The initial ad campaign for Friends back in the ‘90s was amazing. No pictures, no idea what was happening, just a series of increasingly strange phrases that caught your attention both for their sheer minimalism and engagement level. Those ads were before anyone had seen the actors and just came on as text teasers to get people talking about the show. They’re so obscure that you can’t even find them online and it’s unclear if anyone ever archived them since this was only a year after the Web started.
Regardless of how you heard about the show though, there’s no arguing it’s so iconic that it has managed to hook multiple generations and is experiencing a resurgence in popularity due to shifts in Millennial and Gen Z viewing habits. The sad fate of Matthew Perry also impacted the popularity of the show and with this year being the 30th anniversary of the release of Friends, Warner Bros. has managed to remaster the entire series in 4K for Friends: The Complete Series and released it as a massive boxed set.
Whether you are a fan are not, there’s something about Friends that hooks you from the first season. Sure, in retrospective there are some issues that have been discussed at length online but putting those aside, the scriptwriting, acting, and situational comedy are simply excellent. Friends just ends up being a quality show where despite the short sitcom-length episodes, you build emotional connections with the characters and easily become invested, even as the situations get increasingly ridiculous. There are relatively few sitcoms that have stood the test of time this well and while the later seasons don’t quite manage the magic of the early show, they still pull off solid character development and leverage the history of the Friends world which viewers will be intimately familiar with by that time.
If you’re looking at Friends: The Complete Series in 4K though, chances are you are already a fan. You have your opinions about Ross and Rachel, about Chandler and Janice, you get a warm fuzzy when you see Central Perk, maybe you even buy some of the coffee they sell these days. Friends is like comfort food for a huge number of people and the impact it has had on pop culture is profound. It’s more of a shared communal experience than a show at this point, something that bridges generations. With that in mind, it’s fantastic to finally be getting a boxed set like this so let’s dig in to the set itself and get an idea why it’s worth your time and the price of admission (spoiler alert: it definitely is!).
Warner Bros. has gone with a classy cover for this boxed set. Friends: The Complete Series features the cast on a simple white background on the cover with the black 4K UHD logo in a banner across the top. It looks almost elegant and with the spine faced out, even if you aren’t displaying it, it still manages to stand out among other sets with the grey designs on black underneath the series logo. This subtle design work is extremely well thought out and the sturdiness of the cardboard slipcase is reassuring after some of the recent DVD and Blu-Ray slipcovers that have been on other WB releases. Inside the box are six disc cases. Each of the first five cases are black 4K cases holding two seasons per case. The final case is a Blu-ray case, confusing at first until you realize that there are so many extras included with the series that they had to put them all on several Blu-rays! That’s right, there are over 20 hours of extras included on multiple discs, though they haven’t all been upscaled to 4K like the episodes.
Unlike other case designs, Friends: The Complete Series opts for smaller, low-profile cases which have smaller teeth on the ring to hold the discs. We’ve noticed in the past on WB sets like Rick and Morty: The Complete Seasons 1-7 (review here) and Succession: The Complete Series (review here) that the large clamshell cases have tight teeth that make it difficult to remove the discs. The opposite is the case here. With the shorter teeth in the 4K cases, discs don’t stay as well-seated as they do in other cases. In the set we received for review, about half the discs were loose inside their individual cases in the set. Fortunately, 4K discs are quite sturdy and none of those discs were scratched however…the smaller teeth mean less sharp edges too. Snapping discs back into the cases requires pressure from the other side of the disc holder for them to seat firmly and it’s slightly more frustrating that one would like but the aesthetic of the cases is so high that it’s somewhat forgivable.
When you boot up the series, after the mandatory perfunctory warnings, the main menu provides a minimal list of options including Play, Episodes, Audio, Subtitles, and Commentaries. The odd thing about this menu system is that it makes a weird hydraulic piston sound when making selections, a kind of steam hissing noise. Why that particular sound was chosen? No idea, but it’s definitely odd and compared with virtually everything else in the set, it’s the only thing that feels out of place. The menu uses simple static images for the majority of the screen with minimalist menus at the bottom matching the box design (a nice touch) and is incredibly easy to navigate, though it is slightly less responsive than one might hope with a small but noticeable hesitation between selections and response.
