When “Friends’' premiered in the fall of 1994, I was in my 20s living in a city with a roommate. We were young and unattached. Just like the characters on the show. Sometimes on Thursdays, my roommate and I would grab drinks after work, but because this was an era before DVRs existed, we always made sure we got home in time to watch new episodes. The opening credits spoke to our lives: “Your job’s a joke, you’re broke, your love life’s DOA.” Yes, we thought, that’s us!

A season or two later, the initial thrill had worn off. The show’s six leads had become glamorous stars with little connection to the struggling 20-year-olds they were playing on TV, and I distinctly remember thinking: That’s not us. Not at all. It’s irrational to feel betrayed by actors whose circumstances have vastly improved beyond that of their characters, but all the same, it left me with ambivalent feelings about the show, which ultimately ran for 10 seasons. So that’s my disclaimer.

“Friends” could always be found in syndication, but it was the power of Netflix that gave the show a true second life — with 236 episodes in all. In the age of eight-episode streaming seasons, that number sounds absurd, but it also makes for ideal binge viewing, because there’s just so much of it to watch.

Which is why Warner Bros., the show’s producing studio, pulled the rights back from Netflix when the company launched its own streaming platform. The reunion was originally announced as a way to generate buzz for the HBO Max launch last year, before the pandemic delayed filming until now.

According to The Hollywood Reporter, the six cast members — Jennifer Aniston, Courteney Cox, Lisa Kudrow, Matt LeBlanc, Matthew Perry and David Schwimmer — were each paid between $2.5 million and $3 million for the reunion. That’s quite a payday for what amounts to a glorified talk show appearance (with James Corden presiding as host) and some reminiscing on the old set. Good for them, I guess. A lot of entities (from the studio to the network to executives and producers) got very rich and continue to get very rich off that show; why shouldn’t the actors get a piece of that too?

The reunion itself is a cavalcade of gewgaws: the cast around a table reading scenes from old scripts; random cameos by famous people talking about their love of “Friends”; a fashion show featuring memorable costumes; really quick check-ins with actors who played recurring characters, such as Janice and Gunther. The editing flits all over the place, and I suspect that’s because there’s so little substance to this endeavor. The age of streaming hasn’t been conducive to bonus material like the freewheeling commentary tracks that used to show up as DVD extras, but the nearly two hours assembled here doesn’t rise to the level of even that. The group is interviewed in front of the fountain from the opening credits, which is a nice touch, but there’s no awareness that viewers might be curious to learn the backstory about how that opening sequence was conceived or why the fountain even exists on the Warner Bros. lot.

Why not let the actors talk on their own for the entire running time, without the intrusion of Corden (whose presence here feels like a non sequitur) and a socially distanced audience? Perhaps because the cast isn’t that interesting, as a group, when not in character. At the very least, they don’t come across as natural storytellers. Perry opens the door to something potentially intriguing when it’s just the six of them alone on the old set, and he talks about feeling the pressure to generate a laugh and the anxiety if a joke didn’t land. His co-stars are surprised to hear this, but no one attempts to talk about it more deeply. They shrug and move on. The actors on “Friends” lost so much of their privacy, so quickly, when the show took off; maybe their instincts are to avoid anything too personal when the cameras are on. Maybe they see it as protecting one another — but then, what is the point of a reunion if everyone is too wary to really talk? At another point, Kudrow mentions watching old seasons with her husband and the cringe she felt seeing herself on screen. Huh, comes the response. And that’s it. But no conversations delving into their thoughts about the show or how they developed their characters or how they feel about their experiences in hindsight.

Which is why the special feels so off tonally. “Since the finale, the six cast members have been in a room all together only once. Until today.” Is that something we’re supposed to have strong feelings about? When was the last time you were in a room with all your former co-workers? The show certainly changed the lives and career trajectories of its stars. They seem to have real affection for each other. That’s nice! But can we please talk about this for what it is: A decently entertaining television show that became very popular. And then, 10 years later, it came to an end.

It’s one thing to be pleasantly dull. It’s another to still peddle fallacies: The show’s premise was one “we hadn’t seen before,” co-creator David Crane says here, despite the fact that “Living Single” — a show with the same concept, featuring a Black cast — had premiered exactly one year earlier on Fox.

We’re meant to believe that when Crane and co-creator Marta Kauffman sold their show, they were either unaware of the existence of “Living Single” or they deemed it insignificant. There’s zero acknowledgement or even embarrassment about this, which tells you a lot about the ways in which white people in Hollywood ignore or dismiss the work of their Black colleagues. Even so, I can’t believe Crane is still saying this kind of stuff with a straight face in 2021, or that Warner Bros. — which also made “Living Single” (both shows shot on the same lot) — would choose to include it here.

Like many projects in Hollywood, “Friends” was largely a white endeavor and that’s part of the show’s legacy, as well. In 1999, Amaani Lyle was one of the few Black women employed on the show. She was a writers’ assistant who was fired after four months and she subsequently filed a lawsuit (later dismissed) alleging her supervisors told racist and sexually graphic jokes, sometimes about the female members of the cast. “I had to constantly listen to comments on what kinds of breasts and what kinds of buttocks my supervisors were most attracted so,” she said in the filing (among other allegations, many of which are more explicit), and she later told the digital publication Bustle in 2018 that her supervisors would argue that this behavior was normal. Lyle saw it differently: “It’s not normal to say these things about people in the interest of trying to come up with a story idea. It’s completely disrespectful.”

Some important context here: These types of workplace concerns are not a thing of the past. (Warner Bros. just fired “All Rise” showrunner Greg Spottiswood after a series of complaints about his behavior in the writers room.) It’s not surprising the special never touches on this part of the “Friends” backstory, but it is curious that the cast has never commented publicly on Lyle’s allegations, a choice I will diplomatically describe as “interesting.” What’s stopping them?

Conversely, “The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air Reunion” (also on HBO Max) had the guts to face down its own bumps in the road by including Janet Hubert, who played the first Aunt Viv and has been open about the unpleasant dynamic that existed on set courtesy of Will Smith, which led to her leaving the show.

If the actors on “Friends” are unable to paint much of a portrait about their time on the show, may I recommend a 42-minute special from 1999 originally made for the Discovery Channel that you can find on YouTube, which offers a behind-the-scenes look at prepping for the show’s sixth season premiere.

Instead of focusing solely on the cast, it considers the contributions of many other people involved in making the show: the crew that builds the sets, the prop master, the editor fiddling with the laugh track, the writers. (The writers do not come off well here; many are seen with their feet up on the table as they toss around ideas and the body language is smug.)

The actors, it becomes clear, are just one part of the process. That seems like an important reminder.

Even so, if audiences aren’t connecting with the people on screen, the show isn’t going to last. The HBO Max reunion circles around that truism without ever landing on anything that explains why these particular characters were such a fruitful source of comedy for so long. My theory is that both the writers and the cast were fully committed to just how intensely self-involved and ridiculous this group could be.

Absent the kind of insights that might give you a better understanding of the show or the people who made it, you’re simply left with the occasional moment of genuine humor. “Was it always purple, that wall?” LeBlanc says, stepping onto the set of Monica and Rachel’s apartment — its purpleness being one of its most defining features — and I admit, I laughed.

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'FRIENDS: THE REUNION'

1.5 stars (out of 4)

Where to watch: Debuts today on HBO Max