For free real time breaking news alerts sent straight to your inbox sign up to our breaking news emails

Sign up to our free breaking news emails

Sign up to our free breaking news emails

Max has greenlit a four-part Friends-themed game show in honor of the classic sitcom’s 30th anniversary this year.

Titled Fast Friends, the game show will “take place in the celebrated series’ iconic sets in a fast-paced competition event,” a press release states.

“From racing through Rachel and Monica’s apartment to darting across Joey and Chandler’s bachelor pad and grabbing a coffee at Central Perk, fans will re-live their favorite moments while being put to the test with trivia, puzzles, and games that will keep even the most die-hard FRIENDS fans on their toes. The quickest team will win the title of Ultimate Friends Fan.”

Touted as a first of its kind, the series is scheduled to begin production next month at The FRIENDS Experience: The One in New York City, “a NYC flagship location featuring 18 nostalgia-filled rooms, activations, and recreated sets, spanning two stories and 17,000 square feet dedicated to the show’s history.”

In addition to the forthcoming game show, the streamer will also pay tribute to the comedy by offering Max Ultimate Ad-Free subscribers the opportunity to enjoy their favorite Friends episodes in 4K UHD with Dolby Vision and HDR10 on supported devices.

This premium format is said to enhance the show’s viewing experience, allowing fans to spot “baby Ben before Joey and Chandler with sharper details, experience the iconic prom video and savor Joey’s Dr Drake Ramoray scenes with enhanced clarity, and have Ross’s unforgettable white-teeth mishap dazzle them on screen.”

Friends first debuted 30 years ago this month. The show, which follows a group of six twentysomethings – Rachel (Jennifer Aniston), Monica (Courteney Cox), Ross (David Schwimmer), Chandler (Matthew Perry), Joey (Matt LeBlanc) and Phoebe (Lisa Kudrow) – living in New York City, ran for 10 seasons from 1994 to 2004.

open image in gallery

Aisha Tyler, who starred as Charlie, the series’s only recurring Black character, recently reflected on how the show changed her life.

“It did change my life,” she told The Independent, “but not in a ‘fame and fortune, and she rode in on a tiger, people are feeding her grapes’ sort of way. I still went back to the drawing board and was a working actor after that. But it made me more confident as a performer, to trust my instincts and my comic abilities.

Watch Apple TV+ free for 7 days

Advertisement

New subscribers only. £8.99/mo. after free trial. Plan auto-renews until cancelled

Try for free

Watch Apple TV+ free for 7 days

New subscribers only. £8.99/mo. after free trial. Plan auto-renews until cancelled

Try for free

“And we’re still talking about it all these years later. I don’t know that there are a lot of shows that have been off the air for more than two decades that people still watch on a daily basis and new fans find all the time,” Tyler added.

“Little kids come up to me and say they love the show and I’m like, ‘You were not alive when I was on that show! You were not yet born’ It’s rare to be on a show like that and end up in the collective memory.”

For free real time breaking news alerts sent straight to your inbox sign up to our breaking news emails

Sign up to our free breaking news emails

Sign up to our free breaking news emails

The View hosts have weighed in on Janet Jackson’s recent controversial remarks regarding Vice President Kamala Harris’s racial identity.

In a new interview with The Guardian, the singer and sister of Michael Jackson regurgitated a false claim made by Donald Trump that Harris is not Black.

“She’s not Black. That’s what I heard. That she’s Indian,” Jackson said, admitting that although she hadn’t “watched the news in a few days,” she was told somebody had “discovered [Harris’s] father was white.”

“What she did was spread misinformation,” host Ana Navarro said on the latest episode of the daytime talk show. “I think it’s irresponsible when you have a platform the way Janet Jackson does, to use that platform carelessly to spread misinformation based on a racist allegation by Donald Trump. It was Donald Trump who tried to say Kamala Harris just turned Black.”

Last month, Trump made headlines when he made the unhinged assertation that Harris only recently “became a Black woman” to suit her political agenda.

Whoopi Goldberg, meanwhile, stepped in to defend Jackson. “You know, sometimes I’ve said stuff. And you know, I was wrong. But people want you to say something right away. You know, when people are coming at you saying, ‘Hey, you’re not paying – you’re dumb, you don’t know’ – you don’t want to answer people,” she said.

“And it is a pain in the butt, I have to tell you. Sometimes people get it wrong and they’re wrong, they made a mistake, they were wrong, it happens. Anybody who says it doesn’t happen to every one of us, multiracial or not, we all do it. So, okay, a little grace for the girl, alright?” Goldberg said, arguing that Jackson is “a musician,” not “a political animal.”

While Navarro acknowledged that Jackson has the “right to endorse, support, or not support” whomever she chooses, she noted that the singer has still not yet owned up to her mistake.

