Thursday night marked the end of an era. If you somehow missed it, NBC’s hit show Friends finally came to a not-so-screeching halt. Whether you’re a fan of the show or not, you’ve likely noticed how uncannily undiverse the characters on the show were.

In a 10-year period, there was an Asian woman and an African American woman, each of whose characters are only on the show for a few episodes. I can’t even recall seeing any people of color sitting around as extras in Central Perk, the coffee shop frequented by the six friends.

Ross’ first wife turned out to be a lesbian, who later married another woman, but both women were as prissy and unlesbian as most of the show’s heterosexual characters.

Monica and Ross’ characters were Jewish — but only when it was convenient. Sure, Ross showed up dressed as the “Channukah armadillo” in his attempt to teach his son about Channukah, one of the most minor of Jewish holidays (though the commercial exploits surrounding Christmas might lead you to believe otherwise). But you might recall Monica and Chandler struggling to find a priest to marry them. A rabbi was never discussed or even mentioned. And Ross was married three times, but again, no reference to Jewish customs for the wedding ceremony to his British bride, Emily. In other words, Ross and Monica were Jewish when the show’s writers remembered that they hadn’t mentioned the lesbian ex-wife or Ross’ relationships with the Asian woman and the African American woman lately.

And all six of the main characters lived in large, extremely nice Manhattan apartments, despite working as a professor of paleontology (at a university that was neither NYU — save for a brief guest professorship — nor Columbia, and thus likely public and unable to pay its professors six-digit salaries), a chef, a masseuse, an assistant buyer for Ralph Lauren, an actor with little-to-no skills, and some kind of office job that is never really defined on the show. Perhaps if they were working constantly, they could afford the lifestyles they live, but they don’t. In fact, in the rare moments when these characters were shown at work, they were flirting or goofing off.

I know, I know. It is just television. It’s entertaining, and it’s no different than most anything you’d see on any other show. But I’m not sure that that is a sufficient excuse. I have never seen any statistics about the demographics of the sitcom’s audience, but from people I’ve spoken to, I definitely get the sense that the show appeals to white upper-middle-class youth and 20- and 30-somethings. And I’ve definitely spoken to more than one person who has said that he or she didn’t watch shows like Friends because he or she didn’t see anyone who looked like him- or herself on the show. That is, many people can’t identify with the show’s characters and exclude themselves from the show’s audience because the producers have excluded them and given them nothing and no one to relate to.

I know the same could be said of almost any sitcom, probably even The Cosby Show. I’m uncertain as to whether the same could be said of dramas since the only one I watch regularly is ER, which is likely an exceptional case which features doctors and other characters of all backgrounds, races, and ethnicities. But then again, they work at the county hospital, so people would probably start to wonder if all of the characters were white and well-to-do at a public hospital struggling to remain open.

Thanks to the rise of cable television, there are now networks that target particular groups of people. BET, for instance, targets African American audiences. The Oxygen Channel targets women. So there are attempts being made to appeal to diverse audiences, but it’s intriguing — even a bit disheartening — that this is occuring more as a separatist project outside the mainstream than as a way to address the lack of diversity and underrepresentation of certain demographics on mainstream television stations.

Laura Nathan-Garner