10 Banned Episodes Of Beloved TV Sitcoms
8. The One With The Free Porn - Friends
Despite being on the air for ten seasons, Friends has thankfully been a show that hasn’t encountered too much in the way of censorship. Which, in all fairness, may explain why it felt like it was on TV pretty much every hour of the day for many years.
Notable exceptions to this are The One With the Lesbian Wedding - which attracted some rather silly controversy and censorship due to its focus on a same-sex relationship - and The One With the Free Porn.
The episode’s title, as with most Friends episodes, is a pretty good description. Joey and Chandler discover a free pornography channel on their TV, and, fearing they’ll lose it if they turn it off, leave it on and wind up slightly addicted to it.
What’s remarkable about the episode, for the most part, is how frank the show is about pornography in 1998, where it was still quite taboo in the days before the internet. However, Channel 4 in the UK weren’t happy with its frequent references and it became the only episode of the show that was dropped from repeat showings, as it wasn’t appropriate to be televised earlier in the day.
Channel Five continued to show the episode, but edited it to exclude any shots of the TV when the porn was on - even though, unsurprisingly, it was never explicit.