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Comment by nailer | Hacker News Reader

'Friends' seem to have acquired a second life amongst Gen Z folk who never saw it on TV when it first aired, there's nothing stopping Seinfeld from having the same kind of comeback.

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It'll be a big question of whether the plots still play well. I was watching Seinfeld the other day, and I'd forgotten how many of the plots revolve around someone missing a critical phone call, because they all had land lines.

Kids today won't understand those plots. :)

Do you genuinely believe that kids don't know what it's like to not be near a phone?

Kids are going to understand those plots just fine. You should spend some time reassessing your understanding of today's youth.

I was mostly be facetious, so no.

And in fact I'd say I'm pretty in tune with today's youth. I have lots of teenage family, as well as friend's kids to talk to about these things. I make it a point to ask them questions about how things are different today than when I was a teen, so I can have a better understand.

My first question is always, "How do you learn about new music?" As a teen, they way I learned about new music was from the radio: the DJs would tell us what the cool new songs were. But that curated experience is missing today. Spotify sort of gets there, but it's not really the same.

My second question is always, "How do you talk to your friends?". And surprisingly, the number one answer recently has been "In person". Today's teens are starting to have a backlash against social media and actually like to connect in person, which was refreshing to hear. But number two is usually Snapchat or similar "erase after consuming" media. "Facebook is for grandma" and Instagram is for "only the good stuff that I want everyone to see". Texting is often in the mix too, but they are very aware that texts cane be easily saved and monitored.

Although directly to your point, kids experience missed phone calls a bit differently. Mostly it's more like "I was camping this weekend with my family and they didn't have cell service!".

Kids today now have to grapple with their smartphone battery running out. U.S. infrastructure does not yet possess abundant public charging stations.

I (and many other people at my company) still have a phone at my desk. There are still phones in hotel rooms, and restaurants, and sundry other places. Most people may no longer have land-line phones at their houses, but the concept certainly still exists.

Sure but how many important calls are you expecting on the hotel phone? Or even the desk phone? The only thing I every used the desk phone at work for was outbound calls. If someone wanted to get a hold of me they called my cell, because they knew the chance of finding me at my desk was almost nil.

The desk phones at work were so useless they didn't even bother to hook them up for new employees unless you specifically asked for them.

Considering many have always had a mobile on them, yes.

You've never missed a call sent to your mobile phone?

They still teach Romeo and Juliet in schools, right? Couldn't their deaths have been prevented with a quick text message?

They could modernize the play by making the death the result of a typo in the text message. E.g. Juliet cried / died

"Oh, I am autocorrect's fool!"

Did you see the Baz Luhrmann take on R&J from the 90s? The missed message was represented by a FedEx "Sorry we missed you" note.

Only if their parents hadn't taken their phones away from either of them, and the SMS went through immediately without fail. It's rare, but the latter still happens to me sometimes even when the network appears to be working fine otherwise.

drinking poison brb

But there are plenty of younger people who hate Friends because it hasn't dated that well.

https://www.nme.com/news/tv/friends-criticised-sexist-homoph...

https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/scaachikoul/friends-ann...

https://www.cbr.com/friends-hasnt-aged-well/

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