The One Where Everything Changed
I was at my friend Connie’s apartment one night, talking about Friends and weddings. It was the fall of 2017; I had just been married a month prior, and she was weeks away from her own wedding. Among my peers, Connie was the biggest Friends fan I knew—and that’s saying something. After her fiancé proposed with a ring, she decided he, too, should have something beautiful to mark the occasion. He opted for an engagement tattoo, and Connie knew immediately what the design would be. “The purest idea of love that I have,” she told me. “A lobster.”
Connie was a die-hard, from the beginning. “I watched it obsessively growing up,” she told me. As a kid in Minnesota, she’d painted her bedroom walls purple and spent weekends at the mall, hunting for Rachel-esque baby-doll tees. She, too, hoped to one day move to Manhattan and get a job in fashion, and Friends made it all seem so doable—adulthood, career, New York. “It was my first representation of people in their twenties, living in a big city, who genuinely liked each other... There was no sense that moving to New York City was going to be scary. Everything worked out.”
When Connie got her first New York apartment, she bought a picture frame to hang on the door, like Monica. “Except I did it with the intercom, because I couldn’t drill a hole into the door.” In those early days, Connie constantly turned to Friends reruns for comfort and reassurance. Life was, of course, much harder than it looked on television, but step-by-step she built a life for herself in the city, and a successful career as a fashion writer. A decade later, she’d done it. She’d found her lobster, too (even if he preferred Seinfeld). Having grappled with real adulthood in real New York, Friends remained her old, familiar favorite—a mental salve she applied during times of stress. “A little Xanax for my eyes,” she joked.
Now, weeks away from her wedding, I assumed she was popping an episode of Friends every night. Right? “No,” Connie told me. “Actually, I’ve been watching it less and less these days.” It wasn’t that she loved the show any less—the woman had just tattooed her future husband with a Friends reference—but that she didn’t need it anymore. “Maybe it’s because I’m now technically older than they were on the show?” Connie wasn’t sure what made her drift away from Friends, only that it had become something different to her now. “But,” she quickly added, “I won’t say no if it’s on.”
It startled me, at first, to hear this from such a devoted fan. But as I look back on the middle years of Friends itself, it all makes perfect sense. That night in her apartment, Connie was at the start of a new chapter, forming a family with her husband. And so was I. The time in our lives when our friends were our family was, on some level, coming to an end.
* * *
The beginning of the end happened on Friends in the middle of its fifth year, when Chandler and Monica became a couple. It progressed further in the sixth season when they moved in together and got engaged. And it reached the final phase in Season Seven when they married. Though the series carried on for three more, it was no longer a show about six young, unsettled, unattached adults. In truth, Seasons Five through Seven were the years when Friends reached the peak of its premise, and then began the journey toward its natural end.
The all-time greatest episode of Friends is Season Five’s “The One Where Everybody Finds Out.” That’s just my opinion, but it’s right.64 It takes everything that worked in “The One with the Embryos” and does it again, but even better. If “The One with the Embryos” is The Godfather, then this is The Godfather Part II.
Once again, the cast is brought together in a ridiculous game of their own making. By this point in the season, Rachel and Joey know about Monica and Chandler’s relationship but, for some reason, it still has to be kept a secret. Why? It’s not superclear anymore, but it makes for good TV. For Joey, maintaining the ruse has been a nightmare, and when Phoebe finally finds out, he makes the completely rational argument that they should all just stop this endless game of make-believe. “Or,” Phoebe suggests, “we could not tell them we know, and have a little fun of our own.” Obviously.
What begins with a little teasing (Phoebe flirts with Chandler to make him squirm) quickly evolves into an inter-apartmental war of wills and wit and sexual chicken. It only takes a few minutes before everybody finds out what’s actually going on, but at that point it doesn’t matter. (Ross is the exception; he’s busy with a competition of his own, trying to woo Ugly Naked Guy into subletting him his apartment by outwitting other potential renters.65) By the time they know that they know that they know, we’re completely confused—but who cares?!
As with “The One with the Embryos,” this episode (written by Alexa Junge and directed by Michael Lembeck) had the audience in hysterics, even after a dozen takes. The actors, too, had a hard time getting through the shoot with straight faces. “Lisa was always the first to break,” Lembeck recalled. And Perry—notorious for cracking up his costars—was barely keeping it together himself. Some scenes they never even got through during rehearsal, they got so giggly. While staging Kudrow’s “seductive” dance scene, the rest of the cast urged her to go further, make it even weirder. “And you can see Matthew’s little grin,” said Lembeck, even in the finished product. “If you keep your eye on him, you can see the twinkle. You can see Matthew—while Chandler is curious, Matthew is enjoying.”
That’s the fairy dust sprinkled on top: Kudrow and Perry are right on the edge of laughter the entire time. It’s a perfectly executed scene, but it’s almost a blooper. And everyone loves a blooper—the gag reel at the end of the movie, or the SNL sketch where an actor breaks. It’s a moment when the audience get to see that, yes, they’re having fun, too. A blurring of the line between fantasy and reality. On Friends in particular, these gag-reel moments are vital. Watching Perry and Kudrow—and Chandler and Phoebe—acting out this scene within a scene, both doing their damnedest to make the other break—it’s overwhelming. That’s what makes this episode—this scene, really—the peak of a show with so many extraordinary high points. It underscores the wish we have that these fictional friendships aren’t fictional at all.
