I don’t want to be a crummy person here but this really does fill me with joy. To each their own though, so I’ll put my Friends prejudice to the side and carry on with business as usual.

Without rehashing too much of what we have already covered there has been talk of a much-hyped reunion for about two months now, although people tended to conveniently overlook the fact that it was actually a two-hour special dedicated to director James Burrows.

The first death knell came when it emerged that only five of the six would appear, Matthew Perry too busy to make it. From here on out I will let the Daily Beast do my dirty work:

From the moment Perry let it be known that he would not be participating in the event, all hopes of a true Friends reunion went out the window. But while the presence of the most sarcastic Friend, the character who helped coin the most ’90s saying imaginable—“Could you be any more [blank]?”—would have legitimized [sic] the proceedings, it still would not have delivered fans what they were looking for.

Instead of catching up with the characters of Friends, Sunday night’s special simply highlighted the mostly awkward interactions of five actors who have seen their careers go in markedly different directions in the 12 years since the show ended its 10-season run.

“We really wanted to connect,” Lisa Kudrow said of the “unspoken” need for the cast to become friends in real life. “We instinctively felt like we needed to be friends, we needed to get along, we needed to connect,” she said, thanking Burrows for giving them his dressing room to play poker in on the set between takes…

These are five actors who have seen their careers go in wildly different directions since they shared the screen week after week on Friends. Reuniting them as themselves and not as the characters we knew and loved only brought to light the sad reality that, by this point, they’re not really friends anymore.