Friends
Here’s my theory: despite what they may claim, nobody loves Friends. Nobody on the entire planet has ever felt a genuine whoosh of love when they realised it was on. Maybe they felt a warm tingle of familiarity. Maybe a fizzle of nostalgia. Maybe resignation because the remote was too far away to reach. But love? Hardly.
Friends was – is – too mass-produced for that. It was a fast-food sitcom that prized lukewarm consistency over wit or invention. If Seinfeld was a show about nothing, Friends was a show about nothing interesting. It was about six white twentysomething haircuts relying on tired old cadences for laughs. Friends never changed, it never evolved. Watch any episode now and it could realistically come from anywhere in the series. The only way you can accurately date an episode is by scrutinising Matthew Perry’s face for the ravages of drug-related exhaustion.
Even though it ended 12 years ago, Friends inexplicably refuses to die. It was repeated into the dirt on E4 for years, and now it’s repeated into the dirt on Comedy Central. When Netflix bought the US broadcast rights, over a decade after the final episode aired, it paid almost $120m. This is a bewilderingly vast sum of money, because Friends isn’t anywhere near as good as people say it is. I had to watch Friends in the 1990s because I was young and we only had four channels. But now, with all the choice available, you can do better. Friends is wallpaper. It’s slop, mashed down and processed for easy consumption. Friends is hospital food. Could it be any blander? Stuart Heritage
Seinfeld
An episode of Seinfeld always appears to me to be an exercise in actorly masochism. Here’s a standup’s single semi-insight-cum-joke-type-thing stretched thinner than bubblegum across 22 minutes. How long can you keep selling it? How long can you maintain the illusion that anyone would truly give a mouse-sized shit about any of the infinitesimally small social solecisms that fill this world?
It is further agony to watch Jason Alexander, Julia Louis-Dreyfus and Michael Richards keep pumping energy and credibility into the roles of George, Elaine and Kramer in order to disguise the void that is “Jerry Seinfeld” and Jerry Seinfeld – outplayed by the furniture itself – at the show’s heart. It should be prosecuted for nine years of cruelty to actors, not feted. Lucy Mangan
Mad Men
For a while I had the privilege of writing the Mad Men recaps for the Guardian. With a large and loyal audience, the blogs required attention. You had to watch the episode and take notes. You had to submit those notes to intensive textual analysis, then scan the show once more for oblique cultural references (Don is reading Dante on the beach) and analyse those too (but what does it mean?). Finally you had to double cross-check your observations against every other episode in the series so far, to fit each character’s actions into the grand, heroic arc that creator Matthew Weiner no doubt had planned for them. Then you had to take notes about the clothes.
After a while, I decided all this effort wasn’t worth it. This may have coincided with the third reinvention of Sterling Cooper Draper Pryce Cuthbert Dibble Grub, or when that underwhelming Brit baddy got his toes chewed off by a lawn mower. Like Saul on the road to Damascus, I had a realisation: Mad Men wasn’t the great existential drama of our age, exploring the nature of identity and our Freudian urges. It was just a meandering soap.
I stuck with it to the end, partly because I didn’t want to admit I’d wasted my time (there were 92 episodes, ninety flipping two), but also hoping there would be a satisfying resolution. In the end all I got was an attempt at pulling a Sopranos; an enigmatic ending that, in fact, wasn’t at all enigmatic. The conclusion, if you’ll pardon the spoiler, was that Don Draper, Mr Death Instinct, had used a moment of ultimate crisis to come up with a better jingle for Coca-Cola.
If the conclusion was a cynical comment on the nature of mankind, it hadn’t been necessary to spend 70+ hours to get to that point. And if, as I suspect was actually the case, it was intended as a happy ending with the great man creating a lasting piece of culture, then I had to despair for humanity. Still, nice suits. Paul MacInnes
The West Wing
It’s the drama that convinced me to love American politics, that taught me about filibusters, pork-barrel projects and how fast it’s possible to walk while still holding a conversation. So why don’t I love The West Wing more?
Partly it’s because creator Aaron Sorkin is so unashamedly sentimental about life on Capitol Hill. President Josiah “Jed” Bartlet (Martin Sheen) and his idealistic team always mean well. Their opponents, meanwhile, are cartoonishly evil figures who exist only so Bartlet and co. can point them towards the righteous path of truth and justice. This hectoring tone reaches its nadir with The US Poet Laureate, the 16th episode of the third series, AKA the one in which Josh discovers the internet. Like his creator, he despises it. And he tells us so at great length.
There are some highlights – John Spencer and Allison Janney are a joy to watch as irascible chief-of-staff Leo McGarry and White House press secretary CJ “The Jackal” Cregg – and the series two climax is a beautifully handled look at bereavement, grief and the lies we tell each other and ourselves. But boy does this show know how good those moments are. It’s not quite the smuggest TV show ever made, but that’s only because The Newsroom exists. Sarah Hughes
Lost
For six long convoluted seasons, we lapped up Lost. We lived on that not-very-deserted island, the one that can magic planes to crash into its surf. We loved Jack, Sawyer and their fights over Kate. We loved Locke, Sayid, Hurley, Jin, Sun – all the Oceanic Flight 815 crash survivors in fact. We can still recite the number that cropped up everywhere. We can still sing Drive Shaft’s You All Everybody.
