Friends

You’ll be able to sit on Chandler and Joey’s recliners too.

The beloved series WILL stay on Netflix next year.

So no one told you streaming your favorite sitcom was gonna be this way...

From ‘The Fresh Prince’ to the extended ‘Arrow’-verse. Reader, it got weird.

The Handmaid’s Tale is not friendly by nature, even when actual Friends show up. One of Season 2’s most bizarre moments almost didn’t happen, as producers reveal a labyrinthine process to get brief footage of a classic Friends episode into Gilead.

If Will & Grace didn’t kick in the TV revival door, Roseanne certainly blew it off the hinges. There’s still a few major TV revivals to ponder, but NBC brass now say Seinfeld or Friends will never happen.

Now that CBS has reached back through time to bring Murphy Brown to 2018, the age of revivals is truly upon us. Many have long-viewed Friends as the Holy Grail of potential reunion series, but star Lisa Kudrow now dismisses the prospect as “sad.” Is she right?

It’s not uncommon for movie studios to recycle their sets between productions, or for different crews to make use of the same locations. For sharp-eyed viewers, this can create the surreal effect of fictional universes overlapping and coexisting with one another. Take Hogan’s Heroes, for instance: the company behind the popular POW camp-set sitcom put the compound on which they shot most of their episodes up for sale after they had wrapped. It was later used for numerous other shoots, most notably in the pornographic Nazi-exploitation film Ilsa, She-Wolf of the S.S.

In the decade-plus that’s passed since the series ended, it’s become increasingly clear that Lisa Kudrow was the best actor on Friends. Maybe we were too preoccupied with Rachel’s hair and perfecting our Joey impressions to notice it then, but thanks to the generous gift of hindsight, it seems glaringly obvious now. Despite David Schwimmer’s excellent Juice-fueled turn on The People v. O.J. Simpson, and Jennifer Aniston’s typically solid and, sure, occasionally good roles, it’s Kudrow who has proven herself as the most consistently great actor of the bunch. Why, then, has Hollywood been neglecting her so much in recent years? Why are films like Neighbors and The Girl on the Train wasting her on nothing, throwaway roles with a maximum screen time of three minutes?

NBC’s Friends may have given us one of the last great three-camera sitcoms, but might it have been so successful under the original title, Insomnia Café? Or with Jon Cryer as Chandler? Find an extra capable of working the espresso machine, as the 33rd episode of ‘You Think You Know TV?’ commandeers the couch at Central Perk for some friendly facts from Friends.