The Story of Joey: The Failed Friends Spinoff

while friends are still revered as an Untouchable cultural institution still ever present on streaming services still beloved by fans worldwide there is one footnote in its history that everyone seems to have forgotten about there was a sequel and not just a tiny show that no one watched the spin-off Joey debuted to an average viewership that while it was nowhere near as high as friends was still pretty decent and 46 episodes isn't nothing so many shows get canceled long before producing that many even if some of them didn't actually make it to air given Joey's reputation as that terrible friend spin-off that didn't work I know people are going to be watching this video expecting me to immediately start slating it but the reasons for Joey's eventual failure I think a much more multi-layered and more interesting than simply saying bad show was bad it would be incredibly easy for me to sit here and draw circles around the changes between friends and Joey and call them the reason that continued success didn't follow directly onto the what Joey did next show the fact Marta Kaufman and David crane didn't follow Kevin bright into this new project is the obvious difference between these two shows but the reason Joey the show was never likely to have much of a successful lifespan beyond the one that it had was that there was something conceptually wrong with the idea of doing anything sustainable with Joey so let's start with that [Music] to set Joey in context I'm now going to pitch three potential spin-off shows about the other friends based on where I think they would go in the aftermath of the last one let's start with Ross Ross is now retrospectively the most disliked friend a lot of this comes off the back of modern audiences reapprising old material with our current standards but he was starting to get some open criticism towards the end of the show during its lifetime too people have always thought he was a bit of a whiner and some people might say that a spin-off about Ross would be unwanted and horrible but thinking about the way the environment of American Comedy started to change when shows like the office 30 Rock and Community took off I personally think a spin-off about Ross would fit into that scene quite well I picture its set several years after friends has ended Rachel has gotten sick of Ross unintentionally sabotaging her career she's ended things with him and gone to Paris like she originally planned to at the end of season 10. now in his fourth season in the midst of an existential crisis Ross starts producing a puppet show about dinosaurs for children on a small time educational TV channel I picture this Ross spin-off essentially like 30 Rock as being about the making of a ludicrous television show and the inner workings of a small time TV broadcaster given Ross became quite an unlikable character maybe we could play into the meta fiction focus and feature office star mockumentary talking head sequences and Ross becomes like a Michael Scott character where we're openly laughing at his stupid ideas about how to make this dinosaur puppet show more educational in the way that he used to try and explain a fact about dinosaurs to the friends who would then all make bald faces in response a lot of American sitcoms were beginning to move away from the multi-camera studio setup and away from the warm and comforting vibe that friends had and a show whose narrative is more openly confrontational towards friends most disliked character I think could have easily flourished in that environment foreign Phoebe being the character with the darkest backstory a spin-off focused on her would open about 15 years after friends has ended she's now married happy lives in the suburbs and has two kids but then she hears that her birth mother has died and she gets invited to the funeral her kids then start asking her about her family history which she's hesitant to talk about as she's now moved on and restarted her life and she wants to forget about the darkness but then she realizes she has unfinished business she needs closure with all these people who help to survive the tragedies that were ever present in her life when she was younger and as she revisits people from her past she finds summer dead and some resent her for getting the chance to start her life over again when they didn't Phoebe spent the last chunk of Seasons two through five searching for her Roots searching for her father and making connections with the few family members that still want anything to do with her and it feels weird that most of them fall away and become less relevant as time goes by she reconnected with her father and there was some light suggestions that there could be more to come with him but he never shows up again then her twin sister Ursula caused her a lot of damage and she's made it clear that she hates her but I always felt there was unfinished business between them so the idea of Phoebe having moved on and become the soccer mom that she wanted to be but she has all this history and you don't just get over trauma just by finding significant other and having kids and there is clearly a lot of trauma in Phoebe's past so a show about her confronting her past going through therapy maybe and coming to terms with it and letting go of it could make for a really quite powerful series while Phoebe was always the funniest caratron friends I think a single camera dramedy about her past that allows her quirky humor to sit uncomfortably alongside her tragic backstory would find a dedicated loyal following Chandler I see is the most literary potential sequel to friends like Phoebe I'd have it as