* * *
“One of the selling points of Friends is that we believed they were friends, off camera,” Elaine Lui told me. Lui (best known as Lainey, to her readers) is an entertainment journalist who specializes in the sociology of gossip media. Friends, she points out, had a number of selling points, the first simply being its high caliber. But the highly publicized bond between the cast members was another major asset—one that they recognized and actively promoted in the press. “There were all kinds of stories about how they would always eat lunch together, the three women,” said Lui. “I distinctly remember some of those storylines—that Jennifer and Courteney always ate the same thing from craft services. I think it was a turkey salad. That’s how specific it got.”
A Cobb salad with chickpeas and turkey—sometimes reported as turkey bacon. I remembered it, too. Indeed there have been hundreds of articles (and recipes and diet plans) published in the past twenty years, based on this legendary tidbit from behind the scenes.66 In terms of gossip it seems so benign, but it demonstrates the incredibly successful symbiotic relationship that Friends had with the media. Items like the salad story were an undeniable element to the show’s popularity. “When you give details like this—that you always spend lunch together, and that you eat the same thing—you’re giving people a sense of intimacy,” Lui said. “You’re feeding the illusion that what we’re watching every Thursday night is actually how they are in real life. That’s compelling.”
Friends had come of age during a period of rapid growth in celebrity and entertainment journalism. Outlets like Premiere and Entertainment Weekly reported industry news for a mainstream readership, and now behind-the-scenes drama was as watchable as a show itself. Meanwhile, monthly magazine Us became Us Weekly, and shifted its lens to the personal lives of celebrities—and zoomed in, hard. It was the beginning of the “Stars Are Just Like Us” era, when consumers were less interested in seeing actors at their most glamorous and untouchable, and more eager to see them taking out the garbage. “The distance between celebrity and civilian began to close,” explained Lui. But not all the way. No one actually wanted the stars to be just like us. Here, too, it was all about aspirational normalcy. The stars are just like us, but slightly better.
From the beginning, Friends had played well with the press, embracing this blurry line between celebrity and character. Lui cited Julia Roberts’s Season Two appearance as a prime example. Roberts had turned up as a love interest for Chandler at the precise moment that tabloids were reporting she and Perry were an item. “That blurred the lines even more, between reality and art,” Lui explained. “Because [as a viewer] you’re like, ‘Oh, my God, they’re dating in real life, so let me watch their chemistry during this half hour. Let me see how they look at each other, and how she bats her eyelashes at him, and if he grabs her hand.’” Fans were always looking for a glimpse behind the curtain—and sometimes Friends seemed to deliberately open it, both on-screen and in print. The more famous the actors grew, the more their own individual lives became part of the draw.
Shortly after the fifth season ended (with Monica and Chandler almost getting married in Vegas, only to be derailed by Ross and Rachel’s drunken wedding), Courteney Cox got married herself, to actor David Arquette. People published a detailed recap of the event, under the headline “Friends and Lovers.” People, too, had amped up its celebrity coverage, to stay competitive with outlets like Us—though it made great efforts to maintain an air of respectability. People used what one staffer called a “publicist-friendly strategy” (or, as others put it, “sucking up to celebs”), generally choosing stories that seemed positive or wholesome. The bad boy turned family man; the starlet who finally finds true love. Us reported the nasty breakups and infidelity, but in People, every new couple was made for each other, and every marriage was happy, right up until the amicable divorce.
People’s stars-are-just-like-you-want-them-to-be strategy was a perfect fit for Friends, and vice versa. The magazine gobbled up items like the salad anecdote, and blitzed the public with cover stories about the cast. As Lui pointed out, most popular shows and movies offered only one or two stars, but with Friends “they had six people to build narratives around.” And all of them came with a built-in angle that matched the magazine’s feel-good ethos: The Friends are friends! This was the through line in every story. When Lisa Kudrow was pregnant, her castmates “rallied ’round” her, according to People, throwing her a shower and offering to babysit. When Aniston had boyfriend problems, Matthew Perry was her “shoulder to cry on.” Even when reporting on Perry’s struggle with alcoholism and prescription-drug addiction, People reminded readers that his costars would be there for him, every step of the way. He was, as the headline read, “A Friend in Need.”
Friendship was a great narrative for the magazine, and it sure didn’t hurt the show. In the article on Cox’s marriage, the primary focus was not so much the wedding but the fact that Cox’s five castmates were in attendance. And one of them brought Brad Pitt as her date.
It had been over a year since Aniston and Pitt were first photographed together, though neither had acknowledged the relationship publicly. By the time they did make an official appearance together, attending the Emmy Awards in September 1999, People had already claimed (under another winky headline: “Brad and Friend”) that they were engaged and had even found a wedding planner. Both had gone through publicized breakups shortly before getting together—she from Tate Donovan (who played Joshua), and he from fiancée Gwyneth Paltrow (who was Gwyneth Paltrow).
