Programmes/Films That Haven't Aged Well..

[JengaCupboard]

I have been off work a couple of days with a stomach bug, so a lot of time has been spent flicking through Netflix and Amazon for films/programmes etc. I'll preface with being an avid fan of easy-watching background rubbish.. however a few things have been ruined for me this week...

Starting strong I thought we'd have a bit of Christmas trash and put on 'The Holiday'; used to love this. However I switched off after the first half hour because all I really homed in on was Cameron Diaz punching her ex (because she's a woman & he's a man that's OK), followed by advocating drink driving by swigging red wine out of the bottle in the Deli... and quite generally just found it quite dated and cheesy and ultimately not entertaining.

I've had a similar experience with old episodes of SATC recently too - used to love this however in hindsight what a bunch of god-awful self obsessed women in completely unrealistic and narrow minded roles.

I dare not put on Friends or Bridget Jones in case I tarnish the memory forever!!

Obviously this is light-hearted, but more seriously is this an age thing (nearly 40) or is it created by a more cultural/societal shift where women punching men, using 'gay' references as comedic slurs and advocating for drink driving is literally not accepted, let alone funny?

Is it just a continuation of change, for example watching Carry On from the 60's & 70's is potentially an even more extreme example, yet to me at least less unwatchable?

Is there anything that you used to love that you now can't watch for this kind of reason?

Outdated attitudes and opinions are one thing, which if the material is high enough quality can be more interesting as a discussion point as time goes on. One thing that becomes more painfully apparent with time is gimmicks. I don’t like Love Actually primarily because its plot line is gimmicky. Several stories going on at once, none of which you can really get interested in or develop because a film is only a couple of hours or so long. It’s like they tried to reinvent the storytelling wheel. Again.

See also: Inception (who remembers that now?), Avatar (lots of little blue people; so what?), the most recent Star Trek efforts (Discovery etc, though several episodes of Voyager also disappeared up their own final credits).

I think that ‘Holiday On the Buses’ is still hard to beat.

I never could stand the likes of Carry On etc. Unlike lots of others I still enjoy watching the likes of Allo Allo, and absolutely love Benidorm because they are supposed to be micky taking, shocking and offensive. Most films and TV was made by men, for men, and reflected the world they wanted and enjoyed. The guy was the personality and the hero, the woman, usually referred to as "the girl" was a prop and / or just there for decorative purposes. It reflected society and how pushed back women really were. It isn't about being woke or easily offended, it's about being pissed off at how the 90s and 00s saw women.

I know he is a national treasure, but I started to find Alan Bennett really creepy when all those Talking Heads monologues were on during lockdown. Every single one of them was sexually perverse - a mother lusting after her own teenage son and admitting it to her friend who said she lusted after her own son too. Or the woman who is married to a man who joins in the gang raping of a neighbour's wife with a bag over her head on a regular basis. History Boys is one of his less creepy ones by comparison.

A musical about the AIDS epidemic in NYC in the 80s is very 80s? Imagine that.

Some viewpoints transcend a particular point in time, and some don't. Squatting artists writing bad songs and contemplating their own navels as heroes vs man trying to clean up neighbourhood as villain doesn't wear that well in the 2020s. That's not to say it's not a legitimate piece of art or legitimately important and groundbreaking.

It’s based on an opera composed at the end of the 1800s. Seems to transcend a certain point time to me.

SATC was always shallow and labels-obsessed.

Pretty much all Steven Seagal films are unwatchable now. He’s the expert who is going to save the day and he brings some random girl from the street along for the ride.

@WinterParakeets not true. There are a lot of monologues with different themes.
https://vocal.media/geeks/alan-bennett-s-talking-heads-a-review-of-the-original-monologues

K. But the ones I saw were extremely creepy. Those, together with History Boys, add up to quite a sleazy attitude to sex.

So we’ve basically become more sensitive because other people have told us we should.

No other reason. If no one had told you those things were ‘bad’ you’d still find them funny.

Rubbish. It was made for everyone not just men. Lots of women liked the idea of being rescued by a hero and I bet many still do.

Most of the crap on TV now is ‘made for women’ and it’s garbage.

I don't really apply real life ethics and morality to films all the time. Like swigging wine in a car in the Deli... To me, that doesn't advocate drink driving, it's just a character is drink driving, you know it's wrong because you already know it's wrong, you don't need the film to tell you that when it's just a trashy romcom. Characters and events don't have to match what we think is OK in real life.

Just saying how I saw it @HelenTherese2 , no need for the comeback.

I recently heard from someone the phrase friends hasn’t aged well and it made me question a bit. Was the person just saying that to look woke and cool? Or were there genuinely offensive moments in friends? I was friends crazy as a teen so I’m working my way through the series. I’m now up to Chandler and Monica’s wedding.
First, the tech did not age well. There’s episodes with pagers and the one where Joey and Chandler get the big TV - which is small by todays standards. Lots of scenes wouldn’t happen today because they would have mobile phones.
Fat Monica wasn’t even that fat and today she’d be normal size. But I remember as a teen I thought she was massive. I can imagine a lot of people would be annoyed by the fat jokes, because a lot of people today are bigger than Monica.
I guess none of the ladies dated a non white man, and the cast was not very diverse at all.
Chandler smoking in his office.
The rest, I think it’s just humor that you couldn’t get away with now but it wasn’t particularly offensive. Especially when you mix it with the pagers, small TVs, 90s clothes, cultural references. It’s a show from the 90s and you can appreciate it through those eyes. Like that is what it was like back then, this is what it’s like now.
Also, how I met your mother, made after friends and I find that easier to see offensive things if I am not in a funny mood. So things aren’t necessarily getting better.
Anyone seen those awful reality shows like too hot to handle, perfect match, love is blind. That’s a sad portrayal of reality in 2023.
But the most offensive stuff is probably on TikTok - just guessing cause I’m not on it.
Dont worry everyone, there’s still offensive stuff out there in 2024. We’re not doing much better than the 80s and 90s. Just the channels for consumption have changed.

