Come back to the Central Perk, Rachel Green, Rachel Green- Page 4

[CarlosAlberto]

Posted: 7/29/13 at 12:39pm

Oh wow, that sucks! The extra footage is what made them so special on DVD and justified me owning them when everyone around me was asking, "Why do you own a TV show that airs on 5 different channels at least 15 times a day?"

Updated On: 7/29/13 at 12:39 PM

[DottieD'Luscia]

Posted: 7/29/13 at 2:41pm

Every time I watch an episode of Friends, I'm reminded I liked it more than I thought I did. I even came across an episode a couple of weeks ago I had never seen before.

[beautywickedlover]

Posted: 8/9/13 at 3:34pm

I can't believe this almost happened.


'Friends': Jennifer Aniston Was Almost Replaced As Rachel Before The Show Aired (VIDEO)

[Phyllis Rogers Stone]

Posted: 9/22/13 at 1:32pm

19 years ago today, Friends premiered!

[Phyllis Rogers Stone]

Posted: 9/22/13 at 1:32pm

19 years ago today, Friends premiered!

[Phyllis Rogers Stone]

Posted: 9/22/13 at 1:32pm

19 years ago today, Friends premiered!

[suestorm]

Posted: 9/22/13 at 5:00pm

When did it premiere?

[Reginald Tresilian]

Posted: 9/23/13 at 10:55am

Funny: I was on a train back from the shore last night, and I had an urge to watch an epidose of "Friends." I must have sensed the anniversary.

[DottieD'Luscia]

Posted: 9/23/13 at 12:48pm

I remember I missed the first several episodes of Friends during its first season. Part of the issue was that I worked from 5pm-midnight and didn't record most televion shows. Well one Thursday evening I was home from work waiting for a furniture delivery and the rest is history. I tuned into see Friends that night and had taped it ever since.

[beautywickedlover]

Posted: 5/6/14 at 4:46pm

10 years ago we said goodbye to this show, but to me it feels like only yesterday. I could not wait to discuss with everyone at school the next day about Rachel and Ross getting back together. Even though the show ended over a decade ago I don't feel like the show ever left the air since I see it on syndication.

http://popwatch.ew.com/2014/05/06/friends-poll-ross-rachel-break/

[jasonf]

Posted: 5/6/14 at 8:16pm

I still watch it in syndication almost every afternoon. It's one of only a small handful of shows I can watch over and over and it never gets old.

[Jungle Red]

Posted: 5/6/14 at 8:19pm

My boyfriend and I watch the DVDs, in order, at least once a year.

I have a feeling we'll start watching them tonight, since we haven't done it yet.

[candydog2]

Posted: 5/9/14 at 5:47pm

It's a great show I admit, but I just can't count it as a favourite. The concept always struck me as being very pedestrian. It was just straight, middle-class, thirty-year-old white people who occasionally dated straight, middle-class, thirty-year-old white people. Yes they had personalities, but even the quirks they had seemed boring and forced.

I can't really fault the show itself. It was very 90s, but that's because it WAS the 90s. It just never really did anything for me.

[Phyllis Rogers Stone]

Posted: 5/9/14 at 7:21pm

All the characters were in their 20s for the first several seasons, if that helps.

[Reginald Tresilian]

Posted: 5/9/14 at 7:28pm

I love this show so much. But yeah, as Alec Mapa said, it should be called "Straight White Friends." (And that was before he appeared on the show. As a houseboy.)

[Reginald Tresilian]

Posted: 5/9/14 at 7:29pm

Though it has to be said that Ross dated several nonwhite women.

[Phyllis Rogers Stone]

Posted: 5/9/14 at 8:14pm

Both times he and Joey competed for a woman the woman was non-white!

[Phyllis Rogers Stone]

Posted: 5/9/14 at 8:48pm

I loved this show and always will, but there I think even the most ardent fans have their own personal beefs with the show. One of mine is the weird sort of macho/semi-homophobic stuff. That episode where Chandler gets all mad and is like "Where are all the men?" is a particularly confounding one for me. Which one gets to be the most insecure in his manhood that he lashes out rotates.

I also always felt like we were supposed to imagine David Schwimmer was really scrawny or something. He's so wimpy and weak and he was always the most jacked of the guys.

[candydog2]

Posted: 5/10/14 at 7:21am

I know that they were in their 20s at first, but the show did go for 10 years so I was going with an average milestone type age.

And yes, all the men in the show were REALLY REALLY insecure about their masculinity, and if any of them ever diverged slightly from being "manly" not only the other men, but also the women made fun of them and put them down for it. The approach to being gay also has not aged well. It wasn't an overtly homophobic show, but it was made very clear that gay men and women were a completely different subset of people whose lives did not fit in with the "normal" lives and expectations of the friends. Being gay wasn't made to look bad exactly, but it was made to look weird.

And I'm not the kind of person who thinks we should shoehorn in characters of other races for the sake of political correctness, but considering that the show was set in New York, other races were severely underrepresented.

[Reginald Tresilian]

Posted: 5/10/14 at 10:44am

I agree: they did a lot of (very mild) gay panic jokes. I mean, they worked in theater, restaurants, and fashion, and hung out at a West Village coffee shop and they didn't know one gay person?