When Paltrow and Pitt were together, they’d been written up as a golden couple; they were like the Kennedys plus Liz and Dick, but blond. In the press, Paltrow was a princess, a beacon of elegance and old-Hollywood glamour. Aniston, on the other hand, was the girl next door—and just what Pitt needed. The People piece quoted an anonymous “Friends insider” as saying: “Jennifer is the anti-Gwyneth. Gwyneth was into going out and being glamorous. Jennifer is not. She’s very nonglam.”
Paltrow was movies and Aniston was TV. Paltrow was blond and Aniston was a little less blond. It didn’t matter that Aniston was a star on one of the most popular shows in history, or that she’d become a style and beauty icon the world over. When the press compared the two (as it forever would, until another movie star entered the picture), Aniston came off as the cutie-pie in jeans. This guileless image had been there from the start, and it had a powerful effect. David Wild noticed it as far back as 1995 after her interviewed her: “Every guy I knew wanted to ask, ‘Oh, what’s her deal? Is she single?’ Everyone thought she was, like, the Really Pretty Girl in High School Who Didn’t Know How Beautiful She Was. And they got it.”
Enter: Brad Pitt, the Hollywood Prom King who came along and noticed her, at last. At least, that’s how the press would tell it, regardless of the truth. Soon, they really were engaged (and Pitt would eventually make his own legendary cameo on Friends). After five years playing the literal girl next door, Aniston’s identity was unshakable. She was inextricably bound with Rachel. And all of them were bound to the show.
“We all made movies and realized, no no no no—this is where home is,” Perry was quoted (in People) during the production of Season Six. Paula Chin, an editor from the magazine, had come for a set visit the week they shot “The One Where Chandler Can’t Cry.” Chin observed how, after all these years, the cast seemed closer than ever. The women played with each other’s hair between setups, and as ever, “the actors can’t help cracking each other up during the take.” It was a bittersweet (but mostly sweet) picture that Chin painted. The cast contracts were set to expire soon, meaning this could theoretically be Friends’ last season. They seemed to be growing up and moving on in their personal and professional lives. Cox was married, LeBlanc and Aniston were both engaged, and Kudrow was actually making traction in her film career. They no longer hung out on Thursday nights to watch the show together, and as Schwimmer told Chin, things had changed, naturally: “As we all get older, we spend more time with our significant others, so of course the dynamic changes.” They were in their thirties, and entering a new stage—the time in your life when your friends aren’t around as much. But when they were together on the set, they still had that same old chemistry. And no one appeared to be saying goodbye.
* * *
On-screen, too, the dynamic had shifted. “Monica and Chandler are really moving in here, and I have to move out, and everything is changing,” Rachel cries to Ross in “The One Where Ross Hugs Rachel.” It’s a sad, all-too-relatable moment—which is quickly smoothed over by a season of funny, not-at-all-sad episodes that insist that absolutely nothing is changing. Rachel first moves in with Phoebe, enabling fun setups for the two of them (like “The One with the Apothecary Table”67). After that, she moves into Chandler’s old room at Joey’s (meaning, she’s basically living with Monica again, and things are pretty much back to normal).
This season puts more of the comedic responsibility on the four single characters, and while there are no great group games anymore, there are still plenty of classic Friends moments: Rachel puts beef in the trifle; Ross and Monica perform The Routine on Dick Clark’s New Year’s Rockin’ Eve; Joey...well, Joey gets a new roommate, Janine—and then immediately gets rid of her, and we never have to talk about that again. Joey also gets a new TV show called Mac and C.H.E.E.S.E., which we also do not have to talk about. It’s maybe a few too many high jinks for six full-fledged adults, but it’s a necessary distraction from the fact that Monica and Chandler are heading deeper into serious coupledom. The show is still good, but nothing will ever be as simple or as fun as it was before. It will be harder and harder to get the group together, and eventually, it will break apart for good.
Smack-dab in the middle of the season comes “The One That Could Have Been,” aka the what-if episode. What would it be like if Rachel had married Barry, if Ross and Carol never got divorced, if Joey was still a soap star, if Chandler had become a writer, if Phoebe worked in finance, and if Monica was still Fat Monica?
To be clear, this isn’t Monica, but fat. Fat Monica is an entirely different character. The other five wear different clothes in the what-if, but essentially remain the same people (and that’s kind of the point of the episode). Fat Monica, however, is a cartoon who bears no resemblance to the confident, mature, multidimensional Monica. Fat Monica has one dimension: fat. She speaks in a goofy, nasal voice and jumps at the mention of candy. She’s never had a serious or sexual relationship, and her entire life revolves around food. And not in the same way that Monica’s does, as a chef who makes the best duck confit and broccoli rabe. Fat Monica screams (with her mouth full) about mayonnaise, and keeps Kit Kats on her person at all times. Fat Monica doesn’t even seem related to the earlier versions of herself. The first time we see her, in the prom video during Season Two—that’s not Fat Monica. That’s Monica, when she was fat. Her fatness is still used as a punch line in that episode, but no more so than Rachel’s old nose or Ross’s ’80s hair. The real Fat Monica first appears in Season Five’s Thanksgiving flashback episode, during which we learn that Monica lost the weight out of humiliation, after overhearing Chandler make fun of her. Then, once she’s thin, he likes her! Aww?
