“Friends.” It’s a popular TV show held to a high-esteem and beloved in the hearts of many. It’s a comedy classic. It’s our graduating class of 2019’s senior shirt.

And I think I hate it. Don’t get me wrong, if I’m stuck in a hotel and forced to choose something to watch and my options are infomercials or “Friends” reruns, I’ll begrudgingly choose the latter.

But if I have to watch “The One with Unagi” one more time, I actually might cry.

It’s not that the show’s really bad, perse. It’s simply not good.

For example, I know I’m supposed to like this group as they go through the trials and tribulations of life. But can I point out the fact that they are legitimately bad people and there is no character development from anyone that spans more than the length of a cutesy confession or a moment of understanding at the end of the episode?

For every good thing a character does or things that the show attempts, there is almost definitely a horrible thing to cancel it out.

Sure, they were a part of history having the second gay wedding on a sitcom on their program, so kudos to that.

But they also have Chandler saying openly homophobic or transphobic comments towards his father, who either crossdressed in drag or transitioned to being female. I’m not sure, the writing was very unclear. Plus the father was played by a straight woman with a husky voice, which is another problem entirely.

And some make the argument that Chandler was simply tired of his dad not being very affectionate or present in his life. In which case I’d gladly direct them to look at the example of any of the children of the main cast.

Ross has had a son, Ben, practically the whole show. This son shows up in 16 episodes and primarily so that the show can make jokes about the two moms that raised him in the stead of Ross and the main cast, like Chandler and Joey who happen to forget the baby on a bus.

Why did they forget the baby on the bus? Because you know, they’re men. And men like boobs, or whatever. So when they were following the women they’re flirting with, they forgot the baby.

Ross, the father, on another occasion with Ben gets super upset and whiny because Ben is playing with Barbies, and that’s so weird. Right?

Then, the show realized that Ben wasn’t really very good at humanizing any of the main cast, and Ben simply disappears from existence because of a little thing I like to call bad writing.

Many tropes simply playing into gender stereotypes or pervasive ideas about sexuality were a staple of the show’s cardinal sense of humor.

For example, one of the guys will do something effeminate or show another male affection and then someone else makes fun of them as the punchline of the joke. The whole gang constantly talks about how unattractive Monica was when she was overweight. And Joey and Chandler literally giving up a nice, spacious, somehow-affordable apartment in New York City to watch two of their female friends, Monica and Rachel make out a little.

Furthermore, I feel like I always hear people joke about how white “Seinfeld” is, but “Friends” is literally no better.

Do you know how many reoccurring black characters there were in all 236 episodes? Four. And that’s including characters that appeared for two episodes. Do you know how many appear in three or more? Two. More than four episodes? One.

And this wouldn’t be so weird if the show didn’t pride itself on taking place in New York City, a city representative of the “melting pot” of cultural vibrancy. While meanwhile, the cast of “Friends” has is about as vibrant as 50 shades of tofu.

And I could go off on a rant about how the show is saturated with easy jokes that we’re supposed to laugh at because it follows the scripts of societal expectation.  I also could give it the benefit of the doubt, and say sure, maybe it was just a show of its time.

Regardless, it informed a whole generation of people and was presented as a wholesome family show. But like everyone’s favorite racist grandfather, no matter how much you love him and want to honor his memory, you shouldn’t defend what verbal diarrhea gets spewed out of his mouth.

And sure, you could argue that the more ignorant things they say are supposed to be comedic and thus are supposed to be terrible. But ultimately, what this teaches is that the overt dismissal of various groups of people is harmless.

It’d be a different case if any of the characters showed growth or development in their thinking over time, but they kept the same character archetypes with the same general misconceptions repackaged each time.

There is no such thing as a lovable brand of sexism or homophobia. There is no such thing as lovable hate.