{"id":37269,"date":"2021-07-30T14:42:00","date_gmt":"2021-07-30T14:42:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.christianitytoday.com\/pastors\/preaching\/sermon-illustrations\/sad-legacy-of-tvs-friends\/"},"modified":"2021-07-30T14:42:00","modified_gmt":"2021-07-30T14:42:00","slug":"sad-legacy-of-tvs-friends","status":"publish","type":"sermon-illustrations","link":"https:\/\/www.christianitytoday.com\/pastors\/preaching\/sermon-illustrations\/sad-legacy-of-tvs-friends\/","title":{"rendered":"The Sad Legacy of TV\u2019s ‘Friends’"},"content":{"rendered":"

In a blog post, author Jonathan Van Maren writes:<\/p>\n\n

\n

It wasn’t until I was doing the research for my book The Culture War<\/em> that I began to come across analyses highlighting a darker aspect of the TV show Friends<\/em> legacy that I’d never considered. Ashley McGuire of the Institute for Family Studies wrote, “In reality, Friends<\/em> was a decade-long Hollywood experiment in testing the moral limits of Americans and desensitizing viewers to harmful sexual behavior … the show made a punch line out of casual sex and hookups and portrayed them as consequence-free. No STDS, no trips to the abortion clinic, no staring at their phones waiting for the one-night stand to call. Just a good laugh over the last condom in the apartment and a porn marathon.”<\/p>\n

TV sitcoms tell stories; stories have storytellers. The cast and crew of Friends <\/em>wanted to push the envelope, knowing that TV is a frequently a feedback loop that not only reflects culture but also drives, shapes, and informs it. Friends<\/em> was the second show on TV to depict a same-sex wedding, decades before the landmark Supreme Court case of Obergefell v. Hodges and a year before Ellen DeGeneres famously came out. Ross Geller’s wife leaves him for a woman and marries her—he walks her down the aisle after her bigoted and homophobic father declines to do so. NBC was braced for a backlash when the episode aired, expecting thousands of angry phone calls. They got only two.<\/p>\n

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