For Your Consideration: The under-appreciated greatness of Cheers

It wasn't terrible, it got better as it went along, but I didn't care for it. I didn't like the characters at all, even though I was the same age. Perhaps it was because I was the same age and thought they were phony. I thought most of them were douchebag poseurs, so I didn't care about their relationships and problems.

Plus, it came hot on the heels on trendy shit like Singles, etc., so it felt really forced at the time to me. Hey! Let's throw Generation X into an apartment, make a few of them quirky and few sincere, and see what happens!

I guess the core of what bugs me in context to Cheers is that it's mentioned in the same breath as Cheers just because it was popular.

There's a difference between popularity and influence. Cheers (and Seinfeld and The Simpsons and a few others) squared the circle of doing both. Friends was just popular and its influence was to create a bunch of knock-offs without doing much to advance the form of the sitcom.

 

But it just wasn't consistently funny. 1990s Comedy for people with low standards, the laugh track letting you know that hey, that was a punch line.

Heehee, Phoebe's dumb. Heehee, Joey sort of is too. Heehee, Chandler just said something dumb. Everyone's dumb! Yay!

While there were attractive ladies to be watched, ogling Aniston and Cox got old the moment Ross showed up. One of the more annoying, useless characters on TV.

And how in the world did they afford those apartments?

Along with Seinfeld and Sex and the City, that show did more to create a false mythology around life in New York City. Of course, I really liked the other two, at least until Seinfeld was clearly TRYING to create "water-cooler TV!" and Sex and the City became more about who they were dating than anything else.

But yeah, never a fan of Friends. "(Mostly) Pretty people not being funny" just wasn't a half-hour I was interested in, though I understood why the show was a hit.

 

While I watched plenty of Friends during its run and still occasionally catch a rerun, like Bubbler there's a serious disconnect with a bunch of "average" people I was supposed to relate to. From a familiarity standpoint, none of the characters made any sense.

 

There's a good on-going thread about the best Simpsons episodes. There's been a Seinfeld version of the thread too, I'm sure.

Could there be a Favorite Friends Episode thread? Is there a greatest hilarious moment in Friends that has entered the pop culture lexicon that most everyone instantly recognizes?

 

Seeing a Friends jack of a perfectly good Cheers thread makes part of me die.

 

There has never been a Caroline In The City jack.

 

Nor Boston Common. Nor Suddenly Susan.

I would do glorious things to Lea Thompson though.

 

Its clear though that both of you are critiquing the show based more on perceptions of what it was rather than having begrudgingly watched the series and then come to these conclusions. It was actually quite funny throughout its run, and the characters were not just hipster archetypes. Chemistry in sitcoms is actually quite hard to manufacture and to find six actors who could sustain that chemistry for 10 years is a pretty rare thing. To find three beautiful women with really good comedic timing is pretty rare too.

The Friends backlash is actually way more hipster than liking the show ever was. If you couldn't relate to six attractive people living improbable lives in NYC that's one thing. I cant relate to Sex and the City and think its one of the most cynical, narcisistic shows of my lifetime. But it wasn't a bad show. It just wasn't for me. I recognize why it works for its time period.

 

Paul Reiser and Helen Hunt haz a sad.

 

The Ross character was enough to make me find something else to watch. A flat, dull, wimpy, truly godawful character. He stood for nothing.

I also had been exposed to enough of the hipster douchebag set on a daily basis that I didn't need to retreat into that world on TV.

 

That prom video episode, when we found out that (female character who is hot now) was once overweight! And how (male character) once had stupid hair! And (other female character who is hot now) used to have a funny nose that ended up getting operated on!

I laughed so much, my side ached, and my heart went pitter-pat!

 

Not buying it.

I watched the show. How could you not through most of the 90s? My opinions are based on having watched it.

Like I said above, it was the network's version of young-adult culture in the mid 90s. At the time, I thought it was insulting because it presented people my age (the still-hated-by-me Generation X tag) as lightweight douchebags who weren't as "serious" or as accomplished as their high-holy Baby Boomer parents. No coincidence, I thought, since it aired on the same night as Baby Boomer avatar Seinfeld.

Nearly two decades hence, I don't give a shit about the generational part of it, but I do think the characters were developed in only the most basic sense. The only character I liked was Chandler, who was self-aware in his buffoonery.

It was a laugh-track comedy show, a decent one that had some moments, which is fine, but in no way does it qualitatively make the cut as one of the best sitcoms of all-time.

And if Friends' backlash is hipster, than I'm hipster as fuck and proud of it!

(Who is SJ's biggest hipster is a thread in the making ...)