An analysis of Friends

friends has had an incredibly odd cultural history it was one of the biggest shows of the 90s and early 2000s and in spite of a slide in critical and audience acclaim it pretty much retained the exact same level of massive success from beginning to end the show was missed for a while after it ended until around five years later when popular opinion of it started to trend inexplicably downwards it began to be perceived as the personification of cheesy 90s vapidity presumably by people who didn't stop to realize that that was kind of the point friends was very much aware of what it was doing but a lot of that probably came from the fact that repeats were being played on endless rotation and it became seen as the type of show that people without jobs would mindlessly binge watch all day and all night i do think there was a degree of snobbery involved in the way friends became seen as the sort of show that you're supposed to be actively ashamed of liking this may seem strange now given its popularity's nostalgic cultural artifacts but i was there this did happen it then vanished off general rotation for a while and while its presence as a series of dvd box sets was still felt and it was still a big seller the mid to late 2000s was the era of hbo box sets and friends was typically seen as a lower brown former binge watching fodder than say the wire or the sopranos because those are shows for clever people with massive brains who do so much more thinking than the peasants who zombie watch something unchallenging and easy going like a multi-camera network sitcom filmed in front of a live studio audience it then got rediscovered by newer generations around the mid-2010s when streaming services became a thing and it was re-evaluated by said newer generations and also older generations nostalgic for it and the recent reunion special was one of the biggest most talked-about tv events of last year and even now decades later it's still a staple of [ __ ] clickbait articles that appear on my news feed every day friends triplets who played phoebe's brothers kids are unrecognizable 23 years later oh my god really newborn babies look completely different as fully grown adults don't know about you but my mind's blown i expected them to look like this i recently went on the warner brothers studio backlot tour in hollywood where they've essentially made the sets of friends and the costumes into a shop and cafe it's one great big photo opportunity for fans what's happened to phoebe's head it's kind of odd wandering around the sets of friends because i remember so many moments from this show that hit me so hard a tacky commercial experience like this one is ideal for the type of show that people like to think of friends as a bright and colorful cheesy slice of 90s nostalgia but if you actually watched the show and thought about how dramatic some of these moments are it can feel quite odd and uncomfortable just look at this set here ross sat in that chair over there and ate candy floss after having a mental breakdown at work and being put on medication this was the apartment where monica and chandler found out they couldn't have children where ross and rachel broke up after he had sex with another woman hey why not buy a central perk mug anyway so what i've decided to do since i know this show like the back of my hand is i'm going to go over the story arcs character arcs and development of the show over the course of its 10 seasons and offer some thoughts and opinions that are strangely hard to form about this show because it's difficult to think critically about an experience as relaxing as friends it's a warm nice and soft experience for the warm nice and soft goop inside of your skull and i wanted to highlight how strange that is because there is a dark edge underpinning it for pretty much the entire time that should be obvious but it's obscured by the nature of the format so let's begin sitcom pilots rarely if ever end up becoming a series favorite they're early test runs designed to see if this works and if all the characters gelled together and the thing about friends is that it's hideously popular and has a massive roster of standout episodes and the audience develops such an intimate relationship with these characters over the course of the series almost to a point where you can imagine as if they're your own friends so it can feel really bizarre for fans re-watching the pilot and trying to remember a time when you didn't know these people all that well it's like trying to remember a time before you met your best friend you can't can you the pilot is a very bare bones demonstration of our character's quirks and you can see the seeds of where all the exaggeration of those quirks came from in later years there is more of a sense of down-to-earth realism going on in the pilot that's much more reflective of the original and less commercial title that the creators first considered for the show insomnia cafe which friends just would not have become as popular as it was if it was called insomnia cafe that title change was a really good idea friends simple effective in the pilot they're more vague sketches of characters rather than defined pictures joey for example is just an ever so slightly dim actor rather than the barely functional man-child that we know he is chandler's jokes and sarcasm as a reflex action is pretty much his only role there's only some sense of his deep dissatisfaction with life but he hasn't got his third dimension yet ross is at the extreme end of one of his defining characteristics he's mopey whiny and self-pitying there isn't really any hint of the smug intellectual superiority that you see in later seasons although a lot of that comes from this being set directly off the back of his divorce from carol you can kind of see monica as the mom of the group but the pilot's focus is more on her love life being pathetic than any of the traits that would come to define her there's no sense of her competitive nature and there's none of her being an obsessive clean freak phoebe's the only one who really comes fully formed she's the character that says weird and out of left-field things that makes everyone feel uncomfortable i remember when i first came to this city i was 14. my mom had just killed herself and my stepdad was back in prison then i found aromatherapy so believe me i know exactly how you feel all that being said i do think the pilot does an excellent job of establishing the core of who these characters are what drives them and setting the stage for potential future developments even if it is quite milk toast by future friends standards it's very much a rachel centred episode she starts out as the outsider which is the mechanism that the writers have used to be able to introduce everyone organically rachel basically starts the series as a completely different character to the one she ends up being she's a spoiled ditzy fish out of water who's just run out on her wedding to a man who would have given her an easy life and she's trying to figure out who she is what she wants and who she wants to be with a lot has been made by the creators of friends of the show being a true ensemble piece where no one character is more important than any other but i'm not really sure i agree with that assessment in terms of what made friends the cultural behemoth that it was and it became this pretty much overnight the show built its initial emotional hook around a very basic unrequited romance this is the type of story that far too many people can relate to and one that can be dragged out incessantly as the audience sits on the edge of their seats waiting for something to happen the obvious successor to ross and rachel is jim and pam from the office even if jim and pam ends up being a very different scenario the initial hook is the same yes it is obviously expected i do agree people who [ __ ] about this but the problem is it just works if you want to be successful do some sort of ngc unrequited romance well yes it is true that all six of the friends had equal screen time across the series and equal amounts of interesting character arcs well almost in the early days specifically the ross rachel will they won't they storyline was what anchored the series so it only makes sense for me to start there [Music] even if you're only vaguely familiar with friends you probably know all the ins and outs of ross and rachel by way of cultural osmosis he was infatuated by her in his school days never said anything ends up in a marriage that doesn't work out gets divorced then he runs into her again he mentions maybe asking her out sometime she doesn't really take it all that seriously and then we're all sat on the edge of our seats waiting for him to act on his feelings it's a simple but really effective means of baiting your audience and once you've hooked the audience in with a simple but effective arc like that and made sure they're going to stay watching you can use that time to start fleshing out the other characters the only problem though is how long can you reasonably stretch this out for you can't have everyone sitting on the edge of their seats waiting for something to happen forever something was gonna have to happen sooner or later and the obvious place to put that something was in the series 1 finale where rachel finds out that beyond telling her about his childhood crush at the start of the series ross is actually desperately in love with her right now you have the audience watching ross get closer and closer to rachel and going go on do something do something for a year and then in season 2 they reverse it for the first quarter because when rachel finds out that's when ross starts to move on with his life with someone new and now rachel is the one who's secretly harboring feelings for ross although rather than this being a desperate attempt to invert a formula that was massively successful the first time round they don't stretch this one out for an entire year like before and they throw a massive curve ball at you in the one with the list where ross and rachel look like they're finally about to get together but then ross does something really stupid and that pushes rachel into rejecting him okay we'll make a list rachel and julie pros and cons ross what is this thank you good luck just a waitress i do not have chubby ankles this arc in season 2 is where rachel becomes the character that she was always supposed to be she was the character that took the longest time to bed in because unlike the other friends she was in the process of completely reinventing herself when she was first introduced the point of her in season one was to be hopelessly innocent and naive and have the five friends enlighten her as to what life outside her spoiled rich girl bubble was really like i'm gonna go get one of those job things that was what drove a lot of the plots in season one but the difference between rachel and the rest of the group was that she didn't have a whole lot of agency you're watching her just drift through life and into an obvious failure of a relationship with paulo in a slightly different way that she had been drifting through life before when she'd ended up engaged to barry she even drifts back into having an affair with barry behind her ex-best friend's back in season one she kept having all these setbacks in growing up and becoming the person that she always wanted to be and this experience with ross in the one with the list meant she finally had something to be angry