Fat Monica is a polarizing character today, in an era when body positivity is a popular concept—if not a sincerely popular practice. As with gay jokes, old-school fat jokes are considered impolite or juvenile, but people still laugh at them. Like homophobia, antifat bias is still deeply ingrained in the American psyche. If it weren’t, then Fat Monica would just be Monica.
In all her appearances, Fat Monica is shoved through the same filter of acceptability as Carol and Susan, the married women who never kiss.68 Fat Monica is tolerable, as long as she’s a joke, just like the only other fat character on the show: Ugly Naked Guy.
Still, not everyone sees it like this. A lot of people really like Fat Monica, including many real-life fat women. Writer and performer Mathilda Gregory published an essay on how the character became a role model for her, in terms of self-acceptance. “Fat Monica laughed, and Fat Monica desired. Oh, the lust of Fat Monica! Yes, she ate all the time, but on the other hand, SHE ATE ALL THE TIME,” Gregory wrote. “Fat Monica ate publicly and unashamedly because she wanted to, and food is delicious.” It’s true, this character flouted the expectations set on fat people to spend their lives trying to whittle themselves down, and until then remain invisible—and certainly never eat doughnuts in public. Fat Monica ate doughnuts in public while dancing. On one hand, she seemed completely free and comfortable in her body. On the other, it wasn’t her body. There was a thin woman under that fat suit,69 and everyone knew it.
Indeed, Cox’s (and Aniston’s) weight was the subject of constant media attention. Celebrity thinness in general was a particularly hot topic, and tabloids openly speculated about eating disorders and drug addictions. Meanwhile, fat celebrities (or just not thin ones) who lost weight were championed as success stories by the very same outlets. The message was clear: thin was aspirational, “too thin” was cause for hand wringing. And fat? Fat didn’t go on the cover. The only place you’d see it was in a “before” picture. Even Gregory acknowledged that part of the reason she’d been drawn to Fat Monica was the fact that she was a “before”—a precursor to thin, “normal” Monica. The character only existed only in flashbacks, or in this alternate universe. As ridiculous and theoretical as Stockbroker Phoebe, Fat Monica (fat anyone) had no place in Friends’ reality.
* * *
The what-if episode was a temporary detour out of that reality. When the show came back to its normal timeline, it still seemed to be in a holding pattern. There wasn’t a whole lot of plot going on in the second half of Season Six, and a number of stories had clear expiration dates: Ross dating a student; the Bruce Willis episodes; the infamous Mac and C.H.E.E.S.E. debacle (now we’re really done talking about it, promise). The story wasn’t completely stuck, but it did seem to be hitting the snooze button. Perhaps it was a deliberate lull, to make the ending pop. Or maybe they were stalling because they had to.
No one really thought that this season would be the last, and nobody really wanted it to be—certainly not NBC or Warner Bros., both of which were bringing in enormous profits from Friends. Warner would earn a reported $1 billion off the first syndication cycle. In 1999, the producers renegotiated their own contract with NBC, signing a new deal that would keep the show on the network for two more years, at $5 million per episode—as long as Warner Bros. delivered the cast, of course. But as production inched closer to the finale, none of the actors had signed anything. No one had even made an offer. “None of us have heard anything,” Schwimmer told People. And then he said one more thing: “I can’t imagine showing up for work and about to rehearse a scene at the coffee shop with one of the cast gone. I just wouldn’t want to be here.”
They were really going to do it, again. The network and the studio realized that once more the cast was sticking together and negotiating as a team. This time around, they were savvier, and even more famous. One telling comment in People, and the message was sent: Your move.
Finally, on April 21, 2000, Entertainment Weekly announced that negotiations had begun. The actors were reportedly asking for $1 million per episode, plus a larger percentage of the back-end profits. (It would have been an enormous raise, but not an unprecedented sum. In 1998, Paul Reiser and Helen Hunt had gotten million-dollar deals for the final season of Mad About You. That same year Tim Allen got $1.25 million per episode of Home Improvement. And, lest we forget, Jerry Seinfeld had recently turned down an offer of $5 million per episode for a tenth season of Seinfeld.)
The cast got a counteroffer of $700,000. No dice. “We want Friends to come back and are hopeful it will happen,” an NBC spokesperson told the magazine. “It would be a true shame if this can’t be resolved,” she added ominously. In situations like this, the network itself would be expected to pitch in, and potentially share the cost of cast salaries with the production company. By now, Littlefield had left his position at NBC,70 and Garth Ancier was the president of NBC Entertainment. It was on him to help sweeten the deal for the Friends cast—and to let them know that he could yank it off the table, if it came to that. It did, and quickly.
On Thursday, May 11, the penultimate episode (“The One with the Ring”) aired, concluding with Chandler preparing to propose to Monica. By Friday, May 12, they still hadn’t reached an agreement. It was three days before the NBC up-front presentation, when the network would announce its fall schedule—and less than a week before the show’s season and/or series finale. On Saturday, May 13, at 4:00 p.m., Warner Bros. delivered a final offer of $750,000. The cast had until Sunday at noon to decide. NBC had set the deadline, but Ancier knew it would take more than a ticking clock. The cast had proven unshakable in their all-for-one stance, and so he had to make it clear that NBC was willing to lose them all.
