Welcome to Retro Recaps, where we revisit your favorite old shows and give them the modern recap treatment that they always deserved. Last week, we revisited Buffy The Vampire Slayer's silent episode. This week, it's Friends.

Caution: snark ahead.

One of the greatest mysteries of the streaming era, at least to me, is the continued popularity of ‘90s three-camera sitcom Friends. It seems odd to me that so many young people would want to watch a 20-year-old sitcom when they have a literal never-ending well of content to choose from.

When I was in my 20s when Friends was originally on, we certainly weren’t watching repeats of All in the Family, but we also didn’t have a platform that would mainline “Next Episode” into our brains. We barely had the internet. In 1997, the year the episodes aired that we’re going to look at today, you were lucky if you had a Prodigy.com email address and a modem that would load online pictures faster than one row of pixels every 20 minutes.

I was never a huge Friends fan the first time around, but I was a young person so I was busy ignoring my parents, smoking weed, and stealing CDs from the local Sam Goody; I wasn’t watching a ton of TV at the time. But it was impossible to miss Friends. It was such an all-encompassing and popular show that it seems like everyone in America watched it as if by osmosis. It was like the ‘90s version of Game of Thrones except with fewer tits and absolutely no dragons.