about when rachel finds her anger that's counterbalanced by her naivety and lack of experience in the real world which is what finally turned her into a funny character hey that's funny you're a funny chandler you're a funny guy you know what else is really funny weren't you the guy that told me to quit my job when i had absolutely nothing else to do of course now the audience is waiting on the edge of their seats to see if they patch things up and eventually will get together which again can only last for so long and after a few episodes rachel sees just how much ross cared about her in the one with the prom video and they finally get together properly this lasts for pretty much an entire year but you just know something's going to split them up again because of the awkward toeing and throwing that's been going on over the course of this arc it would have been really easy to have rachel find out it wasn't just a childhood crush and ross's head over heels in love with her at the end of season 1 and have them get together but instead season 2 is a messy and complicated process of them almost but not quite getting together and then they finally do it the reason it finds all these excuses to have them not get together of course is partly because we need a reason for people to stay watching and we have 24 weeks of programming to fill but this was also beneficial for not just extending the lifespan of the fact that was driving people to watch friends in their droves in the first place but also for the sake of realism people make a huge deal of friends being warm and fuzzy and nice but if you actually pay attention it really isn't because it doesn't shy away from showing just how messy and complicated love can be the show isn't just ross and rachel getting together and making love in the museum this romantic moment comes at the cost of ross having really hurt rachel's feelings quite badly and i love the fact that these moments of tragedy can be punctuated by some of the sharpest comedy writing that somehow manages to not upset the flow of drama at all we've just gotten a call from rachel and she told us what ross did it's pretty appalling and ross if you're listening i don't want to play your song anymore sitcoms typically get referred to as comfort food tv they're nice unchallenging and easy going and friends is that yes but unlike lots of sitcoms it's not always about everything working out and there being no consequences for anyone's actions it's comforting for the exact opposite reasons that a sitcom is stereotypically meant to be comforting a sitcom is supposed to have a status quo that will be maintained in some way there will be dramatic twists and turns but typically everything will look exactly as it was at the start of the next episode but friends wasn't like that at all when characters broke up things stayed broken for long periods of time and these events had major impacts on their lives and we had to watch them be miserable as they try to recover the idealistic theory of tv comedy and drama is that people always need a happy ending because life sucks and people want an escape from that but that isn't always the case friends doing the opposite of that was what was comforting because in the real world we have to go through heartbreak too and watching our favorite characters having to deal with their own heartbreak and managing to get through it and still make us laugh in spite of personal tragedy was what was uplifting which is obviously what leads me onto [Music] so let's talk about they were on a break the infamous arc that lasts from mid season 3 all the way up until season 4. basically by the start of series 3 everything looks too perfect for ross and rachel yes sitcoms are comfort food tv but friends never wanted you to be too comfortable so they slowly start to introduce cracks into their relationship ross gets insanely jealous when rachel makes friends with the man at her new job now that rachel's quit her job at the coffee house and she's in fashion an industry she's interested in and is finally finding her own career path he feels like he's losing her ross's paranoid and obsessive nature gets the better of him and then they made the unthinkable happen ross cheats on rachel or does he yes he does no he doesn't okay whether ross did or didn't cheat on rachel isn't really a conversation i'm interested in having what i find more interesting about the take a break storyline is the construction of it and the reason the creators had no choice but to do it like this by finding these messy and complicated reasons for ross and rachel's tooing and throwing over the course of season 2 they'd not only found a way of extending the life of the ark that was making friends compulsive viewing for people they'd also constructed an interesting and realistic relationship dynamic that gave friends the edge in the sitcom market it made it clear that it wasn't safe and easy and predictable but by doing this what they'd also done and this is where they kind of shot themselves in the foot a little bit was they proved that ross and rachel were just bad for each other like really really bad for each other they had serious communication and trust issues and neither of them respected the other's careers he didn't respect fashion and she didn't respect dinosaurs remember that thing that's been dead for a gazillion years well here's a little bone we didn't know it had a hundred million people went to see a movie about what i do i wonder how many people would go see a movie called jurassic park so yeah they needed to break up they didn't make sense together the story of how the science geek ends up with the homecoming queen is a classic tale for dumb romantic comedies but friends shows you what it would actually be like if the science geek ended up with the homecoming queen the audience might think a story like this is vindication for the underdog but love isn't supposed to be about vindication if this happened in real life you would get an extreme personality clash the take a break storyline was a point of escalation and was ultimately really good for the series as i said earlier they could have just gotten together when rachel found out at the end of season one but where's the drama in that and what would happen next they get together they get married have kids where's the show supposed to go from there it's a show about six friends and their lives and loves and you give two of them a happily ever after right at season two that wouldn't work at all so what else are you meant to do so ross and rachel had to break up in season three it was completely inevitable and there had to be a high stakes dramatic reason for them to do it and cheating was the obvious one but the reason for giving a moral grey area to what ross did was to make it so it's still okay to like ross afterwards they couldn't just have him out and out cheat because then it would quite blatantly all be ross's fault and you would just look at him differently if he just cheated and that was all they gave you he's not joey the point of ross is that he's a lovable pathetic loser though yes i do agree that a lot of his actions across the series are toxic we'll get onto that later but cheating is a line that you shouldn't really have this character cross because it goes against his nature and goes against his purpose and the reason i think this is genius is they found a way of giving us a moral gray area that doesn't make us look at ross any differently gave them a viable reason to break up and gave the audience something to talk about around water coolers which was the point of making the ross rachel arc so tumultuous in the first place what's so interesting about ross and rachel's relationship is the fact that sitcoms are typically so averse to change the rule is that everything always looks exactly as it was at the start of the next episode and if two characters get together that's usually it they're together now and that's the new status quo and given ross and rachel were the big 90s tv romance changing the dynamic in such a dramatic way was a real shock to people sitcoms are meant to be comforting and unchallenging they don't usually do things like this i know a lot of people can't stand the one with the morning after but it was a complete game changer and it's one of the most fascinating episodes of a sitcom i've ever watched because it's so uncomfortable and because it's so unexpected everyone thinks wait that can't be it can it and they've just dropped this in everyone's laps in the middle of the series this can't be it then how come it is and so that's when the will they or won't they hook returned even though we've just demonstrated precisely why they're bad for each other everyone was expecting something to happen again because it's ross and rachel and then oh my god it looks like it's about to happen again with the one with the beach and the one with the jellyfish but then rachel gives ross a letter that's way too long for him to read late into the night and she makes him agree to accept that they weren't on a break and to own up to everything without realizing that that was what he was agreeing to and it really does it does it really and truly does it so does not the one with the jellyfish is like a microcosm of the entire ross rachel storyline because there is no way this facade can be maintained and you just know that something's gonna snap and the writing is some of the show's sharpest but the way you owned up to everything it just showed me how much you've grown you know i suppose i just wish we hadn't lost those four months but if time was what you needed just to gain a little perspective we were on that bread coffee house in bed and that's the point where they've taken this arc as far as it could go will ross and rachel get together was the show's key selling point in the early days but it was time to move on the way this aunt kept driving you to the edge of your seat waiting for them to either get together or to break up again was essentially the dramatic equivalent of one of the core formulas that friends would spend most of its years working to it was basically the relationship equivalent of a farce [Music] so we've got arcs for our characters that's the main reason that people watched friends in their droves but all sitcoms need basic formulas that are going to keep people entertained while those arcs play out and friends had a few simple types of stories that it would tell week in week out the most common of which was your basic farce and they were exceptionally good at that one of the best examples of a friend's face is the one with the two parties from season two where monica arranges a birthday party for rachel but she can only invite one of her parents because her parents are getting divorced but both her parents show up so they have to invent convoluted reasons to have a party in each apartment happening separately and simultaneously it's funny clever rob liebman is a force as rachel's dad and it has a poignant story at its core and it does wonders for rachel's character development she finally realizes that her old life that she's already made such strides and letting go of is finally gone for good you work and you work and you work at a marriage but all he cares about is his stupid boat you work and you work and you work on a boat i may have only been in therapy since we snapped here but what the hell is half a vote and another great fast of course is the incredibly famous the one where everybody finds out which while