Anime Like Friends
If you loved Friends's Comedy storytelling, these anime deliver a similar experience — selected for art style, narrative depth, and emotional impact. Each includes where to stream it now.
★ Top Picks
New Girl
Jessica Day is an offbeat and adorable girl in her late 20s who, after a bad breakup, moves in with three single guys. Goofy, positive, vulnerable and honest to a fault, Jess has faith in people, even when she shouldn't. Although she's dorky and awkward, she's comfortable in her own skin. More prone to friendships with women, she's not used to hanging with the boys—especially at home.
Will & Grace
Will Truman and Grace Adler are best friends living in New York, and when Grace's engagement falls apart, she moves in with Will. Together, along with their friends, they go through the trials of dating, sex, relationships and their careers, butting heads at times but ultimately supporting one another while exchanging plenty of witty banter along the way.
Girls
The assorted humiliations, disasters and rare triumphs of four very different twenty-something girls: Hannah, an aspiring writer; Marnie, an art gallery assistant and cousins Jessa and Shoshanna.
How I Met Your Mother
A father recounts to his children - through a series of flashbacks - the journey he and his four best friends took leading up to him meeting their mother.
Adults
A group of twenty-somethings in New York trying to be good people, despite being neither "good" nor "people" yet.
Baby Daddy
Baby Daddy follows Ben, a young man in his early 20s living the life of a bachelor in New York City with his buddy, Tucker, and his brother, Danny. Their lives are turned upside down when they come home one day to find a baby girl left on the doorstep by an ex-girlfriend of Ben's. After much deliberation, Ben decides to raise the baby with the help of his friends and his protective and sometimes over-bearing mother, Bonnie, and his close female friend, Riley.
Three's Company
When two single girls, Janet and Chrissy, need a roommate to share their Santa Monica apartment, they decide to offer a room to Jack, a man they find passed out in the bathtub after the going-away party for their last roommate. However, hijinks ensure when Jack must pretend to be gay in order to throw off the scent of the trio's conservative landlady.
Perfect Strangers
The chronicles of the rocky coexistence of midwestern American Larry Appleton and his distant cousin from eastern Mediterranean Europe, Balki Bartokomous.
More Anime Like Friends
Weird Loners
Four relationship-phobic people are unexpectedly thrust into one another's lives and form an unlikely bond in a townhouse in Queens, NY.
Don't Trust the B---- in Apartment 23
After a naive Midwestern girl's big city dreams are dashed her first week in New York, she finds herself living with her worst nightmare in this hilarious, contemporary comedy about a female odd couple who are surrounded by an outrageous cast of characters.
Broad City
Broad City follows two women throughout their daily lives in New York City, making the smallest and mundane events hysterical and disturbing to watch all at the same time.
What I Like About You
Valerie Tyler is a 28-year-old organization freak who loves her 16-year-old sister Holly. Even if Holly is rambunctious. Spontaneous. Impulsive. Disconcerting. And definitely disorganized. Then Holly moves in with Val, and the sisters discover they may make better siblings than roomies.
Harlem
Four stylish and ambitious best girlfriends in Harlem, New York City: a rising star professor struggling to make space for her love life; a savvy tech entrepreneur always dating someone new; a no-filter singer; and a hopeless romantic fashion designer. Together, they level up into the next phase of their careers, relationships, and big city dreams.
The Odd Couple
Oscar's life seems almost perfect...sure he's divorced and his apartment is a mess, but he's the host of a well-known sports show, and is enjoying his bachelor lifestyle in New York City. That is until his college friend, Felix, shows up at Oscar's apartment having just been dumped by his wife. Oscar does his best to console his old buddy and get him back on the dating horse, but his attempts uncover just how unresolved his own feelings are about his ex.
Dream On
The family life, romantic life, and career of Martin Tupper, a divorced New York City book editor. The show distinctively interjected clips from older black and white television series to punctuate Tupper's feelings or thoughts.
Seinfeld
A stand-up comedian and his three offbeat friends weather the pitfalls and payoffs of life in New York City in the '90s. It's a show about nothing.
Master of None
30-year-old New York actor Dev takes on such pillars of maturity as the first big job, a serious relationship, and busting sex offenders on the subway.
Two Guys and a Girl
Welcome to Beacon Street Pizza, the perfect workplace and hangout for aimless wise-guy Berg, neurotic Pete and campus beauty Sharon. Pete and Berg are roommates and students at a local Boston university, while Sharon struggles with her work and relationships. Together, these three best friends try to navigate life and love in Boston!
Peep Show
Peep Show follows the lives of two men from their twenties to thirties, Mark Corrigan, who has steady employment for most of the series, and Jeremy "Jez" Usbourne, an unemployed would-be musician.
Girlfriends
The series revolves around the friendship of four African-American women in different phases of their lives. They explore the many trials and tribulations that most women face today such as relationships, family, friends and other current issues that will interest most women. Whether it’s getting over a divorce, finding a career, or looking for true love, Girlfriends delivers along with comedy and wit.
Why These Anime Are Similar
These recommendations share core qualities with Friends (1994): Comedy themes, comparable animation style, and similar narrative pacing. NoBadPicks uses TMDB collaborative filtering, genre matching, and AI analysis to surface anime most likely to resonate with fans of Friends.
See full details for Friends (1994)