First, Ancier drew up two potential fall schedules for the up-fronts: one with Friends in its usual spot at 8:00 p.m., and one with Just Shoot Me in the time slot—and no Friends at all. Next, he ordered some new promo spots for the season finale—declaring it the series finale—and scheduled them to air on Sunday, during NBC’s coverage of the NBA playoffs. “I asked the promotion department to cut promos saying, ‘You’ve loved them for seven years. See how it all ends, with the series finale of Friends, this Thursday at 8:00.’” Ancier explained the bold move years later, adding that, “People around me felt that was a little on the mean side, but I didn’t see any other way to make the threat real.”
True, this kind of story didn’t jibe with the warm and fuzzy media narrative about this show. Readers didn’t want to hear about their Friends using hardball tactics, or being threatened by the big, bad executives. Agents had put their two cents in the press throughout the negotiations, clearly trying to paint a more sympathetic picture of their clients. “They haven’t been treated fairly up to this point,” one anonymous rep told EW. “They are so underpaid it’s ridiculous.” Perhaps it was true, in the context of all the other million-dollar salaries that other actors were making (on shows that weren’t nearly as lucrative as theirs). But it was a bit much, asking the public to feel bad for these TV stars, just because they were making millions every year instead of every week.
Someone had to do something drastic, or NBC would wind up as the network that killed everyone’s favorite comedy, and the Friends would become the Friends who bailed. Hardball or not, it worked. NBC got the call around midnight, and the deal was done by sunrise. Ancier yanked the new promos, and on Monday, NBC announced Friends would be back for two more years. “This is our Mother’s Day gift to America,” he told the press. (That was a bit much, too.)
Everybody won. Chandler proposed, Monica said yes, and Season Six ended with no cliffhangers, on-screen or off. They would be back. The cast didn’t have million-dollar deals (yet), but they had $750,000 an episode, a bigger stake in back-end profits, and a job that none of them took for granted. It was home, as Perry had said, and they had it good there. A job like this was as close to a 9-to-5 as actors ever got. By now, they’d persuaded the producers to start shoots in the afternoon instead of the evening, and there were no more 2:00 a.m. wraps. They had more time for their families and personal lives, and they had the financial stability to take risks on outside projects—or not! As long as Friends endured, no one really had to take on other work. On the other hand, the longer it lasted, the more enmeshed they would become with their sitcom roles, and the harder it would be to succeed in others.
For now, though, everyone was comfortably settled. Unfortunately, it showed. “I think everybody, after Season Six, thought, ‘Okay, we had a good season, but the show’s starting to get tired,’” recalled Kevin Bright. Well, sure, they weren’t kids anymore. Adults get tired. That buzzy, overcaffeinated energy had mellowed into a cozy cup of tea. With two more seasons tacked on to the new contracts, they needed something powerful to perk things up again. And there’s nothing like a wedding to make adults act like overstimulated children.
* * *
Season Seven rides high on the buildup to Monica and Chandler’s wedding. It’s different from every other season in the series because everyone knows how it’s going to end. And, to a certain extent, everyone knows what’s going to come before the big day: there will be arguments over the floral arrangements and dress-buying antics, and ooph, just wait ’til Monica’s doing the seating chart. Wedding planning is both completely predictable and constant chaos. It is a period of high-stakes emotional drama, friend-bonding activities, and wearing clothes that no one can actually afford in real life. In short, it is the ideal structure for a season of Friends. The fun comes from knowing all the milestones to come, and wondering how they’re going to navigate them. Above all, the wedding gives the show plenty of organic scenarios to bring the group together. For once, it makes complete sense that all they do is hang out together and solve ridiculous problems with irrational solutions. A wedding is nothing but ridiculous problems and irrational solutions. Planning a surprise bridal shower with two days’ notice because you didn’t realize the bride was expecting one? Yeah, sounds about right. Sending a last-minute invite to your idiot friend’s parents because he told them they were invited and now there’s no way out of it? Totally. Weddings bring out the wacky and illogical side of everyone. It’s tradition.
And Monica is nothing if not a traditional bride. She wants that princess gown and something blue. Despite the fact that she and Chandler are living together, she even wants to abstain from sex before the wedding. She’s old-school. Which is why it’s a little bit strange that she and Chandler spend an entire episode looking for a minister to marry them—and not a rabbi.
Early on, Friends establishes that Monica and Ross Geller are Jewish. Their background comes up occasionally—Ross buys Monica a Hanukkah present, and Monica once mentions her bat mitzvah—but it’s typically bypassed, or even contradicted. The fact that Monica goes all-out for Christmas is conceivable; it’s not unheard of for Jews to get a Christmas tree, particularly in America, where Christmas is so heavily marketed and secularized. But the fact that she has a copy of the Bible in her living room (which comes up in a joke in Season Four) is—well, it’s like hunting for a minister. It’s weird. If there’d been an episode titled “The One Where Monica Converts to Christianity,” then this would all make more sense. Instead, the show simply ignored her Judaism 90% of the time, and assumed the audience would, as well.