i know i just blatted on about the ross rachel storyline this one is easily the best culmination of a friend's storyline and it uses everything at its disposal to construct the almost but not quite falling apart of a false pretense and i'll inevitably bring this one up again later when it gets to monaco and chandler there's incredibly carefully constructed fastest like that and then on the opposite end of the scale you have the one with the sharks from season nine which is one of the most baffling episodes in the entire series and beyond that just one of the most baffling episodes of a sitcom ever okay so monica goes to chandler's hotel room in tulsa to surprise him he was watching porn and starting to masturbate when she walks in and he panics and switches it to the nature channel and moniker his wife at this point in the show let me remind you thinks that this means that chandler enjoys masturbating to sharks okay i just got to chandler's room and i caught him molesting himself he was getting off to a shark attack show no yes chandler watches shark porn somebody actually wrote that as a pitch and everyone went yep seems legit they actually didn't play this one on general rotation when i was binge watching friends on tv in the early 2000s i had to discover it on dvd later they either skipped it because it was too risque for e4 which they also did with the one with the free pawn or they thought it was too dumb even for a comedy show another cool formula and one of friend's best formulas which sadly gets forgotten about in the second half of the show is people are just [ __ ] weird friends glory days are typically agreed as being between seasons two and five and during this era stories would regularly involve guest stars who are given characters with extremely odd quirks they first hit on how successful this would be with the one with the stoned guy in season one where monica is doing a trial dinner for a job at this guy's restaurant said guy played by john lovitz shows up stoned and he ends up saying and doing lots of outrageous things to prod entertaining reactions out of monika rachel and phoebe oh cool taco shells you know these are they're like a little corn envelope you know if you talk to anyone who spent a decent amount of time in new york city they'll usually tell you it's a weird place where you run into strange people with odd quirks who feel like they couldn't possibly exist and yet they do you wouldn't believe for example the brook shields guest character in the one after the super bowl could actually believe that joey genuinely is the character he plays on the medical soap opera days of our lives but such a ridiculous premise is played with a straight face and is the type of awkward humor that i just love in this show here we sit devil may care and just a little while ago you were reattaching simone's spinal cord that operation takes like over 10 hours but they only showed it for two minutes no one i love this formula so much because it's almost psychological it plays on the audience's fears about what you might uncover about someone if you get too close to them one of the friends will become infatuated with someone like rachel does with danny in the one with the yeti she'll get closer and closer to him until finally they get together and that's when she discovers that he has an incredibly uncomfortable and inappropriate relationship with his sister see when you put it that way you know danny hurry up the bat's getting cold one of the best iterations of this formula was this arc in season two where joey moves out and chandler gets a new roommate called eddie it feels uncomfortable at first because they've upset the natural order of things across multiple episodes as mentioned friends would try and subvert audience expectations like this all the time and they try and make it look like this is the new status quo chandler now lives with eddie and that's just how it is until it gets revealed that there's something not quite right about him [Music] hey eddie just watching you sleep why makes me feel um peaceful and charles just invited this guy to live with him in his home this arc was almost like a friend's horror movie the guests did kind of stop being standouts as the years wore on they did still have big celebrity guest stars of course like rachel's sisters and of course brad pitt in one of the most massively overrated episodes of any television show ever seriously the one with the rumor is beyond terrible it has one joke in it brad pitt's character used to be fat hahaha it is a funny joke because brad pitt is known for being one of the most attractive men in hollywood and it makes this joke again and again and again and also transphobia however the formula of odd quirky character forces everyone into entertaining reactions didn't exactly die though because the show did have two main characters who essentially filled this role and who were the uncomfortable exaggerated comic foibles to all the other friends joey and phoebe were there to say and do things to make everyone else's lives hell they're like if these odd quirky and uncomfortable people infiltrated the core group and since this gives me the opportunity to wax lyrical about phoebe i'm gonna do that phoebe buffet is one of the greatest comedy characters ever written seriously she's up there with alan partridge malcolm tucker and basil faulty for me she starts out as simply a character with no social awareness and whose unconventional view of the world can be milked for laughs but the point where phoebe really starts working for me is where they started expanding on the sort of things that a character like this with no social filter and no sense of shame can get away with saying a lot of friends stories are farces that involve characters trying to hold everything together and failing and phoebe is the perfect character to have in a story like that because she just does not give a [ __ ] who she makes feel uncomfortable reason for leaving last job yeah they thought i was a [ __ ] i'll tell you about the time i stabbed the cop phoebe what he stabbed me first actually giving birth to three babies is not that different than giving birth to one what do you know some large parties waiting oh one really does have a stick up one's ass doesn't what that because you see that was an actual problem and um yours is just like you know a bunch of you know high school crap that nobody really gives to him phoebe having this gives no [ __ ] attitude is world reason too because they gave her an incredibly tragic backstory if someone told you they were going to write a character whose mother committed suicide and they spent years living on the street and they're going to play these things for laughs usually you'd be staring at them open mouth and complete an absolute horror but it's the blunt and off-handed way that phoebe talks about her tragic past that's so extreme that it passes the point of extremity to a point where it's actually hilarious i made a man with eyes of coal and a smile so bewitching how was i supposed to know that my mom was dead in the kitchen she's the perfect example of a character laughing in the face of adversity this is a character who's been through a lot and seen some [ __ ] and the fact she survived and carved out a semi-successful life and career for herself and doesn't let it bother her just leaves you with a smile on your face i need to write some depressing stuff to go with my new bluesy voice but nothing that sad has ever really happened to me well um how about your mom dying uh-huh oh yeah i could write about the time i heard it that woo-hoo thing phoebe was a character that was so off the leash that there were basically no rules to her friends was too ridiculous sometimes like with the sharks episode i mentioned earlier but phoebe was a character who could basically say anything and you'd buy it it was surreal having a bunch of characters who seemingly lived in the real world but then there's this one with no rules whatsoever who's just there in their orbit one of the most ingenious moments in the entire show for me was this one where phoebe's grandma died and this is what her funeral was like thank you so much for coming well okay here's your m3d glasses and reverend pong will tell you when to put them on let's go say goodbye [Music] i think what i love about phoebe so much is that she bolsters this darker edge that friends always had about her she was always just a bit too real for everyone she even led to this one incredibly strange dark fan theory that the entire show was the result of phoebe's meth adult imagination as a homeless drug addict looking through the window of central perk and imagining a successful life and a group of friends for herself which would kind of make sense she is the outsider of the group lives further away than the others and doesn't slot into the backstory as easily although personally i think this theory is a bit too far i do like the dark edge of friends but there's got to be something hopeful to counterbalance here and the idea that someone with a dark past like phoebe can find somewhere she belongs is one of the more uplifting elements of the series they tried to change their approach to phoebe towards the end of the show where they gave her a boyfriend in mike who would now be the straight man to her eccentric cook and this didn't work nearly as well as it did with the five friends who don't have the extra factor of romantic involvement phoebe mike did work occasionally in episodes like the one with phoebe's rats where she insists that they take care of the babies of a rat that got caught in a trap in their kitchen but the whole mic storyline was an attempt to wind us towards an acceptable conclusion for phoebe phoebe came from her mother's suicide in a broken home went through some difficult relationships and a career path that wasn't always smooth towards this happy ending with a guy she loved and that's nice sure but it kind of sacrifices her quirks to get there the other five friends would reign in her quirks over the series but found she just didn't give a [ __ ] which was what was funny but the factor of a stable relationship at long last gave phoebe more of a reason to listen to mike when he says things like they should give up the box of rats paul rudd has said he felt like more of a prop in friends than an actual character and i have to agree with him there mike was used as a tool to work our way towards phoebe growing up and getting a happy ending which makes sense but it just never really sat right with me given just how much i adored her quirks over the course of the series this is why i totally got it when lisa cudrow made that case against doing one more episode of friends in the reunion special last year because her character did totally change as the show drew to a close and she got her happy ending phoebe in the 2020s would be completely different to phoebe in the 90s and 2000s the approach to phoebe over the end of the show was pretty much the exact opposite to the other comic foy ball who's basically allowed to stay the same as he always was from beginning to end [Music] friends detractors often make the point that the characters are all terrible people but i would personally argue that that is kinda well it's the point a difference between british comedy and american comedy that's often cited in media studies is that british comedy presents characters you're meant to laugh at whereas american comedy is more about characters you're meant to laugh