Writing for Slate, Chris Suellentrop takes a look at Friends:
Only 21 million viewers tuned in [to Friends] last year, compared to the nearly 30 million viewers who watched during the Ross-and-Rachel heyday of Season Two. And fans haven’t been coming back for the show’s final episodes, either. During last week’s time slot, more viewers watched CSI than the penultimate episode of Friends. As the South Florida Sun-Sentinel TV writer Tom Jicha pointed out this week, seven out of eight American homes don’t watch Friends, and this season’s ratings wouldn’t have cracked the Top 20 for any show only a decade ago, in 1995. This is mass appeal?
But there’s another, more fundamental problem with hailing Friends as the last great situation comedy: It misstates the genre to which the show belongs. Friends isn’t a sitcom. It’s a soapcom, a soap opera masquerading as a situation comedy. The earworm theme song, the laugh track, and the gooey sentimentalism all conspire to fool viewers and critics into thinking they’re watching a family sitcom like Growing Pains or Family Ties updated for urban tribes (a Golden Girls for the pre-retirement set). But the beautiful people with opulent lifestyles, the explicit sexual content (everybody’s slept with everybody, Ross’s ex-wife is a lesbian, Chandler’s dad is a transvestite, etc.), the long multi-episode story arcs, and each season’s cliffhanger ending are the show’s real hallmarks. Days of Our Lives isn’t the only soap opera that Joey has a role in. And this one’s got jokes to boot.