"After years of neglect and boomer dominance in popular culture, someone had finally noticed us, in the sweetest way... 'Friends' was comfy, adorable, yet sharp."

"The hate-watch became a secret pleasure and, soon enough, we all had their haircuts... What nobody could have envisioned in the 1990s was the way children in the 2010s and '20s — born after 'Friends" first started to wear off — would form their own fixation on the show... My nearest frame of reference to this sort of cultural inertia would have to be 'The Brady Bunch,' the 1970s sitcom that, in reruns and brief revivals, acted as Gen X’s security blanket.... Irony was the key to it all.... But irony seems to have no place when it comes to the nonstop streaming of 'Friends'... [It is] slavishly re-watched with what appears to be an authentic and uncomplicated sincerity. Nobody watches [it] to make fun of the clothes or mock the message.... 'Friends'... acts as a soothing gateway to a time when people aren’t constantly looking at their phones. They sit on their Central Perk sofas and just talk, maintaining eye-contact. They listen to one another. They hilariously relate, in a constant state of mutual care. Their idea of stress is almost touchingly benign. No wonder people still want to hang out with them.... As the 'Friends' theme song goes, 'I’ll be there for you.' But those words referred to the bond among its characters. They were not an eternal promise to generations yet to come, and they should not have to be your friends forever. Let television take you somewhere, anywhere, everywhere else."

From "Do you really want to live in a world where ‘Friends’ and ‘The Office’ are TV’s most valuable shows?" by Hank Stuever, the WaPo TV critic.

Stuever is over 50, a Gen Xer. He thinks irony is key and these kids today are making a big mistake longing for sincerity and friendship. Something a quarter century old feels too "eternal" for him, and whoever wrote the headline for his column turned his dictate — "Let television take you somewhere, anywhere, everywhere else" — into a question — "Do you really want to live in a world where ‘Friends’ and ‘The Office’ are TV’s most valuable shows?" The market always answers that question. These shows are phenomenally valuable commercially. "Valuable" isn't really what's nagging at Stuever. He's objecting to the feelings and longings of younger people. They're not thinking right. The question — if you want to rephrase Stuever's opinion as a question — should be:  "Do you really want to live in a world where ‘Friends’ and ‘The Office’ are TV’s most emotionally rewarding shows?" And then it becomes easy to see that it makes little sense to tell young people to watch something else on television. The problem is in the real world, which is wearing on people in such a way that "Friends" feels restorative.