“We forget that we live in information silos. This is so different from how the media was even 10 years ago,” Alyssa Farah Griffin added. “My guess is she’s not looking at great sources of media.”

Watch Apple TV+ free for 7 days

New subscribers only. £8.99/mo. after free trial. Plan auto-renews until cancelled

Advertisement

Try for free

Watch Apple TV+ free for 7 days

New subscribers only. £8.99/mo. after free trial. Plan auto-renews until cancelled

Try for free

open image in gallery

Sunny Hostin went on to say that “regardless of whether Janet Jackson thinks she’s Black, white, or Indian, the very fact that she’s in the room deconstructs, in my view, the alleged societal norms we’ve seen in the nearly 250 years of this country of what a presidential candidate looks like.”

“I think that’s what matters most, and I think that when you’re biracial or multiracial, you do get to identify yourself in any way you choose to identify yourself,” Hostin, who is biracial, continued. “It’s unfortunate that Janet Jackson, an icon, admittedly said, ‘I don’t know, I haven’t been reading the news these past few days.’ I don’t know if it comes from misinformation, I don’t know if it comes from a lack of information, all I know is I don’t want to give it this much air.”

Yesterday, it emerged that Jackson’s apparent “apology” for her comments about Harris was not authorized by the “That’s the Way Love Goes” singer.

It was widely reported by several outlets that Janet had issued an apology through a man named Mo Elmasari, who claimed to be her manager.

However, it has since been corrected that Jackson is, in fact, managed by her brother, Randy, and that the unusually worded “apology” did not come from Jackson.

For free real time breaking news alerts sent straight to your inbox sign up to our breaking news emails

Sign up to our free breaking news emails

Sign up to our free breaking news emails

Donald Trump has slammed Bill Maher for inviting MSNBC’s Stephanie Ruhle and The New York Times opinion columnist Bret Stephens on to his Real Time with Bill Maher talk show.

The late-night host recently sat down with Ruhle and Stephens, where they discussed the week’s headlines, including the former president’s claim that if he loses the 2024 presidential election, “the Jewish people would have a lot to do with that.”

Trump made the remark last week at a campaign event held in Washington DC, which had been billed to be about tackling antisemitism.

“Whenever the autocrat starts blaming the Jews, I think it’s a great sign because when has that ever turned out badly,” Maher joked.

Stephens jumped in to add that “democracy is at risk whenever antisemitism rears its head,” going on to call Trump a “really scary guy” and “antisemitic adjacent.”

He confirmed that he would not be voting for Trump but also shared that he has not yet committed to Vice President Kamala Harris, explaining that he’s unsure about her policies.

“Kamala Harris is not running for perfect. She’s running against Trump,” Ruhle responded. “We have two choices. And so there are some things you might not know her answer to, and in 2024, unlike 2016 for a lot of the American people, we know exactly what Trump will do, who he is and the kind of threat he is to democracy.”

Trump has since blasted the talk show host and his guests in a lengthy and irate post shared on his Truth Social media platform.

“The ratings challenged Bill Maher, on his increasingly boring show on HBO, is really having a hard time coping with TRUMP DERANGEMENT SYNDROME,” he wrote.

Watch Apple TV+ free for 7 days

Advertisement

New subscribers only. £8.99/mo. after free trial. Plan auto-renews until cancelled

Try for free

Watch Apple TV+ free for 7 days

New subscribers only. £8.99/mo. after free trial. Plan auto-renews until cancelled

Try for free

open image in gallery

Advertisement

Describing Maher as a “befuddled, mess, sloppy and tired,” Trump continued: “And every conversation, with B and C list guests, seems to start with, or revert back to, ME!

“This week he had ‘dumb as a rock’ bimbo Stephanie Ruhle, from MSDNC [sic], on the show,” he said, with what appeared to be a reference to the Democratic National Committee (DNC).

The Republican nominee’s misogynistic comments ironically come the day after he wrote on Truth Social that he would “protect women at a level never seen before.”

Trump then attacked Stephens, calling him a “Trump hating loser” who “seems totally confused and unsure of himself.”

He went on to suggest that the journalist “should find himself another line of work because I am driving the FAILING New York Times absolutely crazy, and it is very hard, perhaps impossible, for a writer to write well of me without suffering the wrath of the degenerate editors who, with a push from the top, have gone insane.”

open image in gallery

“They apologized to their readers in 2016 for their complete and total MISS, and they’ll do it again in November,” Trump said. “The FAILING New York Times is a badly run ‘newspaper’ that has totally lost its way. Put it to sleep!”

In 2016, following Trump’s election victory, the NYT published a note apologizing to its readers for underestimating Trump’s “support among American voters.”

“We aim to rededicate ourselves to the fundamental mission of Times journalism,” the statement read. “That is to report America and the world honestly, without fear or favor, striving always to understand and reflect all political perspectives and life experiences in the stories that we bring to you.”