with mazel faulty of course is a key example of a british comedy character who you're not supposed to respect and you end up laughing at his misfortune whereas the type of kitschy us sitcoms of the 60s 70s and most of the 80s were more focused on well-adjusted families and the mild scrapes they got into the rise of alternative comedy changed all that and this idea that american sitcoms are always about laughing with the characters rather than at them i feel is more than a little outdated friends was always a mix of laughing with our characters and at them and a lot of the time we're laughing at the character's stupid vacuous world views or their general lack of intelligence we fought the nazis in world war ii not world war one who was in world war one mexico yes very good just when i got taught that distinction between american and british comedy and media studies i looked back at my memories of friends and i thought to myself wait a minute is that actually true because i'm really not sure it is joey tribiani isn't a character you're meant to respect but that kind of gets lost on people part of this was probably because the show kind of fell in love with its own character and his stupid pathetic nature got lost in his charm people have this stereotype of actors as airheads because they have to be really into their looks to make it in this industry and sure some of them are like that but most of them aren't because it's a really difficult industry to navigate efficiently which requires some serious intelligence and joey was just so cartoonishly inept and childlike that i had a really hard time believing he'd be doing it for this long and that he was ever all that successful at it friends was ridiculous at times sure but there was a line it's not like 30 rock with jenna and tracy who are entirely absurd the main points where joey's acting career really worked were when they had him in the kind of obviously terrible place that you'd expect someone of his intelligence and skill set to be in i gotta say goodbye and i gotta say it quick cause this is killing me i will never forget you and so i'm gonna get on this spaceship and i return 200 years from now you'll be long gone but i won't have aged at all joey's unsuccessful career and obliviousness to his obvious failings was one of the show's key selling points one of the best examples of an episode of joey's career failing was probably in this one where he loses his insurance and he gets a hernia and he has no choice but to go on a ton of auditions while he's in an extreme amount of pain uh joey tribiani i'm here to audition for man i mean dying man yes unsuccessful actor joey is great but when he becomes a rich and famous soap opera actor when he's back on days of our lives was a bit of a stretch for me because joey is a man who's never really adapted to living in the real world phoebe worked better the more exaggerated her backstory became and the more off the leash she was allowed to be but they were exaggerating her past whereas joey was living an exaggerated present at times i felt like they got a bit carried away in making joey more childlike than just plain stupid like the one with ross's wedding in london where he's essentially doing the little kid his homesick storyline and it's funny that this story is playing out but with a grown man instead of a child everything's different here i want to go home i i miss my family i miss the coffee house i can't even remember what phoebe looks like well yeah as i said earlier friends would have characters who could barely believe existed at all and phoebe was kinda one of those yeah but you can mostly deal with that when it's say an anecdote or you see a small snippet of say brook shields character brookshield's character was essentially a sketch character but if you were watching her entire life it would be very hard to believe that a grown woman would drift through life thinking that people on television were really the characters they played phoebe is different because these moments of unreality like the funeral weren't structural they were occasional glimpses at insanity the most depth we got with joey was in this season 3 storyline where he falls in love with his co-star kate but she doesn't like him back joey was always the good looking ladies man who was always in control of his love life but this arc forced him into a position of vulnerability those are the most interesting moments for joey like when his professional life fails this was the first time where his love life failed i felt the show didn't really play into this contrast between his typically successful sex life and what should be his incredibly unsuccessful professional life with quite the same level of depth outside of this arc while i'm enjoying his position as the show's ladies man since the rediscovery of friends by modern audiences most of the friends have come under scrutiny for some pretty toxic behavior and world views and joey is the obvious one to single out for toxic behavior he's a dumb guy who gets laid a lot treats women as objects never calls them cheats all the time and yet he's allowed to get away with being a [ __ ] because of his charming smile and demeanor here's my point though the show does know that joe's behavior is terrible it's not endorsing people be like joey it's sending them up of course when you take what joey says at face value it either sounds stupid horrible or sometimes both because you waited too long to make your move and now you're in the friend zone now yes i agree that this idea as taken and applied in the real world that women apparently actively put male acquaintances into non-sexual boxes rather than you know having their own thoughts and feelings has done a lot of damage and i would agree in calling it irresponsible though given this is an early season one episode you can kind of say well they didn't know how much of a cultural impact friends was going to have yet but when you watch this clip you've got to remember it was said by the same character that said this right because if he doesn't like you this is all a moot point a moo point it's like a cow's opinion it just doesn't matter and this say hello to the new champ of chandler's dumb states game wow how many you got 56. because the friend zone talk is a joke and it gets proven to be an incorrect and ludicrous hypothesis when ross and rachel actually get together next season i do feel there's been a bit of selective outrage that's been going on when people have been reevaluating friends because is the inclusion of the friend zone talk and more of joey's dodgy behavior really any more offensive than the screaming laughter that everyone bursts into whenever phoebe offhandedly talks about her mother's suicide because help suicide isn't funny is it and if i just didn't bother to acknowledge the fact that we're not laughing at suicide we're laughing at how blase phoebe is about such a heavy topic then that would further serve the argument that friends endorses toxic behavior when it demonstrably doesn't it makes mistakes in its presentation of it sure but it doesn't actually endorse the character's world views you're not meant to respect joey you're meant to laugh at him and while we're on toxic behavior let's do an equally difficult one so this is a point where i'm probably going to make some people angry because a lot has been made in recent years of how toxic a lot of the behavior that ross exhibits throughout the series is and while yeah i agree it is like with joey i would argue that that was the point take for example the one where ross is mortified by the fact his son is playing with a barbie doll and tries to convince him over the course of the episode to play with the gi joe well yes this is not exactly the height of comedy in about a million miles away from friends at its best the point of the episode is undeniably this is a stupid attitude to have people keep on telling him he looks ridiculous ross you are so pathetic why can't your son just play with his doll ross is very much the villain of this storyline and he can't argue that it's not in keeping with his character ross spends pretty much the entire show not accepting people for the way they are and that's what causes him to sow the seeds of his own discord he got married to carol far too young because he assumed that's what you're supposed to do and then when she discovered she wasn't straight she split up with him and he had a hard time accepting that so hard that he never really did he lashed out it essentially became carol's fault that she was a lesbian and left ross a divorced dad by his late twenties ross desperately chases this dream of what he considers to be a normal healthy functional life a married professor of paleontology with children when that doesn't work out he can't accept that he is the one who's made mistakes and so he tries to change everyone else and not himself here's a wacky thought let's say you and i give it another shot no no i know what you're going to say you're a lesbian what do you say we just put that aside for now you know let's just stick a pin in it okay you know that thing we put over here with a pin in it it's time to take the pin out this is the type of character who would be homophobic and would have internalized toxic masculinity and he's not meant to be right he's meant to learn lessons and accept other people and accept that he's in the role doesn't always happen of course because even though friend's approach to the status quo was much looser than most sitcoms if he changes too much we'd run out of stories that we could tell with him i feel that the ross toxicity argument a lot of time misses the point that you can't have ross learn that he's in the wrong if you make it so he's right in the first place that's how stories happen people have to have flaws to overcome oh ross's behavior is toxic yet that's the point like with joey you're laughing at this behavior not with it the reason i find a lot of these how friends has aged badly essays and lists particularly lazy is a lot of the time it just amounts to pointing at a plot or a line and saying look this character is behaving in a toxic way when that's not really any kind of unique or mind-blowing interpretation of a piece of media from the past that's just what it's about ross learning how to become a better person is probably best demonstrated in the one with the lesbian wedding which yes has aged incredibly poorly but for the time its heart was clearly in the right place it's a look at how ross is having a hard time dealing with carol marrying susan because of the circumstances of their relationship but he does the right thing in the end he assuages carol's doubts when she comes to him and says she doesn't know if she can go through with it because her parents won't accept her i can't believe i'm gonna say this but i think susan's right you do look do you love her i do well then that's it and if george and adelaide can't accept that then the hell with them ross has been struggling with this but he does the decent thing in the end and he lets go [Music] all right carol wasn't ross's to let go and this episode is less about two women finding each other and more about a self-important man's neuroses again not saying this is the most progressive thing ever but for 1995 it was clearly trying and you understand where ross is coming from given that carol is someone who he was incredibly close to it's not just out and out bigotry that's going on here although yes they do do that with