It was a fair assumption in this era, when virtually all American sitcoms defaulted to white, straight, and vaguely Christian. There were significant exceptions, like Seinfeld, and...Seinfeld.71 But Seinfeld was the exception to a lot of sitcom rules; it succeeded by openly flouting them. It went hyper-specific, daring the audience not to get the joke. Friends worked its ass off to make sure everyone, everywhere, got it, and liked it. Both shows included culturally Jewish reference points, but Friends (which, like Seinfeld, was created by Jewish people and written by a largely Jewish staff) almost never identified them as such. It took a show-but-don’t-tell approach, which might have gone unnoticed had the show been set somewhere other than New York. But Friends did so much showing-not-telling when it came to Judaism that the subject remains a topic of debate among critics and fans. Rachel is usually at the center of these conversations, with many people arguing that she’s clearly a Jewish character, but deliberately not identified as one. In 2014, critics Emily Nussbaum and Molly Lambert got into a lengthy Twitter discussion on the subject, Nussbaum saying there was no question. “[The name] ‘Rachel’ is not ambiguous,” she wrote. “It’s like naming her Shoshannah Lowenstein, in TV terms.” Nussbaum pointed out the show used obvious clues (like Rachel calling her grandmother “bubbe”) as well as glaring stereotypes (her nose job, her engagement to a Jewish orthodontist). Lambert argued that these could also just be “ethnic suburban tropes” and not necessarily Jewish ones. “Anyway,” she added, “I just think it’s dangerous to decide that someone ‘looks’ or ‘feels’ Jewish, because that’s not actually how it works.” Nussbaum agreed, but added that she felt just as uncomfortable with those who adamantly argued against Rachel being Jewish. “[Friends used] so many cues...that it kind of rankles me to insist, ‘Hey, she could be anything.’”
Kauffman and Crane have both stated (in interviews after the series ended) that Rachel was Jewish. In fact, Kauffman said she was the only “real” Jew in the group, according to halachic law, because she had a Jewish mother. As for Ross and Monica, she said only their father, Jack (Elliott Gould), was Jewish, though they were clearly raised in the faith. Given details like this, it’s evident that the writers did have this in mind—regardless of Monica’s minister moment. Like the characters, they were used to being Jews in a vaguely Christian culture, and never was that more obvious than when it came time to write episodes for December (aka Christmastime).
Holiday episodes were always a favorite in the writers’ room (hence, the annual Thanksgiving shows). In the seventh season, they took the opportunity to do a Hanukkah episode for the first time: “The One with the Holiday Armadillo.” Over the years, Ross had become the character who most strongly identified as Jewish, and they felt it made sense that he would want to share that with his son. The story emerged from a very real conflict that a lot of Jewish or interfaith parents have around Christmas: How do you get your kids psyched about Hanukkah, without coming off like the jerk who took away Santa? “I’m sure any non-Christians go through that,” Kauffman said, commenting on the episode. “Kids are so aware of Christmas, and so much less aware of any other holiday.” She called her own rabbi and asked how she handled the issue. “[She said] it’s about identity. It’s about saying, during a very Christian time, ‘I’m Jewish. I’m not that—and that’s okay.’”
In dressing up like an armadillo, Ross doesn’t exactly succeed in conveying a sense of Jewish identity. But he does manage to teach Ben the story of Hanukkah, along with some help from Chandler as Santa, and Joey as Superman—who flew all the Jews out of Egypt! The hilarity of the scene (Schwimmer’s physical humor alone is pure gold) overshadows the compromise beneath. In the end, Ben will only listen to the Hanukkah story while sitting on Santa’s lap. It’s the kind of compromise that many Jewish parents are probably used to making. For a lot of people, this episode exemplifies the show’s handling of Judaism in general: it’s clunky, but it’s better than nothing.
* * *
“Better than nothing” came up a lot in the interviews I conducted for this book. I spoke with a number of people about the representational issues, lack of diversity, and all those elements that make the show dated (as we politely put it). To be honest, I expected more outrage. The internet is packed to the gills with hot-take opinion pieces, as well as thoroughly researched academic papers about how problematic Friends is—how quickly it went for the cheap jokes, how rarely it featured minority characters, and on the rare occasions that it did, how poorly those characters were treated. But when I spoke to people one-on-one, there was very little vitriol. For obvious reasons, I made a point to seek out commentators from within those minority groups. Some were fans and others told me up front that they didn’t like the show. But those who disliked it told me they thought it was corny, or just not their kind of humor (some folks were in the Seinfeld camp). No one cited lack of diversity or homophobia as the primary reason they were turned off by it, because, of course, those problems were not unique to Friends. And Friends was clearly not a show that wanted to cause controversy or tackle touchy social issues. The general consensus was that TV in that time was not a sophisticated or inclusive landscape, and in some ways Friends was better than its peers. By Season Seven, Carol and Susan had pretty much disappeared from the show, but the fact that they’d been there at all was something. Okay, the Hanukkah episode was a little bit silly and Santa-fied, but you know what? Better than nothing.
Then there’s Chandler’s dad. Of all the so-called dated storylines on Friends, this one most clearly marks it as a product of its era. That era being one in which transgender was not a word most people knew. Transphobia was not a touchy social issue because most people hadn’t even heard of it. Today, the trans community remains one of the most at-risk populations in the world, but in 2001, it was virtually invisible. The fact that Friends made such a big, flashy, nonstop joke of it was hardly controversial at the time. It was nothing like the lesbian wedding, which had been handled with such enormous caution. When Chandler’s dad appeared, there were no press conferences or subtle nods to the political climate. If the show had made a statement about trans rights or visibility, most of the audience wouldn’t have known what the hell it was talking about.