[strummergirl]

Posted: 5/10/14 at 10:35pm

"Though it has to be said that Ross dated several nonwhite women."

I only remember Aisha Tyler, who Joey also had an eye on.

I'm pretty sure Carol and Susan were the first lesbians that I ever saw on TV. That said, aspects to their life used for humor was pretty hit and miss. I do like in the 'Bizarro' episode that Carol and Susan would find each other anyway.

I did think Kathleen Turner was pretty great in terms of her showing she has a sense of humor about herself in playing Chandler's dad, a female impersonator.

I'm not really sure the Monica was fat aged well or was good in the first place. I was too young to hear any feedback, but I can't imagine it was universally praised or derided.

[Jordan Catalano]

Posted: 5/10/14 at 11:27pm

Fat Monica is one of the greatest things to ever happen in the history of television.

[Phyllis Rogers Stone]

Posted: 5/11/14 at 12:03am

Agreed. Fat Monica was always lovingly drawn, I thought. Marta Kauffman always spoke so warmly of her on the dvd commentaries, and she always had praise for Courteney Cox's performance. I never would have even thought about her being problematic.

strum, Gabrielle Union was the first African-American woman Ross and Joey competed for.

Having see every episode multiple times (and the viewings of my favorites number in high double-digits), I'm not immune to the show's warts.

I agree with a lot of candydog's points (and apologize for being a little snarky to you!), but I think it should be noted that this show began twenty years ago, which explains (but doesn't excuse) its somewhat regressive notions of homosexuality. I was twenty when the show premiered and sometimes I really do find it staggering how different the world is when it comes to homosexuality than it was in 1994. But yeah, if you really start thinking about it, there are all sorts of wonky messages when it comes to non-heterosexuality.

Susan got course-corrected a bit as the show went, I thought, but she was sort of like a stereotypical angry man-hating d-word in a lipstick lesbian's body when it started. But the introduction of Carol and Susan (with Carol #1) is all kinds of off-putting. I always thought the one-off Kathleen Turner thing was kind of borderline offensive, too. There's a lot about gender issues the show didn't even care to understand, there is a sort of "freakshow" feel to show's attitudes toward anything on the LGBT spectrum.

The show was pretty shameless with retconning, especially as the years went on and they kept going back to flashback well. Ages got fuzzier as it went on. By the show's end, all the characters were significantly younger than they should have been with the ages they were ten years before. Monica says she's twenty-six in season one, but Rachel turns 30 in 2001, and since they have to be roughly the same age, a couple of years got lost. I think they're 28 for seasons three through six, maybe.



Updated On: 5/11/14 at 12:03 AM

[wickedfan]

Posted: 5/11/14 at 8:57am

And speaking of non-white women, we can't forget Julie! I mean, they almost got a CAT together.

As Phyllis has said, the show is very special and also very flawed. Part of it is a product of its time and part of it is somewhat the safety of the writers. In one way, it was very brave of them to have a lesbian wedding on the show (no matter how broadly Susan was drawn for a while or how inconveniently timed Carol's guest appearances were). On the other hand, the show never understood, nor cared to understand, homosexuality. It was always a punchline, really, whether it was someone thinking Chandler was gay, Joey's handbag, or Ross thinking it was entirely plausible that Emily could go gay overnight just by spending quality time with Susan.

I think the most disappointing thing is that this attitude never progressed or matured as the show went on. No matter how much older the Friends got or how many life experiences they struggled through, the one thing that never really changed was that homosexuality was considered funny and separate. Even as time went on and Will & Grace premiered (which also used homosexuality for humor, but at least bothered to give us characters to understand and love while it did it), Ellen came out, and Matthew Shepard's death made headlines, Friends never caught on with the times. If I could go back and change one thing about the show, that would be it. If only because every dozen episodes or so, this issue comes up when I watch it again and it always makes me uncomfortable and slightly hate the characters for the rest of the episode.

It should be known, though, that approaching homosexuality this way was pretty much the norm for a long, long time. If anyone cares to remember, Cheers was incredibly homophobic to the extent where there's an awful, awful, awful episode in the first season called "The Boys in the Bar." It's central story is Sam coming to terms with a former teammate who is now gay, which is nice, except that EVERY character except for Dianne (who is mocked and ridiculed throughout because of it) is a homophobe and fears that homosexuals will frequent the bar. Then they panic when they hear that there *is* one in the bar that moment. No character other than Sam grows from the experience (except maybe Norm who is kissed on the cheek at the end), and throughout the series homophobic comments are still used as punchlines. And this is from one of the most loved, acclaimed, longest running sitcoms of all time.

[strummergirl]

Posted: 5/11/14 at 10:12am

"strum, Gabrielle Union was the first African-American woman Ross and Joey competed for."

Bah! Of course!

"There's a lot about gender issues the show didn't even care to understand, there is a sort of "freakshow" feel to show's attitudes toward anything on the LGBT spectrum."

Oh, definitely. But this plagued a lot of 90s TV programs- not that they can be acquitted for doing so.

"Fat Monica is one of the greatest things to ever happen in the history of television."

I remain kind of on the fence but I loved that again, maybe I just love the 'Bizarrro' episode, Chandler was into her anyway.

Now that I am brainstorming how the show dealt with homosexuality, I remember the Winona guest-spot as Rachel's friend.