We Finished All Ten Seasons of Friends

If you're like Jenn and I you spent a lot of the late 90's and early 2000's in love with Friends. I know we both have watched most of the episodes but we were both going through Junior High and High School when the show was on so we definitely didn't watch all of it. At the start of 2015 Netflix added all ten season to their streaming service and so Jenn and I made it our "fill in" show for much of last year into the first month of 2016. 

A week ago we finished the last episode of Friends and have now put a ribbon on the entire series. I will say that going back through the entire series gave me a different appreciation for it. The first five or six seasons still hold as comedy brilliance. There are not many shows on today that can match how good Friends was. The six friends have such a good rapport which each other that you just can't help but feel like your meeting up with your own friends. 

However for those that watched Friends when it was actually airing you know that the last couple of seasons start to go completely off the rails. That's not to say that they aren't enjoyable but it didn't hit with the same punch. My biggest issue was that all of the characters become characters of themselves. Chandler and Joey are probably the biggest offenders. Somehow Joey becomes dumber and Chandler becomes terrible at jokes. It got to the point where the writing just started to feel lazy and I found it really hard to finish the last two seasons of Friends. All of the storylines started to feel like rehashes of the early season stories, I'm talking about you Rachel and Ross. 

When I look back at ten seasons of Friends I still consider it one of the best comedies of my lifetime. However now that we have gone through from episode 1 to 236 I think it will be a while until I feel ready to go back and watch Friends in syndication.