Why has the popularity of Friends endured?

The New Republic

When Friends became available on Netflix in January 2015, a wave of think pieces declared that the NBC comedy was over since millennials were rejecting its outdated cultural politics. "Offended by Ross’s anguish over his gay ex-wife and Chandler’s transphobic comments about his father, such essayists predicted that Friends’ supremacy would soon be over," says Josephine Livingstone. "In a trend-bucking twist of TV fate, the opposite came true. Friends has bulldozed its way into the American canon, and is somehow more relevant than ever."

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