Fun
Frisky
Nostalgic
Intense
Adventurous
Choked Up
Curious
Romantic
Weird
It’s true. Friends is already on Netflix, but unless you have your passport handy and feel like venturing to Finland, you’ll have to wait until January 1, 2015 to binge-watch the series. To make matters worse for us, across the pond it’s called Frendit. Frendit? It sounds like a fictional social media network mentioned in ABC Family tween dramas.
According to reddit.com user KojoDee, the American sitcom staple is just one of a ton of great picks Netflix Instant doesn’t feature (yet) here in the states, including Pixar’s Brave, Martin Scorsese’s The Departed, and Francis Ford Coppola’s The Godfather.
But Finland isn’t the only hub to binge-watch Friends for hours on end without getting up to change the DVD. Argentina, Brazil, Columbia, Denmark, Mexico, Norway, and Sweden all currently have streaming access to the series. Since Friends has been such a pop culture phenomenon here in the U.S. for the last twenty years, it’s pretty outrageous to think we have unlimited access to the series after the rest of the world — kind of like sloppy streaming seconds. Why do things like this happen, you ask? International television distribution markets are all kinds of crazy and abide by completely different contracts than over here in the states. Add the newness of SVOD into the mix and things get even more complicated. Therefore, acquiring streaming rights to a series of Friends’ caliber is pretty much luck of the draw and up to the distributors’ (in this case Warner Bros. Television) foreign branch. And of course, Netflix.
It’s okay, Netflix, as all will be forgiven on January 1st, when we’re peeling off our glittered, fake eyelashes from the night before, ready to curl up on the couch and properly celebrate the New Year with Rachel, Ross, Monica, Chandler, Phoebe, and Joey. In the meantime, however, take this:
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Photo: imgur.com