a single camera dramedy as we explore in the one that could have been Chana had this dream when he was younger of writing for the New Yorker or something like that where he would be paid to be funny so the irony is that 18 years after friends has ended and he and Monica have moved to the suburbs with their kids a video of Monica cooking and being typically over the top while doing it blows up on the internet and she starts getting booked on talk shows at the same time his daughter's Tick Tock blows up meanwhile his son has grown into a popular confident joke type of character the sort of person that charmer always fancied himself as but never had the emotional stability to pull off he's been in marketing for 15 years a job he loves but it's not really scratching his creative itch anymore so he decides to start writing a memoir about his family life China was showing a lot more maturity towards the end of the show and growing out of his humor as defense mechanism roots and watching him be the adult in the room the straight man who used to be the comic relief while Monica and the kids have to deal with the attention that their respective successes have brought them would make for a really funny and insightful family drama day now with these three potential shows the key factor that all of them have in common is that in terms of style tone and form they're about as far removed from friends as it's possible to get but the reason they all have that distinction is that narratively there is a lot to be gained from them the reason the creators chose to end friends in the first place was that the show is about a specific time in people's lives where their friends are their family but that time is fleeting things change circumstances change and people mature so with characters who are approaching 40 narratively it would make sense to change the tone and start exploring how their lives are completely different now so the new forms that I've chosen for these spin-offs make sense this is precisely the opposite of what was always going to happen with a spin-off about Joey so basically we send him to LA and he tries to make the next big break in his acting career and a style tone and former friends is replicated so accurately that it might as well just be friends again except John and Monica Phoebe Ross and Rachel have all mysteriously disappeared the likely reason that Joey got Green Layer outside of the fact that any follow-up to friends was always going to be successful at least in the short term purely by the fact it's already got an inbuilt fan base was that a show about Joey makes absolute sense from a production standpoint we have an established character an actor who wants to keep playing him he was one of the most popular characters and we have an established format of the trials and tribulations of a dumb actor making dumb decisions and failing upwards through the industry you've essentially just pitched the Joey episodes of friends which act as a proof of concept for a potential show about Joey and also the inner workings of the Hollywood studio system are something that every single person working on the show will be familiar with inside and out so mining that for material and getting Matt LeBlanc to carry it out on a bunch of sound stages sounds like an easy route to further success problem is with Joey as I noted in my analysis video that I did a friends last year I lost interest in him because I felt like his storylines weren't really going anywhere he demonstrated time and time again that he wasn't going to move forward emotionally and mature he just sort of fell into things and had a good time while doing it good for him sure but is there a narrative future there or are we basically just going to be watching him doing what he always did forever well yeah of course that's how most sitcoms work but as I explored in my friends video friends were starting to mess with that conventional understanding of what a cozy domestic sitcom was because it spent so much of its lifetime disrupting the status quo but if you're looking at the traditional pre-friend sitcom model of safe repetitive routine Joey was always the option to bank on them running with because with the other friends it would have been hard the Ross Phoebe and Channel shows that I just pitched would have required taking the building blocks of friends apart and putting them back together again in a completely different way Joey never changed and was determined not to change and so a sequel show starring Joey that was essentially just more of the Joey episodes of friends would importantly be easy to do and so he's the one they made the show about I hadn't watched the Joey pilot since it aired about 18 years ago I remember enjoying it and I did again because although the style of humor and look and feel is exactly the same as friends I could see small hints at something potentially darker that probably got sanitized by someone concerned about scaring away the friends fans that followed the character from one show to the next there's this storyline where Joey gets a part on a brutal and bloody cop show for a cable channel that ends up getting canceled while friends had its dark moments particularly when it came to Phoebe I found a lot of the dialogue on Joey was more openly provocative than friends would have been my show is dead it's not even gonna air people thought it was disgusting jeez you defecate on one corpse in fact this one joke near the start of the episode Set Me In Mind of another show that debuted about a decade after this one look over there is that the middle of the Hollywood sign yeah so you've got this aging actor known for one thing and