The TV sitcom “Friends” was…unPC (PunC?)

…“Friends’” has been the main lightning rod for such perceived shortcomings, especially since it became available on Netflix in January 2015. Right after that, Slate ran a piece that called Chandler Bing “agonizingly obsolete. . . . Once he may have seemed coolly sarcastic, the gang’s designated ‘funny one.’ But through the eyes of a 2015 viewer even vaguely cognizant of modern gender politics, he’s also the cringe-worthy one.” The piece referenced a YouTube video called “Homophobic Friends,” a montage of the show’s male characters engaging in “gay panic” — where the implication that one of them might be gay is the joke. The concern has cropped up in other online think pieces, listicles and forums, including one Reddit thread that asks: “Was ‘Friends’ really as homophobic as the Internet seems to think it was?”

I’ve seen a grand total of maybe 20 minutes of “Friends” – it came out at a time when I wasn’t watching a lot of TV, and for a while didn’t own one.

But the article does include one quote that needs to be pasted into just about every discussion about revisionist PC; Ray Bradford of the gay activist group GLAAD, noted:

“Images don’t exist in a vacuum — you look at where they were at that time of progression of TV and our country, and also where we are now and the standard,” Bradford said. “When I looked at Kathleen Turner’s character [apparently, Turner played Chandler’s trans-gendered father], there was nothing tragic about it. It was not a story line depicting her as a killer or a psychopath or a sex worker 0r anything like that.”

Whenever I hear people retroactively picking over the political incorrectnesses of the past, I say to myself – and, not infrequently, to others – “God save us, meaning mainly you, from the opinions of our descendents; we have no idea what’s going to set them off”.

And this article is proof…