Why Gen Z's answer to Friends keeps falling flat

A crop of new American sitcoms is trying to recreate the cultural magic of Friends for a Gen Z audience – but none has come close, according to a BBC analysis of the genre's recent flops.

Emily Maskell writes that Friends, which ran from 1994 to 2004, remains the defining sitcom of its generation: its finale drew around 52.5 million American viewers, making it the most-watched television episode of the 2000s, and it still ranks 16th on Gen Z's own list of favourite film or television titles in UCLA's 2025 Teens and Screens report.

Several recent shows have chased a similar formula – groups of twenty-somethings navigating messy careers and relationships – including Mindy Kaling's Not Suitable For Work, FX's Adults, Kaling's earlier The Sex Lives of College Girls, and HBO's I Love LA. Yet Not Suitable For Work was cancelled this week after a lukewarm reception, The Sex Lives of College Girls was axed in 2025 after three seasons, and while Adults and I Love LA have both been renewed, neither has matched the cultural weight of Friends or of current "watercooler" hits such as The White Lotus or The Pitt.

The BBC piece identifies several reasons the format keeps struggling to translate:

A tougher TV landscape

Modern sitcoms are competing against endless scrollable content and personalised algorithms that can pull viewers away the moment a show fails to hold their attention – according to Activate's 2026 Media Outlook Report, 43% of Gen Z now favour YouTube or social video over paid streaming or traditional television.

Shorter seasons compound the problem

Where classic network sitcoms ran to more than 20 episodes, partly to make daily syndication viable, the new wave typically runs to only eight or ten, leaving little time to build attachment to the characters.

A generational gap behind the camera

The shows are still largely written by millennials or older writers, rather than Gen Z voices, and it shows. Entertainment journalist Max Gao is quoted as saying that few Gen Z television writers have yet been given a platform, making it harder to capture the realities of being young today. Slang deployed by older writers in The Sex Lives of College Girls and Not Suitable For Work has landed as forced rather than authentic.

Gen Z's circumstances resist comfort viewing

Sitcoms traditionally function as comfort television, a role Friends filled easily. But Dr Yalda T. Uhls of UCLA's Center for Scholars & Storytellers notes that this generation has lived through a pandemic, economic scarcity and a combative political climate it doesn't trust – a sharp contrast with the tech-boom optimism Gen X entered the workforce with.

The shows have handled this unevenly

Not Suitable For Work touched on employment despair only glancingly, while Adults' second season leans in further, following one character's prolonged struggle to find full-time work, and shifts its households toward more realistic, cramped living arrangements rather than the aspirational apartments of Friends.

Representing a more diverse generation

Gen Z Americans are, per Pew Research Center, the most racially and ethnically diverse generation yet, which the piece argues makes a single, relatable ensemble harder to write than it was for Friends' more homogeneous cast. The Sex Lives of College Girls is criticised for treating differences of race, ethnicity and sexual identity as non-issues, while Adults is praised for embracing its cast's diversity more fully, even if that comes at some cost to narrative focus.

Life lived online

Depicting the internet's grip on young lives without resorting to clunky on-screen text graphics is another hurdle. Adults largely sidesteps phone screens altogether, while Not Suitable For Work barely engages with dating apps despite centring on its characters' dating lives. I Love LA, set among influencers, comes closest to confronting online culture directly, though the piece notes it offers little deeper insight into the divide between its characters' real and online lives.

The BBC concludes that Adults is currently the strongest attempt at a Gen Z equivalent to Friends, but that finding an audience for something both funny and authentic to the generation remains an uphill task.