one thing only failing upwards through the Hollywood studio system through Dom fake TV formats satirizing how spiritually and creatively bankrupt Hollywood is you've basically just pitched BoJack Horseman if Joey had allowed the nastier Edge to the humor to fully flourish I could be sat here saying that Joey was actually ahead of its time and the question I've end up with is who was it that stamped on this spark of edge the idea it was the network that sanitized the obvious darker trend of the humor and Joey doesn't make sense because after the fact Kevin breiter said this in interviews about the show on Friends Joey was a womanizer but we enjoyed his exploits he was a solid friend a guy you knew you could count on Joey was deconstructed to be a guy who couldn't get a job couldn't ask a girl out he became a pathetic mopey character I felt he was moving in the wrong direction but I wasn't heard I'm gonna respectfully disagree with him here about this being the reason the show was destined for failure because the Joey we see in this pilot and in the series up until the point where he gets the job on deep powder is exactly who he used to be and should have been in my opinion Joey stopped working for me and friends because he's a dumb guy who never learned from his mistakes and never changed so when he actually found success I never bought it what's essentially done at the start of Joey is to take him back to his roots where he was in bad projects and made obvious career mistakes and we laugh at his misfortunes not with him at the expense of others I shouldn't respect Joey I should be watching him act like a big shot while people make fun of him and take advantage of his obvious personal failings I'm an actor oh that's cute you think being an actor is a big deal everybody out here is an actor if Joey the spin-off was about this confident successful together womanizing actor in Hollywood well where's the conflict where's the struggle he can be a womanizer sure as he always wasn't friends but if you give him actual career challenges you've got some room for some dramatic pathos for Joey while you poke fun at his misfortunes and also at the Hollywood System that throws him into terrible shows that never would have let him fully flourish anyway this is probably hindsight working here because this was 2004 and shows like the one that I'm pitching Joey has weren't really a presence in mainstream American Comedy yet the Joey I'm envisioning would work nowadays when mainstream comedy has a tendency to be much more meta the Joey as Kevin bright outlines him at the end of friends as the solid friends you can count on runs counter to the pathetic loser Joey that I want to watch a show about once High status one's low status and this quote confuses me because in the early stages of Joey it's not that he's one thing while Kevin bright thinks that he should be the other thing it's that they try and make him both of these things at the same time where the show tries to have Joey's this confident together guy that you can count on is in the new Dynamic established would the series essentially replacement Ross charm the figure Michael Joey's dorky nephew who moves in with him and it's exactly what you think it is Michael is socially awkward bad with women is indirect with people says nerdy stuff and we're supposed to laugh at how nerdy he is versus Joey who is normal and likes normal things this whole dynamic just doesn't work when you said it alongside portraying post friends Joey is having career problems and also he has the hots for his neighbor Alex but he can't do anything because she's married yet when Kevin bright complains that Joey is now a Moby character and not the solid woman as he can count on he kind of Misses that he is the things he wanted Joey to be in the Michael Joey Dynamic so Joey's a pathetic Moby character who can't get a job and the solid womanizer you can count on aside from this Dynamic being out of kilter with the other elements of the show you can also see a big problem already because as I just mentioned Michael is a Ross Chandler hybrid Joey's new agent Bobby is essentially Phoebe she's the character with no filter who says really intense things that make people feel uncomfortable [Music] we are living in a dream world come insanely rich and it's going to haunt you for the rest of your life successful spin-offs need their own identity that almost make you forget you're watching a spin-off and Joey was close to having one the points where I laughed the hardest were when characters made dark jokes that you probably wouldn't have heard on friends but if I'm playing spot the replacement element from friends that's not really a good first impression I'll admit there is a surprising amount of stuff to like in the Joey pilot while Bobby is just Phoebe cut and pasted into a high-powered agent role Jennifer Coolidge is always fun and here is no exception there are interesting meta jokes and the potential for an ongoing satirical commentary on the Hollywood system the problem with Joey is the looming shadow of friends that the show was never going to be able to escape it is possible for spin-offs to escape the shadows of their predecessors even incredibly successful ones like Frasier did after cheers but Joey was always going to struggle because his lack of firm Direction in friends made him an empty space that can be filled with confident sexy cool womanizer Joey or sympathetic dramatic loser Joey and he can't really be expected to be both of these things at the same time with my success so the resulting Series has them spending a few episodes trying to decide which one to follow and the reason that Kevin