ross sometimes there are instances where they go overboard and make him too toxic specifically in the one with the male nanny from season 9 which for me is up there with the one with the rumor and the one with the sharks in worst friends episodes that aren't clip shows actually i'd go further this is the worst episode of friends clip shows and all the problem again was it had one overdone unfunny joke ross thinks it's weird that they're about to have a male nanny and because he's a male nanny that means he must be gay and that is a problem oh my god a gay man looking after children heaven for friend are you gay what kind of job is that for a man a nanny you gotta be at least bi and it does this joke again and again and again the b story's pretty weak too it's double length sometimes friends really did have a hard time finding the line beyond which ross just becomes genuinely unlikable it's not the ultimate intention that's the problem with the one with a male nanny though ross admits that his neuroses about feminine men comes from his dad judging him for playing with dinosaurs when he was a kid instead of playing sports maybe maybe because of my father you know when i was growing up he was kind of a tough guy you know and as a kid i wasn't the athlete i am now i always got the feeling he thought i was too sensitive the thing is though this doesn't work at all because ross's dad is historically the more emotionally supportive of his parents and both his parents have always thought the world of ross his toxicity does not come from his parents thinking less of him it comes from his parents thinking too highly of him and him trying to live up to that again like with the one where ben plays with the doll the one with the male nanny does know that ross is in the wrong and it does try and analyze why he's wrong but the problem was its analysis was based on something there was no groundwork for and also making a half-assed apology at the end for spending half an hour playing homophobia and toxic masculinity for cheap last felt like an excuse to indulge in it rather than to analyze it i think a lot of the ross toxicity backlash has less to do with the points the show was making and more to do with the specific jokes that were told under this premise and the fact it was played a bit too straight in this case it wasn't ludicrous it was a simple case of homophobia and that's way too close to reality to be funny whereas keeping it a secret from rachel that he's actually still married to her from that time they got drunk and married in vegas is toxic behavior but it's so damn stupid and unreal that you can find this behaviour funny russ are you crazy yeah ross is not the good guy in any of these situations but he's not meant to be although the specific jokes chosen for things like the one with male nanny do obscure this point i do get why this backlash has happened though because being a main character and having all these stories in which he's supposed to be this lovable pathetic loser does endear the audience to ross and it does kind of put you on his side regardless of whether he's actually meant to be right or not take for example the situation with emily where he says the wrong name at the altar emily is one of the most despised characters in the entire friend's canon and yet she didn't really do a whole lot that was wrong ross showed up at the airport when she was about to leave and told her he loved her even though they'd barely known each other a month ross encouraged her to get married way too fast he demanded they push ahead with the wedding when she asked to postpone it rachel showed up to the wedding with the intention of telling ross that she was still in love with him then ross said the wrong name at the altar of course emily was going to feel insecure about that of course she was going to make unreasonable demands in order for there to be any chance at making amends any human being would react this way the point of this story is that ross barely knows emily and he should not have suggested they get married so fast and of course that he and rachel never got over each other none of that is emily's fault and yet my fellow friends fans tend to blame emily for it and they see her as this crazy [ __ ] when she starts making unreasonable demands that he ditch rachel if he wants them to reconcile in season 5. i ross i ross take the emily take thee rachel who am i saying hello to i don't know about who's here but i can tell you're for damn sure who's not here and that's rachel well i should hope not ross knows better than that by now would you act any differently of your emily cause i sure as hell wouldn't i do get why people don't take its points and side with our characters even when they're clearly wrong though because no one's ever really been that sure what friends is actually supposed to be and therefore the line between laughing with our characters and at how ridiculous they are tends to be much blurrier than it should be so what is friends actually supposed to be why don't you tell us stuart if you know this show better than the rest of us thank you i will again there was this perception that arose around the mid-2000s that friends was an endorsement of cheesy 90s vapidity rather than a send-up of it it's possible that this was owing to the aforementioned outdated ideas about the difference between american comedy and british comedy as characters you're meant to laugh with instead of at and people arguably did start laughing with them instead of at them and actually got deeply invested in their delusions people started taking friends at face value not just in terms of things like the friend zone becoming a supposed tangible concept and not something openly ridiculous suggested by the show's least intelligent character ross and rachel are very much not right for each other and yet people wanted them to get together because network sitcoms induce a feeling of warm cuddly fuzzy comfort in the viewer simply by the osmosis of being surrounded by audience laughter friends was not a very happy show lots of miserable things happened in it and yet people don't notice that because the environment of a network sitcom disguises the darker edge with a soft focus and a nice easy going unchallenging comic rhythm okay yes i do recognize that it is literally just me that thinks this please scream at me now comment section but yes that is what friends is supposed to be in my opinion it's a subversion of the standard sitcom formula where openly tragic events are masked by the format the episode where ross has a mental breakdown at work and gets put on medication stands out to me because it's a really tragic life event and yet it's punctuated with audience laughter that juxtaposes it i saw a psychiatrist at work today why on account of my rage well when the psychiatrist told me that i had to take a leave of absence because i yelled at my boss so he offered me a tranquilizer and i thought it was a good idea so i took it friends looks cute and comforting but there's always downsides things and people are not always perfect characters retain toxic world views they openly [ __ ] their own and others lives up for comic effect nothing can ever just be good in friends even when it comes to what is easily the brightest and warmest spot in the entire series [Music] the story of monaco and chandler is kind of an inverted version of the story of ross and rachel the story of how rachel will eventually see just how much this humble science nerd cares about the most popular and beautiful girl from their high school when the time is right is a story that ross has been telling himself for years and it tells us a lot about his over-inflated sense of his own importance giving himself all these [ __ ] reasons not to say anything to her to you know just see whether she'll reciprocate grants his story all this drama and gravitas and paints him as this heroic underdog when honestly he should have just pulled the plaster off and stopped being such a mopey self-pitying coward ross and rachel is painted like a doomed hollywood romance whereas monica and chandler had none of that because they were both on a level playing field there are all these light hints going way back to season one that monaco and china will end up getting together someday but it did take the writers a while to figure out just how similar these characters are they both have severe confidence issues left over from high school and traumatic incidents in their lives have deflated their own senses of self-worth chandler may have had a rich and spoiled upbringing but he couldn't handle his parents divorce and his mother and father's very public ownership of their respective sexualities made him feel small by comparison and so he's incredibly sexually and romantically immature and he developed his sense of humor as a defense mechanism to avoid facing up to that folks when we come back we'll be talking about her new book euphoria unbound the always interesting nora tyler being you might want to put the kids to bed for this one i gotta tell you i love your mom's books i mean this is so cool yeah well you wouldn't think it's cool if you're 11 years old and all your friends are passing around page 79 of mistress [ __ ] and his lack of self-worth is compounded by setting himself alongside joey this confident and good-looking ladies man he doesn't have joey's looks or ross's tragic romance he's the joker that's his role and therefore his love life is always a series of jokes he's stuck in this perpetual loop of a relationship with janice a woman who he ends up despising and yet he always just seems to end up with her and all his friends keep making these snide crass insinuations that maybe he's actually gay which he's incredibly uncomfortable with because of his homophobia which appears to be born from his troubled relationship with his father meanwhile monica grew up with a binge eating problem and she always found it impossible to measure up to rachel her extremely popular confident ensure of herself best friend and also her brother ross the golden boy and her parents clear favorite this is demonstrated by her mother's snide attitude towards her throughout the show even when ross's life takes a down turn monica is always second best she's pregnant with my child and she and susan are going to raise the baby and you knew about that and part of the reason that monica takes on this role of the motherly figure to the rest of them is to counter how her parents treated her growing up he's trying to show them up and show the world that see this is what a caring person really looks like but the result of that is that her life is spent looking after everyone else at her own expense and putting up with a terminally unsatisfying romantic life where she's always seeing to the needs of others instead of herself this happens in obvious cases like her relationship with pete where her initial instincts that they're not right for each other are put to one side and then put to the test when he decides he wants to become the ultimate fighting champion this is also demonstrated less obviously with richard who may seem great but she ultimately put him on a pedestal and continued to date him even though she has clear maternal instincts that he was never going to want to satisfy if kids is what it takes to be with you then kids it is if i have to i'll i'll do it all again i'll do the four o'clock feeding thing oh but i have to do it all again then i will and if you hadn't have said if i have