"If everybody was the kind of frighteningly self-confident, heedless smart-talker that Fake Monica is, we’d end up with … okay, the Millennials, but bear with me."

Exactly. The show never demands any kind of sympathy for the geeks (or, for that matter, the freaks). They're portrayed as flawed and immature high school kids just like everybody else.

I think the important thing to understand about a show like Friends is that, from a purely critical standpoint, it was never really a great show. Nostalgia might try to argue otherwise, but the show from start-to-finish had some pretty major technical shortcomings (inconsistent characterizations, very sloppy writing…