Let’s get to what you’re really interested in though…the visuals. If you’re a fan, you may already have a whole shelf of DVDs or Blu-rays of Friends. Is it worth upgrading? In short, yes it is. On a 4K TV, the visuals for Friends: The Complete Series in 4K are simply excellent. This is a fairly old show at this point and sometimes upscaling works better than others. Those paying close attention will notice that the fine detail in the 4K transfer is greatly improved but the actual faces of people are only marginally improved from 1080p versions of the show. It can be assumed that there was no way to fully remove the film graining from a show this old effectively without spending an absolute fortune and that’s a good thing, because in 4K, the whole show looks much more like the shot-on film it actually was and enhancement hasn’t changed the overall aesthetic.
That’s not to say there aren’t some changes though, as this new transfer is noticeably more vibrant and color-saturated, keeping in line with the actual set design of the show. While those colors aren’t necessarily as realistic as they could be, it manages to work and evoke a sense of ‘90s nostalgia that dovetails nicely with the show’s content and music. Videophiles might find this shift from previous iterations offensive to the eyes but after a few episodes, you really start to adapt to it and it seems more normal. The fine detail is the big winner here with patterns and backgrounds standing out much more clearly and crisply, especially in the earlier seasons. It does almost seem like the transfer was somewhat inconsistent, like there was a deadline that had to be hit or something as you watch through the seasons, but that might also just be the eye getting increasingly used to the specific mix of slightly crisper backgrounds and clothing than people. Overall it’s a solid transfer with nearly unnoticeable artifacting for the average viewer. For a set this size, you’d expect a little bit here and there, especially if depending on more modern automated tools instead of people to do some of the work but there are plenty of much worse transfers out there.
Audio is a bit better than the video in this release. Friends: The Complete Series has had an upgrade, shifting to the now standard DTS-HD Master Audio and surround sound splits the laugh track and music to the rear, making viewing feel more immersive. Even if you’re not using surround, the sound is still solid and the mixing is extremely crisp due to the conversion to lossless and you’ll have no trouble making out dialogue or with wildly fluctuating volume or music levels. That’s definitely reassuring considering some of the painful audio mixes around these days pushing Gen Z to become dependent on subtitles. Both audio and subtitles are available in French, English, German, and Spanish for this release, which is fantastic given the inconsistency we’ve seen lately with regard to language support. Additional subtitle languages also include Dutch, Chinese, two types of Spanish (Castellano and Latino), Danish, Finnish, Norwegian, and Swedish. Those languages don’t necessarily carry over to the bonus features though and the boxed set itself doesn’t contain the full language list even though they’re available in the menus.
This is an absolutely massive set spanning 23 4K Blu-ray discs and two Blu-rays in the bonus disc case. In addition to those bonus discs, a physical booklet is included in the final case with a paper episode and bonus feature list. The special features from all 10 seasons are split between those discs in addition to 10 other features and featurettes, too many to go through here. Also included is the music video of the original theme song by The Rembrants, fun if you’re into music videos. In additional to that vast stack of special features, select commentaries are also available from the main menu of each disc, though not every episode has one. Notable for its exclusion is the Friends Reunion episode, the last appearance of Matthew Perry before his untimely demise. Considering that it was an HBO release and HBO is now owned by Warner Bros., it’s odd that this was not included but perhaps rights issues were involved.
It’s hard not to love a release like this that’s been curated, made outstandingly presentable, and covers pretty much all the bases for most viewers. While Friends: The Complete Series is not cheap in 4K, weighing in at a hefty $249.99 for MSRP, you are getting a heck of a lot of content for your cash with 10 seasons, over 120 hours of content, and a ton of extras. The set has also been on sale already for as much as 25% off, so if you’re paying attention, you might be able to save a bit on it as well! It’s really impossible not to love this massive offering that will keep you rewatching this classic series for years to come and makes a great addition to any 4K collection.
This review is based on a physical copy of Friends: The Complete Series in 4K provided by the publisher. It was viewed on a 65″ Sony 4K TV. Friends: The Complete Series is available at find retailers everywhere.
Nate Van Lindt has been a gamer since the days of yore (aka Commodore 64), and has played a bit of virtually everything out there. He's also an avid comic book collector, both vintage and current, and reads a fair amount of sci-fi and fantasy. On top of that, he watches a fair number of movies and TV shows as well. Oh, and he has a family, a full-time job, and lives somewhere in the urban wilds of Southwestern Ontario, Canada, foraging for old video cables and forgotten game soundtracks.