Has anyone seen How I Met Your Mother? A bunch of.... I dunno twenty-somethings who were probably forty-somethings by the time it concluded cos it went on for fucking ever. This bunch of people are essentially the same people as in friends, the main character who is the narrator telling his kids about how he etc is a hopeless romantic type with soft crying eyes and the dream of a perfect woman, a guy with surprising academic qualifications and so on. In short, he is Ross from friends, right down to his physical appearance.
Ross
Ted
And, I could basically go through the characters and explain why they are all the same (although there are five instead of six so I guess they share characteristics at times) as those in Friends.
In fact, the whole thing - despite its post-modern gimmick of it being a narration and the tiny number of jokes they glean from that (eg when they are smoking joints he censors the story cos he's telling his young kids and he will talk about eating a sandwich and then it hilariously stops making sense as the sandwich and its successor make him increasingly confused and hungry) - is an unashamed and shameful rip off of Friends, to the extent that they should have just called it Chums and had done with it...
Someone above (
@Simon silverdollarcircle I think) said something about how, despite being set in NY, Friends has nothing to say about it, less than nothing, and it's the same here, it frustrates the hell out of me that they always go to the same bar? Every day they go to the same bar and sit at the same table, and why is it they do that? NY has loads of bars, some of them are pretty good, is this one the best, the most convenient, one where they are friendly with everyone, what? They might as well just say "We are paying these guys hundreds of thousands each per episode, we need to save some money so we are only making one bar scene and by having them always at the same table we never even have to move the camera, ker-ching" - and sometimes when you read a review of something and it says "it really makes Tokyo (or Paris, or Llangefni whatever) a character" and sometimes I'm not sure if I like that idea, it feels a bit like the reviewer is scrabbling round for things to say; who cares if the location matters, if it seeps in to the plot and the feel and the.... well, I totally take that back, I was wrong, the location should be a character and she/he deserves some good lines and a bit of fleshing out cos the alternative is something like this where you just have some wankers floating round in nowhere as though it was an experimental novel in which you slowly realise that the characters are merely empty simulacra created to populate this dimensionless prison, doomed to repeat for all eternity the events of lives which were not even theirs in the first place, forced to re-enact Ross's love for Rachel with all passion removed by the fact that they don't know who Ross or Rachel was - and there was no passion to start with.
In short, they tried to write a sit-com but came up with The Invention of Morel instead by accident. And, worst of all, the shagger guy, what's he called, fuck my brain, he's called Joey, anyway in How I Met Your Mother, he is played by Dougie Howser and he is a massive massive prick, so that even if the programme was amazing, even if that whole splurge above was about how good it was, the programme as a whole would still be unbearable cos it has this cunt on it and i'm getting angry just thinking of him so I will stop there.