Friends (TV show)

IanExMachina

I've always found it to be lacking anything humourous or funny.

To me it is just forced bland tripe.

AHR

A suitemate of mine LOVES it.

Vivi

I've been watching it the last couple of days, for the first time.

I've seen quite a few hilarious moments.

gentlemanorcus

Eh. I don't really find it funny but I don't have the frothing-at-the-mouth hatred of it like some people do.

Malkavian

I've seen an entire season and I'm not sure I could tell you a single thing about it.

MillerCross

I actually like early-Friends. It's quite good for a sitcom, anyway.

TheConductor

First four seasons: Gold.

Seasons five and six: Slipping a bit, but still good

Season Seven: Friends at it's best

Season Eight: Meh

Season Nine: Crap

Season Ten: Better than nine, but not as good as eight.

captainbrass

I used to watch it a bit when it first came out. It was OK, but I never thought it was as good as some people claimed.

Evergreen

I've never seen it, though I remember how big it was at the time. I didn't watch TV as a kid, and even if I did it wouldn't have been something like that. I've never watched sitcoms...(my first-ever properly watched TV show was Lost, the only show I still watch today is Fringe. 'Nuff said.)

The co-creators of the show went to my university. We like to boast about it, and claim that Central Perk is based on our charming little coffeehouse, but apparently that's not actually true or something. (I once heard the myth even more horribly mangled by a student who claimed that our coffeehouse was the one drawing inspiration from the show, and that a member of the main cast had gone to school here. And a freshman believed her!)

captainbrass

^ Well, if you want to impress people with your college history, but the connection's just a myth anyway, you might as well go for broke and make some completely outrageous claim.

"The character of Phoebe was based on an actual bad folk singer who used to perform here!"

"The co-creators of Friends like the coffee here so much, they used to have it shipped to the set! Then they bought the coffeehouse!" 

Evergreen

Ah, but see, I care so very little about Friends that I would never do that!

My life here is dedicated to the cause of dispelling our many myths and spreading the truth about, especially, our castle. (Just barely not pictured: The entrance to the aforementioned coffeehouse.)

I don't even think my parents watched the show. Our family in general have always been more of Seinfeld people. (Not me of course, for the same reasons discussed before. I just didn't watch anything at all, and being a lazy bastard I haven't gotten around to enjoying Seinfeld on Netflix or whatever.)

IanExMachina

^

That is a pretty modern castle.

captainbrass

^ Sadly, unless you present Mythbusters or run Snopes.com, mythbusting is a pretty thankless task. A lot of people prefer the cool stories to the drab reality.

Evergreen

^^It's America. We don't really have proper castles like you do. This guy Smith was a bit of an eccentric but he wanted to make his medical school interesting. Contrary to the exceedingly popular myths that I try very hard to dispel, he did not seek to relocate an entire Scottish or Irish or [tour guides can't seem to agree on where it was] castle and then when denied sought to sketch the whole thing but was denied interior plans and thus imitated the whole thing from the outside in, which is why it's so incredibly confusing-

Nope.

John Hall Smith wasn't that dumb. He drew from many influences for his castle, and built it one section at a time over the course of a few decades, adding on new parts as the school's needs grew. Any confusion today is the fault of my university, which altered it extensively over the past decades to suit their changing needs. A combination of alteration and modernization is what robbed the castle of most of its original charm and left it muddled and hard to navigate. But Smith didn't build it that way.

The myth scapegoats Smith and shifts all blame off the university, for one. And two, I don't think the reality is, to quote captainbrass here, drab. And anyone with a passion for history, which describes most of my friends pretty well, cares about the truth in these cases.

As you can see, this is a subject that I really care about, and it's completely derailed the thread. If you want me to start a separate thread, then fine. But I just don't think a university that's only 63 years old should be so shrouded in myth. We're not frickin' Harvard. My grandparents are older than this damn place!

IanExMachina

It is quite interesting to hear about really.

I remember the University I went to was named after someone who might have been a paedophile. Different opinions on historians and all that.

Evergreen

My university was named after a legendary Supreme Court justice. He was several decades dead at that point, I think. We have an awesome statue of him looking like a wizard with robes blowing in the wind, hands out like he's about to cast a spell.

It was almost named after Einstein, and designed entirely by the great modernist architect Eero Saarinen, but Einstein quit the whole thing, and Saarinen became too expensive for the founders to work with because he suddenly got famous so he quit after designing just two buildings. The tour guides still boast about these two, but one has been notably altered almost beyond recognition and is now horribly ugly. It's a student center. I ate lunch today, the room was far too cold and I think the (notoriously bad) food constipated me. (Sorry if that's TMI)

The other building is right next to it, it's a dorm and while the only change made to it was a window swap-out in 1979, it's now rather hated because it's the only unrenovated one in the quad.

If he had designed the whole campus according to plan, we'd have lots of connecting bridges and walkways, and at least one dome-shaped building. We have no such things. He actually did design some other colleges more like this elsewhere though.