to like 17 times but i'd be saying okay let's do it i want to have a baby but i don't want to have one with someone who doesn't really want to have one monica and charmer have both spent so much time treating themselves as secondary characters in somebody else's story that they don't even realize that they're almost too perfect for each other they both have the same issues and can work together to resolve them there's a similar bit of tuning and throwing throughout their relationship beyond the light hints for the first couple of years the point where the ultimate intentions became clear happens at the one at the beach and the one with the jellyfish over the end of season three where chandler offers to be monika's boyfriend after she breaks up with pete this is just him testing the waters and she's unsure of it at first and it's done in this sort of jokey ways and hey what if we got together that'd be completely ridiculous wouldn't it because we've been friends for years and we've both accepted by this point in our lives that we're pathetic unlovable losers with terrible relationships that's the way it is was and always will be that's the status quo of the sitcom that we're a part of we're principally there to be ross and rachel's plus ones respectively this show is about ross and rachel and whether they will or won't get together that is the point of friends that's what the beach storyline over the end of season three in the start of season four is primarily about the light suggestion of monaco and china may be getting together isn't even the bee story the b story is phoebe finding her birth mother it's not even the c story it's like the d e or f story it's treated with such little prominence that everyone completely forgot this happened and then them getting together in london was a total shock for everyone everyone just forgot that it was seated here okay all right i think you're great and i love you but you will always be the guy who peed on me and the ross's wedding finale mirrors these episodes because again on the surface it's all about ross just like it was throughout monica's childhood as her mother was undermining her just like it was throughout the ross and rachel storyline where chandra and monica's every relationship was falling apart in the background the church that ross and emily wanted to get married in is halfway demolished rachel shows up to wreck the wedding meanwhile monica and chandler keep their hook up at a lower more background noise level monica keeps making the excuse that she's drunk sad lonely and child is still making jokes about it and they make out like them hooking up isn't a big deal it takes a few more episodes when they get back to the us to admit to themselves that them hooking up and then planning on doing it again wasn't just an accident but they really don't want it to seem like it's a big deal so what they do is they keep it a secret that they're together for the first half of season five but just stop and think here outside of giving us some interesting stories to tell why do monica and chandler do that the reason we didn't tell anyone was because we didn't want to make a big deal out of it but it is a big deal please we just don't want to deal with telling everyone okay that might seem like it's an answer but it isn't they never explain properly why they don't want this to be a big deal but it's quite obvious why when you look at how we got to this point because then publicly owning this moment in their lives clashes with who they've made themselves out to be for such a long time monica feeling inferior to ross and chandler feeling inferior to everyone is a part of their identities the initiation of this relationship should have been the happiest time of their lives and they should have allowed themselves to bask in it but they can't because their stories have never been about them before and it would feel weird and wrong to make it about them now they're just so afraid that anything might ruin it even something as completely innocuous as just publicly admitting to their friends that they're together while the monaco and chandler relationship is the brightest thing to happen in this show it's not allowed to come without its inhibitions it's warm and nice but it makes sense that there's a counterpoint to it that's been driven by all this detailed character work that's been going on throughout the show that's why this is one of the more memorable arcs on the show because it's really well balanced really well reasoned and it also allows the show to indulge in a lot of farces which carry on for some of the show's strongest episodes the one with ross's sandwich which as well as being a hilariously tragic character study of ross also plays up the pressure that keeping the relationship a secret is having on joey the only person who knows about it the hideously over-complicated lengths that monica and charma have to go to now to keep their relationship a secret are both hilarious but also an important trigger for emotional growth for both of them their inhibitions have made their life so complicated that they have to openly humiliate themselves in order to keep up this facade i'm monika i'm disgusting i stalk guys and keep their underpants this all culminates in the one where everybody finds out an utterly gorgeous fast that lay a scheme on top of scheme on top of scheme they know they won't be able to maintain a lack of attention on their love lives forever but they're in too deep now and they can't let the other side win okay so now they know you know and they don't know that rachel knows we could not tell them we know and have a little son of our own oh my god she knows about us phoebe knows and she's just trying to freak us out it's over now right because you can tell them you know they know oh man they think they are so slick messing with us but see they don't know that we know that they know they don't know that we know they know we know following the one where everybody finds out their relationship is allowed to progress at a normal pace but because they had this established history of being the underdogs when set alongside ross and rachel it still comes with doubts setbacks and the natural arguments that will occur when two people are still finding each other's boundaries and because they've built such simple but effective character traits for moniker with her obsessive nature and chana with his self-doubt they still had hundreds of great stories left to tell with this couple dynamo one of my favorites is this one where chandler decides to do something nice and cleans the apartment while monica's away at work but then ross points out that everything won't be put back exactly where it's supposed to be did you get monica's authorization to move all of her stuff that i'm gonna put everything back put it back exactly where you found it i i i cleaned the apartment i moved everything around and then i i forgot where it where it went back and i'm sorry i'm very sorry i'm sorry i'm sorry i love this one so much because of the incredibly satisfying ending where monica lets go of her obsessive nature when it comes to her other half oh my gosh taylor what you did it's just a wonderful thing and i really appreciate it i know i have this weird thing where i want everything to be in the perfect place but i would never expect you to worry about that the monaco and chana story is essentially a tale of two people moving past their worst instincts in pursuit of collective happiness and it's beautiful of course the key arc that pushes this character growth for chandler is the one at the end of season six where he's about to propose to monica and he has a plan to throw her off guard and make it a surprise that fails and the ex-love of her life richard returns to the show china has to confront his jealousy and his constant doubt that a story could ever truly be about him and do what he knows he has to do in order to allow himself to finally be happy and richard is the perfect character to drive that home and stop chandler from self-sabotaging because you know that he could never be spiteful or undermining and that he would always want what's best for monika and i love that scene where chana confronts him and realizes his perception of richard as a potential threat is driven by his own sense of inferiority you go get her chandler if you do get her don't let her go you know richard you are a good guy i know i hate that this is also attempted in that arc at the end of season seven surrounding chandler's dad which okay the clear intent here was for chandler to face up to the fact that pushing his dad away because his dad came out as gay and then came out as trans was a shitty thing to do and he needed to get the [ __ ] over himself they had already taught him this lesson that the way he perceives other people is based on horseshit and is making his life worse in terms of his love life and got an ending out of that but he was yet to apply this same principle with his historically fractious relationship with his parents like i said earlier the way the show used ross's learned behaviors and toxic masculinity to teach him progressive lessons was the show showing its heart was in the right place and while this arc does make it very clear who is in the right and who is in the wrong the channel's dad arc is the part of the show that's aged the most poorly because it's quite clearly come from writers on the outside of the community looking in and we also had the same problem as with the specific jokes told in the one with the male nanny the point of the story might be punching up but the jokes themselves punch down and trans people's opinions on the chandler's dad episodes are going to be much more valid than mine so please comment with those opinions now because i recognize i'm really out of my depth here as well as having monica and chandler undergo the emotional growth necessary in order to become a happy healthy adult couple there was also this newfound tension with ross and rachel as monaco and chandler became the show's new central couple ross and rachel hadn't really been a thing for years at this point and monica and china's public ownership of their own stories in season 5 was starting to push ross and rachel into positions as secondary characters and this reversal of roles led to some great conflict-driven episodes easily the best of these was the one i already mentioned where ross and rachel get married in vegas while they're drunk this is primarily done to demonstrate the contrast between ross and rachel and monica and chandler who almost decided to get married themselves in the same episode for legitimate reasons ross and rachel was supposed to be the show's key relationship but they were [ __ ] terrible for each other and this twisted insane nightmare drama where they get married by accident and then he hides the fact that he's still married to her is just taking it the extremist of extremes going so far beyond all prior demonstrations that they're clearly bad for each other and i i have loved her in the past but now she is just my wife ross just for my own peace of mind you're not married to any more of us are you hi how are the gellers don't call us that ross and rachel's lives are complete messes and yet there's still this unspoken rivalry between the two key couples even though monaco and china are going pretty much perfectly by comparison this mostly unspoken rivalry finally gets spoken in the one with monica's thunder where ross and rachel almost get