Margarita Simonyan, the powerful propagandist who heads the state television agency, argued that the sitcom’s portrayal of homosexuality marked a fundamental rift with Russian culture. Vladimir Putin, the Russian president, has characterized the war in Ukraine as a battle against Western interpretations of freedom and tolerance. Ms Simonayan, 42, said when she studied in the United States almost 30 years ago she thought Russians and Americans were “so much the same” – but the signs of a schism were already there. “Things were just coming to the surface with the first rumblings of this boiling ultraliberal borscht,” he told a daily show on Rossiya 1, referring to the 1994 pilot episode of Friends where Ross arrives at a coffee shop to meet his. future roommates look upset. “Why did he look confused and sad? Because he found out his wife left him for a woman. All this is portrayed sympathetically – good for her, and very bad for him! It was impossible then to recognize this as blatant propaganda because it was so rare, so fresh, so interesting.”
