The end of FRIENDS is near. What on earth are E4 going to do?

Early last year Channel 4 announced that from autumn 2011 it wouldn’t be showing its signature show FRIENDS anymore. The move seemed controversial at the time, Hell freezing over seemed more likely then channel 4 not showing FRIENDS anymore, but at the time autumn 2011 seemed so far away nobody really registered the news or if they did they at least assumed Channel 4 would have done a U Turn by now.

But here we are, it’s now 2011 and October, along with the end of friends, is only a few months away. Let’s face it the summer is going to fly by (it always does) and before you know it channel 4 is going to have a great big gaping hole in its schedule.

I’d imagine that if your aged between 15 – 30 then FRIENDS your go to show. If there’s nothing on the TV whilst you’re eating your dinner, well then put Friends on. Waiting for a show to come on in the evening, put FRIENDS on whilst you wait. ‘Stick on FRIENDS’ is a sentence that is thrown around my household quite often. It’s usually met with a groan and ‘no not again’ but never the less, once you’ve put it on and watched five minutes of it there’s always a smile on your face. I usually play a game with myself before I turn the television over to see if I can guess what season is showing and usually I get it right. It’s on so often you can usually work it out depending on the last time you watched it. I know some people think it’s a bad thing that it’s on so much, but if people are watching it (which they clearly are) then why take it off?

Thankfully Comedy Central has picked it up and will be showing it instead. This means there is a glimmer of hope that they will show it after the watershed (something channel 4 haven’t done since 2004) so some of the more riske jokes are left in. It will be quite nice to be able to watch it without it being so heavily censored, but come on, who’s really going to watch it on Comedy Central? Those with freeview won’t be able to full stop and if it’s not on every day in the time slots you’ve become accustomed to then the chances are you aren’t going to bother finding it.

Personally I still don’t really understand why channel 4 is getting rid of FRIENDS. It seems to me like they were embarrassed of how often they showed it, so they acted quickly without thinking it through properly when it came to renewing their contract with Warner Bros. I suspect (in the wake of the success of The Inbetweeners) they wanted to be seen as a more cutting edge channel that breeds home grown comedy, but one good show (that has already ended) does not make you cutting edge and does not give you licence to go round cutting the shows that people watch the most. Credit to the Yanks they’re never embarrassed of showing repeats. You would never see NBC cancelling reruns of Seinfeld and Cheers for good. The thing is if nobody ever watched FRIENDS then it would have been cancelled 7 years ago when the show actually ended instead of showing it twice a day, seven days a week. The whole situation just yells ‘MISTAKE’

I understand Channel 4 wanting to get rid of some of their old shows and introducing new ones. Axing Big Brother was the right thing to do, but by cancelling FRIENDS channel 4 are shooting themselves in the foot. If they’re going to go around cancelling American sitcoms that ended years ago then Everyone Loves Raymond, Frasier and old episodes of The Simpsons should be axed as well. The sensible thing to do would be to relegate it to a weekday morning when people can choose to watch it or record it, rather than it being on all the time. Axing it completely without even reducing the amount of times you show it seems slightly rash.

It also begs the question; what the hell are E4 going to do!? What are they going to show between the hours of 5 and 6 and 8 and 9? That’s 4 half hour programmes that they’re going to have to find and whatever they show I’ll put money on it not being as good as FRIENDS. There’s no way they can show The Inbetweeners and Friday Night Dinner at the same time they show FRIENDS. So where are these, quality new home-grown shows that are meant to be replacing it going to come from?

I only hope channel 4 have the decency of making the last ever episode of FRIENDS they screen is the last ever episode of FRIENDS. It would drive me mad forever if they just ended it in the middle of a random season leaving the show forever in limbo. No matter what you think of the show, it doesn’t deserve to end on a sour note like that.