No sex please, we’re Chinese: Friends sitcom censored

US sitcom Friends has returned to Chinese streaming services but with changes that have upset some Chinese fans.

Chinese censors removed scenes that referred to Ross’s ex-wife Carol being a lesbian.

The American sitcom Friends returned to Chinese streaming services this month after a several-year absence, although with changes that have upset some Chinese fans.

Several scenes were edited or removed, including scenes with LGBT references. The altered episode versions were uploaded to Chinese video-streaming services earlier this month.

The full catalogue of Friends episodes was available on Chinese streaming platforms in their original form, until they were removed in 2018. The tweaked version of the show was uploaded to several platforms, including ones by Bilibili and Tencent, last week.

The show has had a wide fan base in China for years. Many Chinese students watched the show for fun but also for help with English comprehension. At least one cafe in Beijing attempted to replicate the Central Perk setting in the show. The hashtag #FriendsEdited was trending on Chinese social-media platform Weibo over the weekend. The hashtag later became unsearchable, a sign of censors cracking down on the discussions.

Censorship has grown stricter – but also more opaque and less predictable – under Chinese leader Xi Jinping. A directive issued by China’s National Radio and Television Administration in September calls for strengthened regulation of media content to “establish a clear-cut industry atmosphere of loving the [communist] party and patriotism, and advocating morality”.

Some scenes from the show’s first season, where characters were discussing character Ross Geller’s ex-wife being in a relationship with a woman, were removed from streaming platforms.

“I indeed had trouble understanding the part when Ross had to report [the news of his divorce] to his parents,” one user commented on Weibo, a Twitter-like social media platform.

In other cases, the Chinese subtitles were paraphrased in instances involving homosexuality and sex. In one line, the word “lesbian” was replaced with “ex-wife” in Chinese, while “I have a penis” was translated as “I have different organs than a woman” in Chinese.

“To be honest, I’d rather miss the old full version than re-watching an edited version,” wrote another Weibo user.

Many on China’s social media said they had saved the full series as originally streamed on their computers and urged others to just buy uncensored DVDs.

Several Chinese video-streaming platforms, Weibo and WarnerMedia, whose Warner Bros studio owns Friends, didn’t respond to requests for comment.

Friends aired on NBC from 1994 through to 2004 and its re-runs have remained hugely popular. Its re-runs in the US streamed exclusively on Netflix for years, and was often one of the most streamed shows on that platform. Netflix held the rights until the end of 2019, when WarnerMedia outbid it for streaming rights to put the show on HBO Max. That deal was valued at $US425m for five years.

For decades, Chinese censors have demanded that scenes deemed sensitive or vulgar be cut from officially imported foreign films and TV shows. In one famous example, 2007’s Pirates of the Caribbean: At World’s End appeared in mainland cinemas missing roughly half of the scenes involving a villain played by Hong Kong actor Chow Yun-fat after censors decided the scenes made Chinese people look bad.

An altered version of the 1999 film Fight Club was uploaded to Tencent’s video platform in January. The altered version ended on a jarringly pro-government note and was later quietly taken down and replaced with the original ending following a wave of global criticism.

The Wall Street Journal