The Lonely Goatherd Blog And before him shall be gathered all nations: and he shall separate them one from another, as a shepherd divideth his sheep from the goats - Matthew 25:32
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Al Barger and MoreThings - getting people's goats since 1998.
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All original content on MoreThings.com copyright 2008 Albert Barger or the respective authors
August 22, 2003
Colorless Friends you can't get rid of Blessedly, a final season of Friends. Alright, go already. Be gone. And take your syndicated re-runs with you. What do I have to do to get rid of you? I'm just about ready to put on the Captain Beefheart CD.
I've always hated this show. Not really hated, for that is an active emotional state. More like the Martian hate of Stranger in a Strange Land, the kind of bitter hatred that might best be described as "mild distaste."
I charge Friends primarily with the crime of being colorless. Let me just expound by copying and pasting from dictionary.com: they are characterless, dreary, dull, insipid, lackluster, lifeless, prosaic, tame, unmemorable, unpassioned, vacuous, vapid.
In short, they have the blandest show on television, give or take the insipid Everybody Loves Raymond. These character have no personality. They are the blandest bunch of nothing imaginable. Howard Cunningham had more flavor.
Still others have a perhaps not entirely different argument against Friends being "colorless" on the basis that none of the principal friends is black. It is apparently at least a misdemeanor hate crime to have any show without a major black character. You remember when we all voted on that, right?
I really don't see the merit in this lament about blackness. Keeping the argument all in the family, let's refer this to fellow Blogcritic Dew, and her cleverly titled column "Friends race against time."
"Blacks have a problem with the lack of color as its being referred to here because where do we get to identify?" Apparently black folk can't or shouldn't identify with a caucasian character. Hmm. From my side, I have no trouble at all identifying with, say, Bernie Mac.
Here's a particularly prime bit of NONSENSE from our Dew:
I think you would have to be black to understand
Why is that? Do you have some special superior black people logic that goes over whitey's head? Or do you wish to make an epistemological argument that knowledge is based on emotion, and further that being an American of African heritage in 2003 is uniquely oppressive so that no other kind of human suffering would suffice in giving you the ability to understand the horrible injustice of not seeing any black Friends?
Oy, the suffering! Will this torment ever end? By that I mean the whole show, not any non-existent black characters. Thankfully, yes. Just this ONE more season.
But then again, one of these Friends fools already has a new show for the fall. I bet he'll be up to his ass in black folk, doing penance for the Friends collective hate crimes of exclusion. Watch and see if they don't absolutely literally come up with, in the infamous words of James Watts, a woman, a black, two Jews and a cripple.
But why would a black or any other hue of personhood want to watch this crappy bland show in the first place- much less a sequel, when they could be watching any of The Original Kings of Comedy? See, these guys are actually FUNNY.