bright quote confuses me so much is that from what I observed after the opening few episodes he ended up getting what he wanted and the show still crashed and burnt it's clear that our battles going on behind the scenes of the first season over what status Joey himself has and what the focus should be there's quite a lot of episodes where it highlights just how bored Joey is between jobs and we have him acting less like an overgrown man child and more like a literal infant which was the problem with him in friends during its latter years as well although it works a bit better here than it did in Seasons 9 and 10 of friends since in the first half of season one of Joey he is legitimately an unsuccessful washed up loser who used to be on TV so him hanging out by the pool for nine hours a day and playing with his army men fits a bit better here than when he was this sexy and cool TV Star the clear highlights of the episodes that almost exclusively focus on the trials and tribulations of actor Joey case in point I had this hazy memory of an episode that I always assumed was an episode of Friends and then when I re-watched the entire series for my friends analysis video last year I didn't find the episode so I just figured I imagined it or something turned out I did didn't it was an episode of Joey in Joey and The Perfect Storm Joey volunteers to understudy on three different plays on the same night and he has to try and figure out how to get out of one and do the other two and he ends up mixing them up and he walks out on stage to do the Richard III monologue that he'd been stressing about all episode but it turns out he went to the wrong theater are our brows bound with Victorious wreaths our Dreadful marches to delightful measures [Music] four years I mistook this for an episode of Friends it's a classic Joey fast scenario and there is more stuff like this in there there's a pretty decent episode where Bob Odenkirk shows up as a rival actor who takes advantage of Joey's stupidity and sabotages his career and some of the more social stuff can be quite good too in fact some of it harks back to early friends like this one where Gina dates a guy called Roger who's a very strange guy who's another of those I can't believe this person actually exists characters I was working for a big construction company in Newport but I lost a toe on the job oh man I'm sorry oh don't be I made a ton of money off it so I gotta figure out a way to get some more cash not another toll no no no no lose a finger and there's so many ways you can lose a finger you got drills saws Sanders punch presses whoops in that one huh again though I was mostly basing my warm feelings towards this stuff and comparing it to friends and it acting as a throwback to all episodes that I enjoyed oh hey look they've gone to Las Vegas just like that episode of Friends where they went to Las Vegas I was anticipating the show lapsing into basically just being friends again because the state of Joey's career isn't really treated with much urgency every few episodes it gives him some actor celebrity thing to do but a lot of the time the show's knee-deep in parties and interpersonal relationships by episode 10 Joey hasn't really had that much work by this point we've had Michael has a book club and an ungodly long tedious two-part episode where Joey dates a girl that he had a crush on when he was in high school oh my god wow how interesting it's mentioned at one point that he's kept a lot of his Days of Our Lives money in the bank signaling that his career doesn't really need to be treated with much urgency but that really doesn't square with the fact that Joey's an impulsive idiot who buys a yacht by accident on friends and if we can treat his career career is not really something to worry about then that just leaves you asking well what's the point then the reason lots of shows about people trying to make it in the entertainment industry like Flight of the Concords for example have characters as penniless losers in shitty apartments and then playing tiny gigs is that that gives the show a sense of struggle and Desperation and urgency in episode 10 Joey shows up for an audition expecting to be auditioning for the main character and he's surprised when they make him audition for the main character's dad and Joey's shocked wondering what's happened here are his looks going and he's really unsure about how he's going to adapt to playing different roles that reflect the fact he's getting older and we could spend some time focusing on an actor's internal processes and how this is inevitably gonna change his method and how someone as dumb as Joey is gonna figure out how to be an aging actor but the ultimate purpose of Joey auditioning for deep powder a new Primetime Network drama appears to just be to make Joey a success again to remove any of the already little sense of urgency that his career already had and again like towards the end of friends I would argue that success makes Joey work less well by just over halfway through the series Joey gets pushed from being this deconstructed mopey loser back into being this solid confident successful High status character sure a lot of the comedy is still based on Joey made a mistake and said a dumb thing to try and rectify it but there's still nothing much in the way of a threat so once deep paraders is a success we can just go back to more plots about Joey is dating another person and she is weird then he dates someone else this one played by Shelley off Twin Peaks there's a bit of drama over that for the last few episodes but then she leaves and we end the series with Joey and Alex finally sleeping together Bright's argument