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Movies & TV

11th May 2017

Jennifer Aniston describes her idea of a modern-day Friends episode and it sounds depressing

Rory Cashin

Despite being off the air for 13 years, people are still a little crazy about Friends.

Just last week there was a (now deleted) post on Facebook by a guy called David Scwimer (the misspelling should have been a dead give away that it was fake) that claimed that show would be returning this fall for a one-off mini-season event, and the internet promptly lost it’s mind.

In the intervening years, it has become more and more apparent that Friends is deeply of it’s time, as hindsight think-pieces pick the show apart for being racist, sexist and homophobic.

That being said, a modern-day version of Friends would still be watched by just about everybody, especially in the light of the popularity of the return of The X-Files, as well as the upcoming returns of Will & Grace and Roseanne.

In a podcast interview with Arianna Huffington earlier this week, Jennifer Aniston is also very aware that the times, they are a-changin’, and a realistic portrayal of six friends hanging around a coffee shop all day would be very, very different:

“[It] isn’t pretty. Now you have a computer, a television, and a phone. There’s no room. We were jokingly saying that if Friends was created today, you would have a coffee shop full of people that were just staring into iPhones. There would be no actual episodes or conversations.”

Plus, everyone would be in their 40s, most of them with kids, so would they even have time for daily coffee catch-ups in Central Perk, which would most likely be a Starbucks by now? We doubt it, but that’s for the show’s writers to figure out.

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