Jennifer Aniston says there won't be a Friends reunion because of Facebook
'There was something about a time when our faces weren't shoved into cell phones and we weren't checking Facebook and Instagram'
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Your support makes all the difference.Jennifer Aniston has likely already resigned herself to a lifetime of questions about the possibility of a Friends reunion.
So, it's no surprise she's come up with a very smart answer (or should that be a very convenient excuse), which can safely dampen those rumours for a little while longer.
Speaking to Lorraine Kelly about her latest film, Office Christmas Party, Aniston once more shot down the possibility of a future return to the iconic '90s show; revealing that she doesn't think the concept would work in the modern era of social media - yes, it's basically Facebook's fault we'll never get more Friends.
"I don't know what we would do," Aniston pondered. "I think that period of time was sort of nostalgic, you know, there's something about a time - and I think why people have such an affection for it - there was something about a time when our faces weren't shoved into cell phones and we weren't checking Facebook and Instagram. We were in a room together, or in a coffee shop together and we were talking. And we've lost that."
Indeed, Aniston's point actually seems to hit straight at the heart of the problem for so much of reboot/reunion culture; with so many of these revisits ignoring the cultural context which made these projects so iconic in the first place. You need only look at the way the Gilmore Girls revival has struggled to incorporate millenial culture into Rory Gilmore (Alexis Bledel)'s slightly nonsensical trajectory as a freewheeling, rootless freelance journalist, for example.
Friends was the show the world fell in love with over the course of the '90s precisely because it seemed to capture something of the spirit of the age: that coffee shop culture, metropolitan fantasy that epitomised the yuppie lifestyle.
Sure, Phoebe could become an accidental YouTube sensation or Joey could have some Tinder mishap, but attempting to cram those characters into a modern perspective would seriously risk losing the magic that made them loveable in the first place.
If that news is disappointing to fans, Aniston managed to drop another bombshell about the show recently: the cast weren't actually fans of the show's theme song.
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