BOO HOO HOO!!! FRIENDS Creator Apologizes For The Show Being All-White

Small world department: Apu was voiced by Hank Azaria, AKA Phoebe's "science guy."

I've never watched The Simpsons, but this sounds kinda like the days when Hollywood had Italians playing all the (American) Indians and Alec Guinness playing a Japanese guy. Or actually, since it's voices, it's more like the old radio days, when they had white guys playing black characters (e.g., Amos 'n' Andy) -- kinda weird, in other words, considering there were actual black actors available.

Goodness knows there are plenty of good (Asian) Indian actors, so I can see as how it would have made more sense to hire one of them to do Apu. They could presumably have done a more authentic accent (meaning no offense to Azaria), and could in subtle ways have made the character more authentically funny.

Apparently everyone on The Simpsons is a caricature, but most of them are written and performed by people of a similar ethnicity, who understand the group's foibles. It's always been very tricky to do caricatures of someone from another ethnic group (or even the other sex!) without it ending up sounding like ridicule. This was true long before the "woke" crowd started beating it to death.

well that implies blacks are quality, which although truthful, hurts their precious federally-protected egos.

Joey (the character) is an Italian-American, so he might have a darkish complexion and/or a tan. Matt LeBlanc (the actor) is half Italian and half French-Canadian, so his on-screen complexion may be due to genes and/or a tan and/or makeup.

"White" is a pretty general term anyhow. I think the people who are complaining about the Friends being "all white" mean that none of them are obviously black.

That depends on who you ask. I don't know about other countries, but the US officially categorizes Jews as white. Apparently their self-identification has been mostly white as well, but that may be shifting somewhat nowadays, possibly due to intermarriage with people from other categories.

Yep.

Plus actually the relative ‘whiteness’ of Friends is really refreshing, and accurate - ethnicities tend to live and date amongst themselves (none more so than minorities). A predominately white cast with some minorities sprinkled about is demographically representative of the USA, so should it be reflected in mainstream entertainment like Friends.