@TheGruffalochild I agree about friends. The only stuff that hasn't aged are the fat jokes. In the 90s everyone seemed obsessed by weight and fat shaming - it really was open season. I remember Chris Evans weighing members of the Spice Girls on TFI for goodness sake. The rest of it though, I can still laugh at. In the 80s and 90s you seemed to have white shows or black shows. Interracial relationships seemed to still be controversial in parts of America, as I was told by a mixed race couple who experienced hostility from both communities in America.

@TheGruffalochild I agree that it's not necessarily offensive, there are just some outdated attitudes that we wouldn't see on TV today. I was born in 1990 so can't speak to the early seasons of Friends but I remember the 00s being a cesspit of fatphobia and obsession with "heroin chic" thinness, so I have some context for the jokes. However, teenagers today are growing up in a more body positive culture, so those jokes must seem really alien to them. Much like how I was shocked when I saw an episode of Love Thy Neighbour but my parents will be able to remember similar attitudes from the 70s, so can contextualise it in a way I can't.

What stands out the most to me now in Friends is that they're all really homophobic, whether casually (lots of cracks about certain behaviours being "gay") or outright (Ross firing the nanny because a man in a caregiving role "has to be at least bi", or losing his shit because his son had a Barbie).

There's also plenty of sexism and the attitudes toward women are outdated. The open porn use seems odd to me, too, though that also feeds into my argument; the guys constantly talk about porn as if it's as normal as watching the news but when Joey finds Rachel's dirty book, they all take the piss out of her.

P.S. I still love Friends and rewatch it over and over! Your question is interesting though so I just wanted to chime in with my thoughts.

I'm aware. But I think La boheme does a better job transcending its setting than Rent does despite being less far away in time.

If something, even of it's time, it's written well and acted well, it'll stand the test of time. It'll still have something to offer artistically. Gimmicky storylines, cheap jokes, lazy stereotypes don't. It just looks and feels tacky.

The mighty boosh, little Britain, anything by Keith Lemon has aged badly.
Something like the Graduate also had things that wouldn't meet social norms now, but it still has something to offer.

@amusedbush i agree with a lot of what you wrote. It’s easier to understand the perspective of the time when you were living through that time.

Regarding the homophobia. Agree the gay and lesbian jokes aren’t funny and it’s a positive that they are no longer acceptable today. I remember in the 90s though, the fact that there were lesbian characters like Carol and Susan, or a trans character like Chandler’s dad was considered progressive. Until then, the only lesbian characters I’d heard of were Zoe in emmerdale and a couple in Brookside. And there were strong discussions on tv/radio about whether that should be “allowed on television”. So the fact that these characters were included and portrayed as normal was considered progressive at the time - the fun poking was a part of the show, nobody escaped. Of course today we know that those jokes are incredibly hurtful, but the alternative in the 90s was shows pretending you didn’t exist and erasing you from any storyline.
Similar with the porn thing. Acceptance of women taking charge of their sexuality was still progressing, which is why satc was so popular. Everyone laughed at Rachel for having a dirty book but there was a story where a woman had one. And by writing the jokes about it, there were lines where Rachel could defend herself for having one. So while today we think women shouldn’t need to defend themselves, for teenage me it was like Oooh women can have dirty books too. And the one where they won’t turn the porn off, it was in the presence of women. So not a thing that women couldn’t see or had to be protected from.
Im glad the world has changed but some of these today-hated shows were part of the change.
I always thought little Britain was disgusting. I think for many it showed a clear line had been crossed and that could have also made people reflect on things that really weren’t okay.

also Ben having a Barbie. It gave the other characters a chance to argue with Ross about his views and poke fun at him. And in the end it shows Ross as Bee drinking tea, showing this as a normal part of childhood.
Today this is considered outdated because kids can play with any toys they want. But at the time, the teens of the 90s had parents who didn’t think like that. So it was amusing to poke fun at Ross who had similar views.

I was a school in the 90s and 2000s and remember 'you're gay' or 'gaylord' being the most common insult. It seems incredibly strange now!

I think that satc was terrible for women in retrospect. It promoted this idea that women should 'do it like a man', when in reality, most women are very different from men in this respect, and end up getting hurt.

I don't get why people think that Buffy has aged badly. I saw a few episodes not so long ago and actually thought that it had aged remarkably well!

@MidnightMeltdown omg buffy. I think I’m going to watch that next once I’m finished with friends.
I’ll be back with my analysis 🧐

Who here remembers the 1990s/2000s South Park? Now there’s dated. I think they went out of their way to be as offensive as possible (‘there’s a time and a place for that…and it’s college’) and if reports of their recent satire on a certain Montecito couple are to be believed they still do.