Chandler’s dad72 is never identified as a trans woman in the show, but again, Kauffman and Crane both acknowledged the character as such in interviews after Friends ended. (Had they done so during the run of the series, they probably would have used the word transsexual, a term that predates transgender but is not typically used today.) Throughout the series, Chandler’s dad is alternately referred to as a gay man, a drag queen, or a cross-dresser. If Friends were a contemporary series, this might be seen as a deliberate commentary on the complex phases of identity development. But given the time and place, I think it’s safe to say that no one was thinking about those things. They were just looking for new ways to point out that Chandler’s dad wore dresses.
As Chandler and Monica’s wedding approached, the writers had to make a decision about the groom’s parents. Crane said there was much debate over whether or not Chandler’s dad should ever be seen on the show. Some said she should remain an off-screen recurring character (like Ugly Naked Guy), but eventually it was decided that she should be at her son’s wedding. But who could possibly play her? After seven years of Chandler’s-dad jokes, the audience had a pretty vivid (if not clear) picture of who she was. And, of course, Friends didn’t just do guest stars—it did guest celebrities. How many big-name celebs could play a singing, dancing, man-eating Las Vegas headliner with an ambiguous gender identity?
“We went to see if we could get Liza Minnelli,” Crane later explained. The first idea was to make Chandler’s dad “the best female impersonator ever,” and then cast the actual iconic performer in the role. But neither Minnelli nor the others they approached felt comfortable playing an impersonator playing them. So they instead looked for a big-name actress to fill the role of Charles Bing—aka Helena Handbasket.
Kathleen Turner was starring in a touring production of Tallulah, a one-woman play about Hollywood legend Tallulah Bankhead. Crane saw the show one night and went backstage to speak with Turner afterward. Might she consider taking the part? Turner thought, I haven’t done that yet. Why not? In the years since, Turner has often been asked about her work on Friends, and she’s readily acknowledged how bizarre the whole thing looks now. “How they approached me with it was, ‘Would you like to be the first woman playing a man playing a woman?’” she told Gay Times in 2018. “I said yes, because there weren’t many drag/trans people on television at the time.” She added, “I don’t think it’s aged well...but no one ever took it seriously as a social comment.”
That may be true. And there are many people, even in the trans community, who argue it’s ridiculous to critique Friends for doing a lousy job with a trans character—because at least it had one. Kind of. But while Helena Handbasket was not meant to be taken as social commentary, there were indeed people who took her seriously.
I spoke with Mey Rude, former trans editor of the online magazine Autostraddle. She clearly remembers the first time she saw “The One with Chandler’s Dad.” It was her freshman year of college in 2005, a complicated period in Rude’s life. She was trans herself, but still years away from coming out. Like everyone else in the world, she’d grown up without really knowing what it meant to be transgender. “So, when I moved away for college, it was the first time I had internet access by myself, and I could watch TV without my parents seeing,” Rude told me. She began to seek out every show or movie that featured a trans character. “I would go online and watch the preview for Transamerica over and over again.” Other than that, there wasn’t much. Sometimes Law & Order had trans characters, but they always wound up murder victims. Rude was finally learning what it meant to be trans, at least according to pop culture. It meant being ostracized by society, estranged from your family, and probably killed. There were no stories out there to which she could relate, and no characters she could look to for even a hint of hope or positivity. “Then I found out about this episode of Friends.”
Chandler’s dad first appears in the penultimate episode of Season Seven. It’s two weeks before the wedding, and Monica realizes that they haven’t gotten an RSVP. “Maybe that’s because I didn’t send him an invitation,” Chandler tells her. As it turns out, he’s been deliberately avoiding his dad, who’s been trying in vain to reconnect with him for years (even flying to New York). Chandler rattles off a list of reasons, which are both understandable and completely absurd: his dad showed up at his high-school swim meets dressed in drag, and once had sex with Mr. Garibaldi. “Who’s Mr. Garibaldi?” Monica asks. “Does it matter?!” No, fair point. Chandler has plenty of reasons to resent both his parents, and he’s not the first child to carry those resentments into adulthood. His character is so obviously shaped by childhood trauma that it would be tragic if it weren’t so funny (See: “The One Where Chandler Can’t Cry”). But, Monica points out, Chandler’s been shit-talking his dad for a long time now. The jokes are getting old, and so is he. Maybe it’s time he grew up and got on a plane.
The two of them fly to Vegas and go see Helena Handbasket’s cabaret act. The scene opens with a great cameo by an actual trans actress (and Courteney Cox’s then sister-in-law), the late Alexis Arquette. She’s the waitress who asks if anyone’s taken their order yet, causing Monica to go into a pronoun meltdown: “Oh, yeah, she did. Uh, he did. She? I’m sorry, I’m new!” It’s a prescient moment, and one that shows the writers were at least a little conscious of the sensitive area in which they were treading. Helena’s reveal is obviously played for big laughs (“And there’s Daddy,” Chandler grumbles) and much of the scene is devoted to Turner making puns and flirting with the crowd in her huskiest tones. But at the center of it is a poignant moment of reckoning between parent and child. She notices Monica’s engagement ring, realizing she hasn’t been invited to her son’s wedding. Finally, Chandler stands up and says he’d love it if she would be there. “Really?” Helena asks. Chandler smiles. “I know it would make me happy—ma’am.”
