Assuming you've opened this article prepared for the discourse of defending your favorite television show, this may not exactly be the right place to start.

Believe me, I know plenty about how much "Friends" revolutionized a lot regarding television comedy. It was later known as one of the first TV shows with it's own "ensemble cast." It was nominated for like, 62 Emmys. It won an Outstanding Comedy Series award. It's number 21 on the TV Guide's 50 Greatest TV Shows of All Time. People love it.

Personally, however, I don't find it that great.

I think what makes "Friends" so appealing to an audience is the concept of struggling in New York — in that period of your 20s where, executive producer Marta Kauffman explains, "the future was more of a question mark." Even the theme song is very well chosen: "No one told you life was gonna be this way. Your job's a joke, you're broke, your love life's D.O.A."

The show itself is something most everyone can relate to, and maybe watching Jennifer Aniston and Courtney Cox struggle with money and existential crisis helps get through the struggle of, well, money and existential crisis too. It's relatable, but it's just outside that circle of reality that it can be completely hilarious.

However, I think the filmed format of the "sitcom" challenges the television show's ability to actually be genuinely funny.

Let me backtrack here.

Sitcoms, television slang for "situation comedy" is generally a genre of television in which a group of fixed characters is put through different scenarios throughout the series. These can be funny, absurd, awkward, or just plain weird.

The convenience of the "sitcom" allows television series to be discontinuous, short, and simple — plot arcs only need to last 20 minutes, and no one needs that much character development because most of the comedy is only based on the situation of the episode, and how the characters "react" to them.

The logic of situational comedy comes from a long line of theatrical history, all the way back to ancient Italy. The traditional art style of "commedia dell'arte" was one of the earliest forms of professional theatre, pretty much inventing the idea of not only the "theatre company" but also "situational comedy."

Actors of "commedia dell'arte" troupes would travel from village to town square, performing their shows to primarily the lower class. Due to limitations of being a traveling performance troupe, the actors of "commedia dell'arte" created fixed "stock characters" — their shows would comprise of the same characters, simply put in different scenarios. This took less time to introduce new characters and gained a much broader audience of people that were already acquainted with their works.

The practice of using fixed "stock characters" evolved with the art of theatre and eventually became a popular tool for classic television shows, and most importantly, the sitcom — one of the first, and most famous being "I Love Lucy." While "Friends" may be number 21 on TV Guide's 50 Greatest TV Shows of All Time, "I Love Lucy" is number 2.

The sitcom became an overwhelming success not only due to the hilarious misadventures of Lucille Ball and other household names, but also because of the practice of "tuning in" to the show at the same time every week. Children in the '40s and '50s were already practicing the sort of weekly episode ritual with radio shows, and the household use of the television really modernized family-friendly television.

Flash forward to the 21st century, where the rise of Netflix, Hulu, HBO, and the practice of "bingeing" has revolutionized not only how people "watch" television, but also how people should "make" it.

Situational comedy was a practice that became popular out of necessity and desperation, primarily because the actors of traveling theatre companies needed a way to perform successfully without having to introduce and explain new characters every time. When applied to a medium that people can "binge" — watching season after season in one sitting, it can get... well, dry.

Sitcoms in the new modern context can be successful in two different ways.

A sitcom can be done so extremely detached from a "reality" that it becomes hilarious simply from absurdism. This can be seen in "Seinfeld," number 1 on TV Guide's 50 Greatest TV Shows of All Time and widely known as being "a show about nothing." Being a bit like "Waiting For Godot" in terms of lack of development on part of the characters and the series as a whole, "Seinfeld" commits entirely to its fixed characters and absurd situations.

More recent sitcoms, however, have taken a bit of a different take on the formatting of a television show. Shows like "The Office" and "Parks and Rec" become more along the lines of "mockumentaries" than necessarily sitcom. Not only do the characters develop and change dramatically throughout the series, but the camera itself is a part of the universe. This provides an extensive amount of depth to the characters, the season arcs, and the series as a whole.

"Friends, however, falls somewhere in the middle. Committing to the traditional film style similar to "Seinfeld and incorporating similar situations and mishaps, "Friends" really just limply imitates the sitcom formula — and what has become increasingly obvious as more television shows are being produced, it isn't smart to solely depend on the formula of a sitcom to carry your television show.

Even with the structure of a sitcom, the characters in "Friends" are all a bit underdeveloped and over stereotyped — to the extent that some episodes simply become repetitive. Rachel does something selfish, Ross does something inconsiderate, Joey does something stupid, Chandler makes a joke about it, and Phoebe plays a song. And while the dialogue can sometimes be funny, the overwhelming laugh track sometimes makes the episode a bit phony.

Perhaps this is more of a criticism of the art of situational comedy, more specifically targeting a show that very much properly follows the structure of a sitcom. In any sense, I find that the age of the "sitcom" is either coming to an end or evolving into a different genre entirely.

The rise of online television streaming is affecting the way we watch television as a whole, and some television shows are simply meant to be watched as weekly episodes. Similar to the way the rise of the film industry influenced the extinction of vaudeville theatre, so too is online streaming influencing a change in how we watch, and make, television.