Whether you love it or hate it, whether you hate it because people love it, or whether you’re a ‘woke’ millennial and want nothing to do with it, no one cares, because sh*t loads of people are still watching Friends.
So much so, that Netflix have reportedly paid $100 million to keep the sitcom on its streaming service.
Furthermore, fans of the show – as they have been for a long time now – are calling out for a reunion.
Whether it will happen is another question entirely, especially as Jennifer Aniston has now named and shamed which of the six main players are against it.
Speaking to James Corden on The Late Late Show, the 49-year-old actress seemed open about reuniting with her cast members, but there were those who seemed more reluctant.
She said:
Listen, the girls always say we would love to do it again, and the boys are a little less excited about it for some reason, I don’t know…
Instead, Aniston suggested a different kind of reunion.
She added:
And so, we’ve decided that we’ll just do … a remake of The Golden Girls in 40 years…
Sounds like the guys – Matt LeBlanc, Matthew Perry and David Schwimmer – need to get on board or risk being left behind.
Check it out:
You can see why the boys might be reluctant to get the band back together, given the dire results of attempted spin-off Joey.
According to the show’s producer, Kevin S. Bright, Joey was not first choice for the spin-off. To add insult to injury, he wasn’t even second or third.
Speaking to Metro, Bright said:
At first it was the obvious choices of who they wanted to do a series with and Jennifer was up there first, but she wanted to do movies and she wasn’t interested in television.
Then we liked the idea of a Monica and Chandler series, but everyone at the end, strangely enough, while they were grateful for doing the show, they didn’t want to play those parts anymore, [but] Matt loved Joey and he didn’t mind playing Joey.
As for the content of the spin-off, Bright added:
Even I don’t know what Joey was doing in that show, but it wasn’t what the fans were familiar with so it was not successful. We had hopes it was going to be Frasier but it didn’t turn out that way.
So could we soon see Joey and gang back at Central Perk?
Bright told Metro:
I love David Crane’s quote that “50-year-olds hanging out in a coffee shop would be pathetic”.
If we did come back it would be the same characters but wouldn’t be the same show.
They’re at different places in their lives, potentially divorces, and so we feel just like letting them go off into the sunset is one of the things which keeps them going in people’s minds; wondering what they do, and did the marriage last, and what did the kids grow up to be like.
I think that’s best left to the audience.
A Friends/Golden Girls mashup it is, then?
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Charlie Cocksedge is a journalist and sub-editor at UNILAD. He graduated from the University of Manchester with an MA in Creative Writing, where he learnt how to write in the third person, before getting his NCTJ. His work has also appeared in such places as The Guardian, PN Review and the bin.