that the show's failure was down to Joey being pushed as this deconstructed mopey loser but personally I think the reason the show Lost 10 million viewers from episode 1 through episode 24 was not that people had seen what Joey was like now in the first few episodes and turned off but because there's not really much in terms of ongoing drama there's no Monica and Chandler's secret relationship in Joey there's no Ross and Rachel breakup drama no Rachel is pregnant there's no ongoing hook the ongoing Hook is almost sort of Alex and Joey will they or won't they but if both darts and Joe's battle to gain any kind of relevance in Hollywood aren't treated as urgent things that a character desperately needs to happen then your viewers urgent need to watch the show totally vanishes should I watch Joey this week well what am I gonna miss is anything important gonna happen is it gonna throw me a massive curveball mid-season like Ross and Rachel breaking up probably not they seem to realize this towards the end of season one with the Joey and Sarah storyline where they finally decide to go exclusive and maybe Joe's about to finally set down but again that's a friends type storyline the show still has no identity of its own other than to be a coder for the one character from friends that didn't get a conclusive ending there was just no real reason for people to continue watching Joey and so they just dropped off week after week fewer and fewer people saw a reason to tune in because there wasn't really anything at stake and nothing much was happening I know I tuned out back in the day not long after The Tonight Show episode not because I thought Joe was different and wrong but because I just couldn't be asked so I missed the entire Sarah storyline so it was too little too late at that stage Joey worked under the traditional sitcom model of safe repetitive routine where nothing ever changes but friends had upset that traditional mode outside of the occasional moments where it looks like something's about to start happening Joey was the embodiment of that traditional mode to the Core [Music] the fact that was the second season of Joey at all is weird but that's probably because now it's known for being an Infamous failure at the time reviews were middling to negative and while the ratings had trailed off it must have still been considered a bankable option I am a rare person who has seen Joey season 2 at all because it seems to have all but been erased from History season 1 is available for streaming not to mention of season 2 on any platform and the DVD boxer has weirdly become a collector's item given season 2 was canceled in the middle of its run and the last eight episodes were left unaired by the time it was ready for DVD release I can't imagine it shifted that many copies thanks to Mikey Smith for sending me copies of this by the way because [ __ ] if I'm forking over that much money for Joey of all things it was so surprising how hard it was to track season 2 of Joey down I was left wondering what could have been so bad about season 2 that NBC felt they had to pull the plug mid-season and then never release it on streaming because they must have put Season 1 online well after the unceremonious cancellation is season 2 cursed or something am I gonna die in seven days because I watched this the season 2 premiere is a two-part episode and it promises a lot more than the season can deliver so Joey gets fired off deep powder and he's now going on auditions again and having a career crisis while everyone else in his life is nagging him about their own problems this opener is probably the best episode of Joey [Music] not saying much I know it's weird how strong Matt LeBlanc is when he's playing a carrot who's frantic and in the middle of a crisis this is where my investment is at its highest Joey has a thing that he desperately needs to go well and the funny thing is that everyone around him keeps sucking him into their own drama and that's distracting him and his ending ran to all the other characters to just shut up and let him deal with his problems was funny satisfying and really this episode was a great demonstration of all the things I thought during season one that the show needed to do in order to improve and then it ends with him somehow getting the starring role on a high budget Blockbuster despite appearing completely mad in his audition and then we're back to static Joey is a success despite being eye bleedingly incompetent again there are episodes focused on onset drama and the way Joey's life has changed following humongous success but mostly were just back to the Latter Day friends like episodes with relationship drama with no real identity of its own while the material is on the whole significantly weaker than season one there is one Improvement it actually has an ongoing hook Alex is in love with Joey and she's trying to figure out the right time to tell him while this is encouraging in that someone behind the scenes had actually figured out the reason that everyone had stopped bothering with season one again this is a friend's story this is Rachel is in love with Joey Joey is oblivious from season nine Joey eventually finds out but by that time Alex has moved on and is dating someone new and Joey now realizes he's in love with Alex but he can't tell her and yeah you know where you've seen this story before in terms of giving the show its own identity season two [ __ ] that up even worse than season one did in lapsing into old habits that make the show into basically just more of friends but with weaker material this time the worst offender was the episode called Joey and the poker which literally just