ABSTRACT
The sitcom – essentially a prime-time family genre, and one whose conventions are generally determined by a comic impetus – has long dealt with sex and sexuality. Jason Mittell has considered genres as discursive formations, shared notions that come out of a complex relation between texts, industries and audiences. Nonetheless, due to the genre's many differentiations, it is impossible to speak in general terms about its ideological dimensions. Many of the selected episodes deal with sex practices in a straightforward manner, albeit predominantly as a topic of conversation. Sex is represented as something that needs to be scrutinised, and as such, it turns up in plenty of conversations. Sex is considered a key element of the fabric of the series Friends and connected to all sorts of emotions and thoughts. In other words, many of the conversations and discussions that reflect on sex rely on a discourse of feelings. A significant discourse is the discourse of desires and fantasies.