back together on the night that monaco and chandler get engaged until they get discovered by monica i'm sorry apparently i've opened the door to the past the reason monica's so offended is because just like in high school everything is about ross and rachel again it feels like she's being dragged back to a time where she didn't have the confidence to take control of her own life my sweet 16 remember you went to third base with my cousin charlie monica you know what the only reason i did that was because your party was so boring we had a caricaturist a lot of friends fans make the case that the show should have ended with monica and chandler's wedding and a part of me does agree with that the show started out as the story of an unrequited romance between ross and rachel that fell apart and then it turned into a show about two undercover people unsure of their own importance and place in the world finding each other as far as reversals go you couldn't ask for a better one i know it's been built up for years but ross's crush on rachel is not cute it is not the romantic ideal ross is much more in love with the story of ross and rachel than he is with rachel rachel felt lost and directionless in season two and the fact ross was infatuated with her when she was in high school meant that being with him made her feel like she was the popular cheerleader again whereas monica and charma had respect for one another and they gained self-respect as their relationship wore on you don't want to be ross and rachel you want to be moniker and chandler and the finale of season seven does an incredible job in resolving the conflict between these two couples on the day of monaco and chandler's wedding rachel discovers that she's pregnant but her immediate instinct is to keep this a secret she lies and says that obviously the pregnancy test they found in the trash at monica's apartment is monikers rachel accidentally made the day of monaco and charles's engagement about her and ross but this day is about monika and rachel decides that she should not make that same mistake again she carves it up and lets her best friend have her time in the spotlight it's monica and chalmers day not hers and she lets her have that [Music] thing is though you can't just leave it there can you i mean realistically come on while rachel's pregnancy was a useful tool in resolving the conflict between the two key relationships the show had been built around you can't just end a series by revealing that a key character is pregnant and not tell us who the father is i mean sure it is obvious who the father is but anyone who thought this was going to be an ending to the show as a whole was clearly deluding themselves and that leads us neatly onto what i like to call the clutching at straws period oh my god i wonder who the father of rachel's baby is could it be this character or will it be this character maybe it will be this character oh my god imagine if it was gunther fortunately they only treat us as if we're complete [ __ ] idiots for the first couple of episodes before they reveal obviously it's ross and the one where rachel tells him and the one with the videotape where there's this ceaseless debate over how the [ __ ] this whole thing got started up again are both very well done ross's reaction to being told that the girl he obsessed over in high school and for most of his adult life is now going to be having his kid but will not be getting back together with him he's very consistent with his frantic nature and his obsession with doing things in the traditional way we can probably worry about that till after we get married we're married well yeah i think we should get married what because that's your answer to everything no because that's the right thing to do and the episode where rachel tells her dad the situation and has to face up to him is wonderful because even though she knows what she wants and what she doesn't want we all turn into children around our parents and the fast of having rachel point the finger of blame for this non-traditional setup at ross was genuinely hilarious really her dad should have been in more episodes rob liebman is great is it because that punk ross won't marry you that's it is that it yes yes he says i'm damaged goods while season eight isn't quite as solid as six and seven and it would have been much more satisfying as an ending if the ross rachel storyline was allowed to fade into the background while the monaco and chandler relationship is allowed to flourish i do think that rachel is pregnant arc has a reason to exist it's pretty much the culmination of this struggle for independence that rachel has been engaging in for pretty much the entire series and ross has struggled to accept the fact that his life will not work out in the conventional traditional way that he envisioned when he was younger even in respect to the idea that rachel is supposed to be the one he's meant to be with because she's your lobster and to that end i can kind of see how the writers ended up at the horrifying conclusion that they should start the ark that makes almost every friends fan angry and most of you probably knew this was coming [Music] so joey now has feelings for rachel which he's harboring for most of the time that she's pregnant he tells her and obviously she goes it's not the right time i'm carrying ross's child duh he accepts that but then he accidentally proposes to her in a really stupid episode at the start of season 9. there's a bit of drama over that and then she secretly harbors feelings for joey while he's moving on with a relationship with someone else that falls apart and then they try and start something up together in season 10. now yes they try and emotionally manipulate you into thinking this isn't totally stupid with a glaring omission take me a while to get over that's all not even sure how to do that i mean i've never been in love before so you're in love with her yeah um joey your best ark in the entire show remember however while there are huge huge flaws in this entire story joey and rachel isn't completely beyond belief and does serve some kind of warped purpose [Music] okay hear me out here friend spends quite a lot of its lifetime trying to change the dynamic and subvert audience expectations this can go from mild things like swapping the boys and girls apartments for a large chunk of season 4 or major things like ross maybe cheating on rachel and seemingly ending things between them for good and having rachel pregnant with ross's kid by accident following that up by saying no this doesn't automatically mean we're going to get together because hell look at our entire history together we drove each other crazy i mean he was possessive he was jealous he could never just let the little things go and then having her almost but not quite get together with joey i can kind of see how they got there ever since the one with the list it's been a process of saying to the audience that thing that you think you want ross and rachel getting together well life doesn't always work out the way you want it to pretty much everyone including some of the main cast members had a problem with the joey is in love with rachel's storyline because one it almost felt incestuous and two they were complete opposites while they may share some similarly shallow views rachel spent the entire series battling for maturity and carving out a successful life and career for herself joey did the opposite he never matured always lived life as a series of high stakes risks and only ever really had one case of having serious romantic feelings for another character throughout the bulk of the first eight seasons joey always just sort of fell into things but he was happy with that that's why i always felt that joey was the least interesting friend because he never really had much of a long-term goal rachel did and that's why they don't work together in the second half of the show the writers did try and come up with situations where people would encourage joey to mature and search for more meaningful romantic attachments because you know he's in his 30s now and is he really going to want to remain this sleazy shag about forever but when they attempted to do this they ended up demonstrating why joey was never going to mature they gave him situations which were almost always doomed to fail he wasn't going to get together and stay together with janine a woman who he has nothing in common with and starts out completely disinterested in him in one episode the girls try and convince him to become friends with a woman before dating them but he [ __ ] that up as well because he just doesn't know how to because it's just not in his nature and that's why this feels so wrong when they try and engineer a situation where this guy who we've spent so long demonstrating is just not wired for deep romantic attachment is apparently genuinely deeply in love with rachel his friend of seven years at this point however while it is abrasive and uncomfortable the joey is in love with rachel's storyline works on a level of continuing to deny this call for ross and rachel to get together that the audience had been making for years at this point and while it may feel wrong that ultimately is the point of the show life surprising you and not working out the way you thought it would it even sings this to you at the start of every episode [Music] the show does this at almost every turn subverting the audience's expectations and the characters so ross gets married to carol and has a kid turns out carol's gay and she goes off and gets married to susan and they raise the kid without ross so ross finally gets together with his crush from high school and everything looks like the perfect hollywood romance ending but oh [ __ ] they're totally unsuited to each other so ross gets his former high school crush who is unsuited to pregnant but she doesn't want to be with him she wants to be with one of his best friends so yeah i know people are gonna hate me for saying this but that's why the joey and rachel storyline makes sense as a tool for confounding the audience even if they don't make sense together it's not fun to watch it's horrible stupid awkward and on occasion nightmare inducing [Music] i hope you're a better father than you are a friend but it has a point ross and rachel seemed like they should have worked but didn't so instead let's try something which seems like it won't work in any way shape or form okay yes i do recognize that every single point i've made here and about the ross rachel relationship throughout this video gets undermined by the finale but trust me we'll get that [Music] so monica and chandler are together ross and rachel aren't rachel is now an independent single mother with a high paying job phoebe is slowly getting her life in order with mike and joey is now a successful actor seasons 9 and 10 feel a little bit desperate to people because there's not really a whole lot of new things to do with these characters anymore besides getting them to a point where the show feels like it should naturally end monica and china easily have the most interesting arc in the final years they may have gotten together got married and things may seem like they're working out but as ever things get in the way china's work moves him away to tulsa and then he quits when he realizes just how dissatisfied he is with his life throwing their plans to have children into disarray this becomes even more complicated when it turns out they can't have children this