Now, you go get
that beautiful pig. [LAUGHTER] [MAKES PIG NOISE] $30 million. Matt LeBlanc was asked if he had
any regrets about the spin-off he himself said did not work. And he said, I made $30 million. I need more failures like that. That right there, that
quote, is the best thing to come out of one of
the strangest spin-offs in television history. Everything about Friends
only attempt at a spin-off weird, off-putting and at
times, downright confusing. And today, it's all but
disappeared from the zeitgeist of popular culture. It isn't spoken about. It isn't on streaming services. It's just gone. And all these years later,
almost everyone involved regrets that they allowed the
show to even exist, as it was. So when I sat down to
write a Friends episode for this channel, I realized
I was far more occupied with thoughts of what
went wrong with Joey, and how important that character
is in television, and with what should have been a sure thing. What was so bad
about the Joey show? Hey, people expect
a certain flair. All right? The sunglasses say, you may
not know who I am but yeah, it's me. Friends was a 10
season phenomenon. It's almost impossible
to articulate the success of a show
that defined the landscape of that genre for a decade. It was a show built on
camaraderie, relationships, and a slow refinement
of character. And it was an
incredible success. Want some context
to that success? The Friends finale was
the most watched episode of any television show
throughout the entirety of the 2000s. 52 million people watched it. For point of reference,
that's 52 times the population of the state of
Delaware, and 13 million more people than the entire
population of Canada. Seriously. So with any great
show, money talks. following the adventures of
Joey in Hollywood as an actor-- same character, different
show, different location. And then, somehow, the
show's entire pilot episode leaked online, well
before it was set to air. And people were upset. They hated it. had next to nothing to
do with Friends-- yeah, the Friends team moved
on and left the new team to do what was natural,
take everything you knew about the character
and do the exact opposite. Joey in the Joey
show is depressing. He's, as LeBlanc put it,
now glass half empty. He can't make friends. He can't get a date. He's socially inept. And worst of all,
he's overwhelmingly negative about it all. Friends producer,
Kevin Bright, would say it's weirdest
mistake was trying to force a character
who should have always been a kid to grow up. It forced Joey to change
into a character that wrapped all the drama, the
chaos, and responsibility of six great characters
into just this guy. And the writers,
and Matt LeBlanc, simply couldn't
carry the weight. And it frustrated LeBlanc
and the other actors. This wasn't what they wanted. It got so strange
behind the scenes that one of the show's creators
just left after season one. The reality is, in
television, characters are a combination of writers,
directors and actors. Joey lost two of
those three things. And it proved how essential that
pyramid of character creation really is. But where the show
got weirder is how it tried to pretend that
the world it had created simply didn't exist. I believe there is
something bigger for me, right around the corner. Listen, you are living
in a dream world. [LAUGHTER] Joey totally abandons his life
and friends in the Joey show, in a way that doesn't even feel
believable for the character, in a way that
almost deconstructs what made Joey, Joey. The people he loved, that's
what builds his persona, his personality. They never make an appearance
in the Joey show, by the way. Joey only rarely
mentioned his friends in New York, or New
York itself, in passing. And there's
absolutely no attempt to make him feel
like a character that existed before the show,
which as we the audience know, he did. See, the producers
and writers wanted the Joey show to feel
like its own entity, stand on its own two feet. So they believed
the best way to do this would be to
separate the two shows as much as possible for
the first two seasons, to leave Friends and its
characters out of narrative, to essentially pretend they
didn't exist for the most part, which is entirely
antithetical to what a spin-off should be. It was especially confusing,
because they advertised the show as a continuation
of the Friends story, as a chance to keep being a
part of Joey in their lives. And yet, at the same time
they all-- every creative on the show-- felt
the crushing pressure of following Friends success. Almost each and every writer
and producer on the show would say later that they felt
this was an unmanageable task, but out of fear of
that Friends shadow, they didn't give audiences
what they advertised. They gave people exactly
what they didn't want-- a strange, alternate universe
where a weird clone of Joey lives a confusing new life. And to do so, they tried
to fill Joey's life with strange new obstacles--
picking up girls, meeting people, pretending
to relearn English. And he would fail
at all of them. Joey faced no
meaningful opposition. There were no exciting
new relationships. There was no conflict. It was a strange show that
operated in the three act structure, but forgot the
second act altogether. It was just the
beginning and an end, without anything
interesting in between. And this wasn't just boring. It felt inauthentic. Because we already know Joey. He does have friends. Why is he struggling
to make new ones? He's dated girls. Why is he pretending like he
can't fathom the idea of making that happen, either? It's simple. Joey was always a product of
his environment on Friends. He was the fly that
stuck to the glue that was the people around him. The Joey show removed
the glue, and let him fly anywhere he
wanted, and simply couldn't find a way to recapture him. It filled his life with
less interesting people, hollow relationships, and
insignificant problems who and which we
cared about less, and told us that they mattered. But in the shadow of
this, they never could. Although actually, I'm really
not that hungry this morning. When one of the original
creators of Friends was approached with the
idea of a spin-off, his response was
reportedly two words-- oh, no. As it began its
run, Kevin Bright believed turning Joey
into this new mopey, pathetic character, as he
put it, was a bad idea. And according to him, his
concerns voiced to the network were ignored. The executive producer of
the show, the same guy, would say he was relieved
when the show was canceled. And the show was canceled. Today, its average of seven
million viewers an episode wouldn't be terrible by any
stretch of the imagination. But under the shadow of
Friends, or better yet, as it rode the coattails of Friends
into a field of disappointment, that seven million an
episode wasn't nearly enough. And it got bad enough
that NBC decided to cancel the show in the
middle of its second season, leaving eight episodes un-aired. The Joey show is
what happens when you know what you're creating
is wrong, when you know what you're doing is chasing
money instead of story, instead of characters. Joey is what happens when
suddenly, the creatives that made something special are
no longer there to create. Joey is why things should
end, as all things do. It's inorganic, unnatural to
try to make things live forever, which is inherently what a
spin-off tries to accomplish. That's a wrap on today's
episode of Nerdstalgic. If you enjoyed this one, press
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