does an old friend's story again Alex teaches Joey the wrong rules for a card game on purpose to try and manipulate him it's for different reasons and the results have more at stake because he ends up on a celebrity poker game show but the story is basically the same as an old episode of Friends I have two queens what do you have two and a five well you win fifty dollars why I have a two and a four and you have two Jacks yeah but Two Jacks is an awful hand in Texas Hold'em season two just serves to highlight how there's no real point to Joey it's not a show about the Hollywood studio system it's not a show about an aging actor it's not really about anything at all Joey was the existential nightmare happening in the minds of all the people who couldn't face the fact that friends was over including everyone that made it and including the audience including young me that watched the first half of season one back in the day just feeling Hollow and empty as I watched it and I realized holy [ __ ] friends is gone friends has really gone forever and it's never coming back it's gone oh God it's truly gone the reason Joey got canceled mid-season was supposedly because the ratings were too bad and they were but something happened that made them worse season 2 hadn't started off well but was remaining fairly solid right up until here the reason for this dramatic drop-off was because NBC moved it to a different time slot so that now it was playing opposite American Idol on Fox and this feels deliberate the week they moved the show just so happened to be the week the ratings fell off a cliff due to stiff competition and so now the network had something to point out as proof that it was time to cancel it pretty cruel sure but it's a cruel business of course it never makes sense to Outsiders why you'd have eight episodes banked already and then not bother airing them but bad ratings are always embarrassing for a network even if in this case it appears to have been deliberately engineered and this embarrassment has apparently lasted all the way up until the present day given that they've dug their heels in and refused to release season 2 on streaming given Joey was a cheap show that built its relative success on the back of friends writing off these last eight episodes and then airing something else in its place was probably considered less embarrassing I don't know what they aired in its place probably old friends reruns given the general quality of season 2 and having seen the unaired episodes while it is noticeably weaker than season one I didn't really see anything in it that screamed this must be taken off air right now and never at least on streaming it is vital that no one ever sees this but at the same time the world really isn't missing much by never having seen Joey season 2 I didn't even get the visceral thrill of knowing I was watching something deemed to be not fit for public consumption they're just more episodes of Joey that like the ones that actually made it to where basically no one watched and the people that did watch them probably didn't even remember anything that happened in them no one was invested in the revelations of who Michael's father was no one was invested in Alex and Joey's ongoing relationship drama and no one seemed to care when the show vanished from the airwaves because even though these were the right steps that the show needed to take the eventual death of the the show was pretty much set in stone at this stage [Music] I understand why Joey has gone down in history as this Infamous train wreck shows that get canceled mid-run usually get treated that way but it's really not as bad as everyone says it is unfortunately it's not an overlooked Hidden Gem either which would at least be vindicating for the underdog that everyone spent almost two decades calling a piece of [ __ ] usually without having actually watched it everyone's assessment of Joey appears to have come directly out of that Kevin bright quote which I still have my disagreements with I am close to being able to call Joey essentially Seasons 11 and 12 of friends it's very similar to Seasons 9 and 10 which were also cozy if directionless sitcom filler but it doesn't quite meet those submissively pretty low standards Joey is pretty much just another multi-camera Network sitcom that just so happens to be about one of the main characters from friends if you miss friends always wanted a little bit more of it and would put off trying Joey by the myth of its shitness which was largely propped up by its failure if you can get past the aforementioned existential dread factor and if you can actually find season two then you'll probably be pleasantly surprised but that will fade from your memory as quickly as the show did you're probably better off watching the Jennifer Coolidge compilations on YouTube as I said in my friends video friends were surprisingly daring and broke a lot of traditional sitcom rules whereas Joey wasn't really in a position to be daring Joey started out as a known quantity and it had to try and figure out how to keep its inherited audience while at the same time giving itself its own purpose and he can't really do both these things at once it came out of the process of figuring out what it's supposed to be as a perfectly acceptable follower of sitcom convention and people Switched Off in their droves not because they'd been offended by how [ __ ] it was or that it somehow betrayed the character of Joey but because the show hadn't done anything remarkable at all foreign [Music] [Music] [Music] thank you

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Length: 32min 28sec (1948 seconds)

Published: Mon Feb 13 2023