makes a lot of sense as an arc for them because they're both very neurotic people and monaco china's path to adoption led to some funny situations some emotionally engaging situations and sometimes both i'd love to but i gotta get back to talking to your parents they're telling us all about how they adopted you what i'm adopted i got nothing but outside of monaco and chandler seasons 9 and 10 are the least interesting seasons because the types of big events they were playing with had mostly already been played out before were kind of obvious and expected and openly just the creatives trying to find an ending for the show as a whole so phoebe's getting together with mike because we need to give her a happy ending but there's all this drama between the two because they're still finding each other's boundaries and mike openly says he doesn't want to get married again and then david the ex-love of phoebe's life shows up again gee a little bit like with richard and there's all this rivalry between the ex-love of her life and the current love of her life gee i wonder which one she'll choose and then obviously it's gonna lead up to a wedding which there was pretty much no doubt in anyone's minds was gonna happen unlike in previous seasons because hell monica and charlotte could have fallen apart the fact that ross rachel relationship have been so popular among the audience and then have been ripped to [ __ ] pieces in such a dramatic way set an alarming precedent things might not happen the way you want them to that scene where chandler finally gets his wedding day jitters and runs away to his office was hilarious but it also felt genuinely dangerous because of all this intricate character work that had been done with him over the years that genuinely made you believe that this might not happen because if i go home we're going to become the beings the beings have horrible marriages they yell they fight and they use the pool boy as a pawn in their sexual games this is a character we know has serious confidence issues that he may have been working through with monika and everything might look like it's about to work out but again yeah of course they were always going to end up together but they did all the ground work necessary to make this feel dangerous and that's why it's so satisfying when they finally tie the knot with phoebe and mike though i never really bought any of the revelations and mike's saying he never wants to get married again they were attempting a similar arc with similar doubts but i just didn't buy it because as said mike was a prop used to finally give phoebe a happy ending he wasn't much of a character in his own right he didn't have the depth of chalmer so i could predict where phoebe and mike were going joey and rachel obviously wasn't going to be a thing it was just there to throw everybody off guard and there were all these hints that ross and rachel were going to become a thing again which i'll get to the arcs aren't nearly as important in seasons 9 and 10 because it's open about the fact it's trying to find an ending and we pretty much know what's gonna happen with all of them there are arcs like there always were but this is why seasons nine and ten kind of feel a bit static to people and we had a much higher number of standalone episodes with simple premises that had nothing to do with the ongoing storylines we always had these of course like the one with the ball which is a personal favorite because it's so dumb and pointless but episodes like the one with the lottery or the one where ross organizes a memorial service for himself while they are really funny bits of 20 minute time killer the one with the lottery is still one of my favorite episodes but they don't really do anything to advance the overall story of the friends trying desperately hard to find a way of achieving that fabled state of being happy and well-adjusted adults because monaco and chandler essentially already are and the show knows it's almost over and let's be honest so do we so the last one yes it undermines almost every single point i've made throughout this entire video but i would personally argue that that's because the last one undermined the entire show not my reading of it am i reading the show as being a deep dramatic exploration of people's relationships is perfectly legitimate shut up so we end up in a very similar place to where we started the series ross really doesn't want rachel to leave and start a new job in paris and phoebe's telling ross that he needs to tell rachel how he feels before she leaves but he's all shy and doesn't want to say anything and we have the traditional romantic comedy running through the airport to get to her and they do the big revelations and really telling her how he feels but rachel does still get on the plane in the end and ross goes back to his apartment alone depressed and relenting the fact that no one told him that life was gonna be this way fade to black credits [Music] okay no obviously you know what happens she leaves the message on his answer machine which any young people watching this phones actually used to be plugged into walls yeah i know it's weird there were these things called land lines yeah weird right i'm not sure how they work i think the voice is supposed to go in through this wire and then the voice comes out the wire and i i don't get it anyway so rachel reveals she got off the plane i got off the plane and they kiss and happily ever after okay there is some degree of subverting audience expectations here you know it looks like rachel's got on the plane left and moved on with her life he doesn't get to the airport and then she runs into his arms and says yes ross i will sacrifice my career for the sake of someone who's historically made me completely [ __ ] miserable but yeah while this may have been what the fans and most of the people working on the series ultimately wanted the reason it gets under my skin is that rachel is caught at a very similar crossroads she was at in season 3. she wants to pursue her dreams and that is incompatible with ross like i've said throughout this video the idealized romance of the most popular girl in high school gets together with the underdog science nerd may sound sweet but friends counted that with the cold hard fact that life is not always sweet and a long-term romance between these two archetypes probably wouldn't work i do get why they do it though having the finale end with ross and rachel going their separate ways for good would almost certainly leave everyone with a sour taste in their mouths and it is the last one and doing anything other than this would cause everyone to look back at friends with bitterness finales are hard that's why so many sitcoms failed a finale test you need to find a resolution that's satisfying but that also doesn't piss everybody off while friends had a lot of cold moments you do want everyone to ultimately leave the show feeling warm about it as a whole you could see them backtracking over the course of seasons 9 and 10 where they're trying to engineer it so this scenario makes more sense than the idea of ross and rachel ending up together in seasons 2 and 3 would have done and from all that evidence you knew exactly where they were going which is why i said seasons 9 and 10 are pretty unsurprising which is why they're the least memorable rachel had put her foot down and said no we're not getting back together again in season eight but while rachel was pregnant and then when they were raising emirates separated platonic partners in seasons 9 and 10 ross was starting to become a bit more respectful of rachel's needs than he was back in the earlier seasons i know it's a terrible thing to even think this but i want you to be at my constant beck and call 24 hours a day i'm very sorry but that is just the way that i feel okay what i'll be here with you all the time but i'm being so unreasonable true but you're allowed to be unreasonable you're having a baby so all right it's not totally out of the blue that they got back together in the end ross and rachel had both changed so while it appears similar i will admit it's not totally the same crossroads we had back in season 3 when she was starting her job and ross was being a self-centered [ __ ] about it but secretly i do like to think that after the last one rachel decided to go to paris for six months and continue to pursue her dreams and her relationship with ross long distance and he respected her career choices which is a scenario that i have explored in my fan script the one after the last one while rachel has to give up her dreams in order to satisfy everyone who wanted her to get back together with ross again monica and chandler are allowed to move away from the city and start a family in the suburbs despite everyone's protests about everything changing it's difficult but it's right for them and it's ultimately a satisfying conclusion i'm not as bitter about the finale as i used to be and admittedly they did do the groundwork necessary for reigniting ross and rachel in seasons 8 through 10 and doing parenthood the other way around is a great idea you know they have a baby together and then they realize they like each other and want to get together i guess all of this stems from me being a bit of an awkward [ __ ] who when i'm told give the audience what they want would typically respond with wait why do they want that and is what they want actually bad for them is rachel giving up her dreams for a self-important narcissistic [ __ ] actually good for the audience audiences don't know what's good for them isn't this a bit like a situation where you got a kid who wants to eat a massive tub of ice cream for dinner and he's screaming at you for his ice cream and then you sigh really loudly and go fine here's your [ __ ] ice cream who cares you get a ton of cavities your little [ __ ] okay yes that does sound bitter but it isn't because i said it isn't so shut up personally i would re-cut friends and have the show end with the one with the morning after and have it come up with a caption that says this does not work take your medicine this can't be it then how come it is [Music] anyway in conclusion all of this is why i think that while friends might look like any old sitcom its character arcs are just as interesting and richly textured as any respectable hbo boxset drama of that era the experience of watching it may feel easygoing and brainless but the construction of it is calculated incredibly well so well that even when it does something that may seem stupid or reach a conclusion i might disagree with i can always see the thinking that's gone into it it sometimes shoots itself in the foot when it comes to its relationship with an audience that wanted different things from it but it's got much more integrity than most sitcoms of this period and that is why it's left such an enduring legacy [Music] hey everyone thanks for watching if you like this video and want to see more things like it why not consider joining my patreon at patreon.com i'd like to thank these generous people a maxwell alistair macpherson anirun hunt chris lim chris p connor pape dave sanders deneb jennifer milligan joel joanna kirkpatrick louise wade matthew brench max kennedy michael graham oxbow is emsty pastelwich robert conley and ryan scott thanks for watching [Music]

Channel: Stubagful

Views: 600,193

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Id: FCNAh093gF4

Length: 90min 3sec (5403 seconds)

Published: Fri Aug 05 2022