But let’s just stop and consider Lost again. The hatch? The light in the hatch! The monster? A column of smoke that emitted mechanical croaks. And a button that had to be pressed every 108 minutes to “save the world”. Plus the island was full of polar bears and dead people? Oh, and the island speaks – and it’s electromagnetically adrift in time and space thanks to a giant frozen wheel at its core.
It’s so clear now that the entire thing made a mockery of us. I wasted six years on conspiracy theories. I went online to watch Dharma Initiative training videos for clues, for pity’s sake. Millions of us did. No wonder the showrunners will never live down the despicably maudlin cop-out biblical ending. Lost was the ultimate in tease TV. 4 8 15 16 23 42. Kate Abbott
This Is England
“I just … I fuckin … I dunno, I just fuckin … it’s like ... my head, it’s … I just fuckin … I dunno.” So says Woody from This Is England, several times in every episode, regardless of what’s actually happening, and normally ending with: “But I fuckin … I do love yer Lol.”
And so on and so on. Of course, I wanted to love This Is England. I fully expected to. Who wouldn’t get excited about the trials of a group of scooter-riding, Fred Perry-wearing mates as they entered adulthood against the backdrop of two World Cups and one acid house explosion?
But it just seems so one-note. A production line of endless bleak trauma with the odd “having a laugh” scene that usually features nothing anyone in real life would laugh at. And real life is, after all, what This Is England prides itself on. Despite the fact some of the acting looks like a local theatre workshop doing a histrionic run through their new play Look How Real I Am, Me. And without the insight that sometimes talking like you do IRL isn’t so much “authentic” as repetitive and boring.
There’s none of the subtlety or depth that you’d demand from, say, a top HBO drama. The drugs, violence and sex, no doubt intended to be brave and challenging, is delivered in such a heavy-handed manner it just seems try-hard. And despite the suffering written into the lives of the characters, it’s an effort to really care what happens to them.
If I ever speak to anyone about this show they all nod along to these points and then say, “but I still quite like it” – infuriatingly affording it a sacred cow status that makes me really mad and ... I just ... I dunno, I fuckin … I just, I fuckin … I dunno. Tim Jonze
Downton Abbey
Americans have a propensity to believe that anything delivered in a British accent is inherently more intelligent and important than anything with a twang. It’s the only possible explanation why Downton Abbey has won so many Emmys. Julian Fellowes’s saga of the Crawley family and their servants was mostly enjoyable, but it certainly doesn’t rank as prestige television. Just look at some of the events that took place around that historic mansion: Sybil’s death by childbirth, Matthew’s death by car accident, Anna and Bates’s multiple murder investigations and jailings, Lady Edith’s child out of wedlock that she tried to pawn off on the farmer down the road, Cora losing her baby after slipping on soap. These are the plot devices of a daytime show; all that’s missing is amnesia and evil twins.
Downton Abbey was a great spectacle, but it never had the depth to be anything more than posh filler. Don’t be fooled by the accents – it was a bodice-ripper, not an historical novel. Brian Moylan
Battlestar Galactica
Back when Sky aired Battlestar Galactica, they ran an advert comparing it to other golden-age TV series: it had, they claimed, the political smarts of The West Wing, the raw adrenaline of 24, the characterisation of The Sopranos and the social commentary of The Wire. This wasn’t just geek fare; this was gourmet telly.
You hear this sort of thing a lot about Battlestar Galactica, but I’ve never accepted that argument. OK, the show did wrestle with some big issues – race, religion, free will v determinism. But every sci-fi series, from Star Trek to Babylon Five, has done the same. And like those shows, Battlestar Galactica had sci-fi signifiers that made it impossible to take seriously: cringeworthy cod-philosophical dialogue, acting that flits between stilted and hammy, and an overwhelming sense of self-importance, as if we should be treating a series about sleeper robots infiltrating a spaceship like a Ken Loach film.
So no, the Battlestar box set doesn’t deserve to sit on the shelf beside Mad Men et al. But there is one fantasy series that has all those attributes boasted about in that Sky advert. Its name? Game of Thrones. Gwilym Mumford
The Walking Dead
There’s something about The Walking Dead that will transform you into a bloodthirsty gut-junkie, desperately hoping the next supernatural disembowelling will be more depraved than the last. That something is boringness.
The series, which has followed Rick Grimes and friends through a post-apocalyptic, zombie-filled America for over 80 hours now, moves so slowly it can feel as if you’re physically wading through time itself.
It’s not that The Walking Dead doesn’t have characters or ideas or content, it’s just that they are spread so thinly and monotonously. Forget zombie carnage, this is a show most concerned with the senseless killing of your time. Rachel Aroesti
Arrested Development
As much as I liked the ensemble cast and the many talented guest stars, this show was far too happy with itself to make me happy too. It always felt as if I was watching it with the writers sitting next to me, signposting every overly constructed joke, smugly looking back at me not for a laugh but for a self-satisfied smirk. I had similar problems with Community – another show that decided to tell you it was funny then explain why for what felt like an eternity. Benjamin Lee
- Look out for our pick of the most underrated TV shows tomorrow
