; and the show whose Thursday-night time slot was probably the longest steady relationship some lonely women maintained during the '90s - is over, though sure to torture us in syndication. (Bret McCabe)
Wow, that's two torture verdicts.
And we also received mail here at WWDT about the Friends post.
One reader agreed and admitted to calling the show "White Nightmare."
Another wrote:
I celebrate the demise of such a "lowest common denominator" show. Reruns of any Norman Lear show are twice as good as the "best" Friends show. Good riddance! I hope none of those lame actors work again.
And another:
I know! I know!!!! I really hate this show. It reminds me of a lot of people. I do think many people in our culture are shallow and dumb. The popularity, even the existence of this show is absolute proof of that.
Not quite an accusation of torture, but decidedly negative nonetheless.
However, we did receive some hatemail on the piece.
One reader wrote:
I hesitate to be uncool but I like Friends. I never watch TV but sometimes I'll rent the video on a quiet evening. Not that I would go to battle in its defense. It's just a good way to pass the time like going out for a drink with your mates. For the decline of American and Western civilization, I'd rather point to the mundanity of violence on children's TV and cinema, the unraveling of the family unit and a host of other issues. But that's a separate discussion. On the other hand what is excessive is the amount of praise and criticism and the level of feeling it generates (including this comment). For goodness sake, it's just a TV show.
I'm glad the reader agreed that the praise heaped upon Friends is unwarranted. And let me remind all my readers that, for goodness sake, it's just a blog.
Another typed a more defensive response:
OK, I have to take a little bit of issue with this anti-Friends bias, for which I will draw strongly from a Time Magazine article (just so I don't get accused of plagiarizing), but here goes:
One of the most interesting things about Friends is that although they ended
their seasons with weddings and births and all those normal sitcom
cliffhangers, they were all completely outside the mainstream--and no one
cared! If you think about it, the most popular sitcom on television
involves a man who has been married and divorced three times (the first time
to a lesbian) and now is living with a woman platonically with whom he has
had a child out of wedlock. One of the characters gave birth to her
brother's triplets (for whom she acted as a surrogate mother). One of the
characters has a transvestite father. The show has featured interracial
dating, a lesbian wedding and an adoption interview in which a Jew pretended to be a protestant minister in order to convince the birth mother she would be a suitable parent. The guys in the show are constantly flirting with
homoerotic relationships and even open speculation about one another (loved the whole running gag about everyone assuming Chandler was gay).
And no one ever said anything about any of it. None of the characters
comment on any of it as being cutting edge or interesting; it is just life.
And no one in the media or in politics seems to care. America just accepts
their Number One sitcom characters doing all of this stuff that is completely unacceptable to the Christian Right and other lifestyle Nazis and chuckles along.
I am not saying I know what any of it means, but I am saying that I, for
one, applaud a show that feels absolutely no necessity to explain itself.
How it is that Bush folks missed this whole undermining of their agenda,
I'll never know, but I know I am going to miss it. (And I did think some of
the shows were laugh out loud funny--remember how Monica and Rachel lost
their apartment and then how they got it back--c'mon, that was funny!)
It is striking how no one - not even the Moral Majority crowd - got upset over these anti-Family episodes. Could it be that the reason they went unnoticed is that they were mere epiphenomena -- background props to make the show seem "edgy" without actually having to engage with the issues raised?
Yeah, and Avril Lavigne is a punk rocker.
12:02:05 PM 
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