It’s a touching moment of sadness, acceptance, hurt, and love, all rolled into one brief exchange. It’s doubly heartbreaking to see how badly this woman wants to be in her child’s life, and to know she probably never will be. Chandler has made a genuine gesture, but I don’t see him going to PFLAG meetings, or forging a new bond with his estranged parent. By the next episode, when she arrives at the wedding, she’s a walking punch line again.
“But they do invite her to the wedding,” Rude pointed out. “Even though her family makes fun of her, she is invited to her son’s wedding. You know? It’s so sad that that’s the kind of representation that, for so long, counted as good representation.” But, for Rude, it was better than nothing. It let her imagine a future in which she might one day be a parent, and might even be invited to her child’s wedding. “I don’t know if I would call it ‘progressive’ or anything like that. But I do think if you’re a closeted trans teenager or young adult watching Friends [in that era], and you see that episode, you do see yourself, in that [character],” Rude said. “There’s a pang of familiarity there. And since she’s happy—she has a career, she has a boyfriend—that is much better than when you’re watching Law & Order and every trans character is murdered.”
Rude acknowledged the obvious gaffes, some of which are even more confusing than they are offensive. “They have a cisgender woman playing the character—who’s very clearly a cis woman. But everyone treats her like she’s very obviously a man in a wig.” There’s a storyline in the wedding episode where Monica asks Rachel to keep an eye on Chandler’s dad, “the man in the black cocktail dress.” Rude pointed out that no one would look at Kathleen Turner and automatically think, Man in a dress. “It just comes across as extremely sloppy and extremely confusing and extremely weird.” But setting aside that heaping pile of missteps, she said, “the character isn’t so bad. She’s talented and funny and seems to be living a very happy life. Just the way everyone else treats her is terrible.” The bottom line was that she was there—at the wedding, on the television. She was evidence that trans people existed, in an era when they were hardly even recognized. “Trans women were starving to see themselves on screen,” said Rude. “So, when we saw ourselves in a way that wasn’t absolutely terrible, it seemed like a great thing.”
* * *
It would be many more years before television began, in earnest, to consider things like diverse, responsible representation. Even now, the envelope only gets pushed a millimeter at a time, and TV is still dominated by white, straight, thin, cisgendered, vaguely Christian characters. But in 2001, Friends was already beginning to seem a little dated. Something was changing on television. HBO had introduced series like The Sopranos and Sex and the City, shattering the molds of TV drama and comedy. The cable revolution was beginning, but an even greater paradigm shift was happening on network television—and not on NBC. In the summer of 2000 (just two weeks after the Friends cast signed new contracts), CBS debuted a show about sixteen people—not characters, but “castaways”—forced to compete against each other on an uninhabited island. Survivor had exploded into the ratings, blowing everyone else out of the water. For the first time in years, Friends and all the other reliable hits were losing their comfortable lead, their viewership flocking in droves toward the next great phenomenon: reality TV.
It was the end of an era, no mistaking it now. NBC was no longer America’s number-one network. Jeff Zucker—who had recently succeeded Garth Ancier as the president of NBC Entertainment in December of that year—was frantically trying to right the ship. He’d created the concept of “Supersized Thursday,” extending the network’s most popular half-hour shows to forty minutes. That would buy him some time while he hunted for a new Survivor-sized hit. The strategy worked, but it was only a temporary fix. The Must-See TV years were over. The sitcom wasn’t dead yet, but everyone could see its time was fast approaching. And maybe that was okay. Life changes, media evolves, and stories have to end sometime. Friends still loomed incredibly large in the TV landscape, but in the months leading up to the seventh season finale, viewership steadily dwindled. The show was due to return in the fall for one last season, but now it was painfully clear that it wouldn’t go out on a high note.
It wasn’t backlash this time. Season Seven was solid (maybe not spectacular) in terms of quality. There were no Diet Coke debacles or over-the-top stunts that alienated viewers. Many of those who had drifted away came back for the finale. Numbers jumped from 16 million to 30 million, making it the most-watched episode of the year, by far. Would those viewers return in the fall? Probably not. In all likelihood, this was a fond farewell.
And what better send-off than a big, beautiful wedding? What could be more fitting a farewell to a show about the time in your life when your friends are your family? In getting married, Monica and Chandler were closing that chapter and beginning a new one. Like all weddings, it was exciting and sweet and a little bit sad. Of course they would always have their friends, but it wouldn’t be the same within the group. It wouldn’t be the same show. This was the end of Friends as we knew it. What began in Season Five had come full circle. “Everything is changing,” Rachel had cried, and two years later, it had changed for good. Everyone was moving on. The bride and groom kissed and the audience cheered. It was the perfect time to say goodbye, and let the Friends head off into the sunset. By then, the spring of 2001, some were already wondering if they’d overstayed their welcome. Then came the fall.