During this age of reboots and revivals (and even parody revivals), it tends to feel inevitable that every treasured TV show from our past will one day be dragged back into the zeitgeist with a quirky new take. Luckily, it doesn’t sound like Friends will ever get that treatment.
Deadline reports that Friends‘ creators Marta Kauffman and David Crane spoke on a Friends 25th Anniversary panel at the Tribeca TV Festival, where they definitively ruled out the possibility that they’d ever take another swing and the show, which ended in 2004.
“We will not be doing a reunion show, we will not be doing a reboot,” Kauffman said. She went on to explain their reasoning, saying that the show was always supposed to be about a time in your life when your friends become your family, but life eventually changes and your family becomes your family.
That’s a pretty good reason not to pick up 15 years later to find out where Ross (David Schwimmer), Rachel (Jennifer Aniston), Chandler (Matthew Perry), Monica (Courteney Cox), Phoebe (Lisa Kudrow), and Joey (Matt LeBlanc) are now, but to make sure we’re not still dreaming of a rebooted concept, Crane made sure to emphasize that, that particular option doesn’t appeal to them either. “It’s not going to beat what we did,” he said.
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Though there’s no denying that viewers will turn out for a reboot of their favorite show (the Roseanne and Will & Grace revivals both showed solid numbers when they debuted), there’s some part of us that’s glad to hear Friends will continue to exist in its own perfect little time capsule. It truly would be impossible to recreate that kind of magic.
Friends is currently available for streaming on Netflix and will move to HBO Max next year.
Courteney Cox, Matthew Perry, Jennifer Aniston, David Schwimmer, Matt LeBlanc, and Lisa Kudrow, Friends