20 Things Wrong With 'Friends' We All Choose To Ignore
It's nearly been fifteen years since the final episode of Friends graced our screens, but we're still not over New York City's six most famous faces. The hilarious, complex and sometimes ridiculous lives of Rachel, Ross, Monica, Chandler, Phoebe and Joey brought millions of people joy for the decade during which the show aired, and have continued doing so ever since. Even as new shows emerge and new characters take our hearts, we'll always be in love with the Friends.
Growing up watching a show like Friends, you tend to get so caught up in the hilarity of it that you don't always notice when things on the show aren't quite right. Whether there's a plot hole, or a certain character who's actually terrible, it tends to stay concealed beneath the layers of comedy and emotion. And even when you do realize that Friends wasn't so perfect, you just watch The One With Chandler In A Box again and forget all about it.
Even though Friends isn't perfect, it's still the one show we always go back to when it hasn't been our day, our week, our month or even our year. Check out below what most people tend to ignore about our favorite Friends.
20 The Friends Can Never Remember Their Birthdays
It's generally understood that the Friends are all around their mid-twenties when the show starts (for those of us in our mid-twenties now, that's nuts!). But their birthdays seem to change between the seasons.
In The One With Joey's New Girlfriend, Rachel tells Gunther that her birthday is in May, but in Season 7, she says she's an Aquarius.
An Aquarius is January or February, while May is Taurus or Gemini. Ross's birthday is twice cited as being in October, but in one episode he says it was “seven months” ago from October, placing it in March.
19 Or How Old They Are
Not only can the gang not keep up with their own birthdays, but they seem to forget how old they are. In Season 7, Rachel is the last member of the group to turn 30 (and totally freaking out about it), which is all well and good except in Season 1, we find out that Joey is the youngest Friend at 25. Um? In Seasons 3, 4 and 5 there are implications that Ross is 29, but we know time has passed because we see Christmases, Thanksgivings and other events in between those references. Maybe the purple apartment is secretly a time machine?
18 Chandler And Rachel Meet For The First Time A Lot
Eagle-eyed fans will have noticed that Chandler and Rachel meet for the first time on more than one occasion throughout the show. We see them first being introduced in Central Perk when Rachel runs in wearing her wedding dress, but we later find out that Rachel was friends with the Gellers beforehand, and since Ross and Chandler knew each other before too, Chandler and Rachel indeed crossed paths before the show is set. Later plot lines show that they definitely met at least four times during high school and college. A Season 10 flashback even shows them making out!
17 Chandler Tells Monica He Loves Her For The First Time, Twice
Chandler and Monica's relationship is one of the most memorable and organic in TV history, and the first time they admit their love for each other is a big deal. Except, it happens more than once. In The One With All The Thanksgivings, Chandler says he loves her when she's dancing with the turkey on her head. And understandably, Monica is over the moon.
But in The One Where They All Find Out, Chandler tells the group he's in love with Monica, and she emerges from the bathroom stunned as if this is news to her.
Did we miss something?
16 Ben Pretty Much Disappears In The Later Seasons
Despite being Ross's only son, Ben hardly gets any screen time. We know Ross doesn't have full custody, but you'd still think that the Friends would see him a little more than they do. And while they don't see him often in the first few seasons, he completely disappears after Season 8. One Redditor fan theory suggests that Ross possibly lost custody of Ben due to his strange behavior, including his relationship with a student at his college and his anger issues. There's also no mention of Ben meeting his half-sister Emma, let alone an on-screen meeting between them. Poor Ben!
15 How On Earth Was Janice Pregnant?
When Rachel has Emma, Janice happens to go into labor at the exact same time. Don't get us wrong-we love when Janice shows up in all the most inconvenient places. This time, though, it's not logistically possible that she's due at the same time as Rachel. When she has dinner with Monica and Chandler before the wedding, we find out that she was stood up by her boyfriend. And at that wedding, Rachel finds out she's pregnant. In the hospital nine months later, Janice says she met Sid a year ago. Was she dating someone else who stood her up after she'd met Sid?
14 Ross And Rachel's Permanent Ink Was Actually Disappearing
One of the funniest elements of Ross and Rachel's visit to Vegas during which they accidentally get married is the fact that they have permanent ink all over their faces. We see Rachel trying to clean up her face before she starts drinking, and discovers that she can't get the markings off. Ross even calls the pen company who confirms that the stuff is permanent. But the next morning, when the two meet the others at breakfast, the ink is mysteriously gone from their faces. You might argue that it simply came off with time overnight, but it it's still there when they wake up in bed together. Interesting!
13 Ross Actually DOES Like Ice Cream
At the same time that we find out that Chandler doesn't like dogs, we also learn that Ross doesn't like ice cream. According to the paleontologist, it's too cold. Except, if we look at other episodes, it seems like he kind of does like ice cream.
There are actually two separate occasions with Elizabeth and his monkey Marcel where Ross is seen enjoying his ice cream just like your average person.
It's possible that he was just going through a phase of not liking ice cream, or he was pretending to like it on those occasions. The latter definitely seems like a Ross thing to do!
12 Should Phoebe Really Be A Friend?
Having no family or romantic ties with the other Friends, Phoebe is sometimes considered the sixth member of the gang. There was even a movement petitioning for her to be replaced with Gunther! That may be total blasphemy, but it does seem like Phoebe doesn't fit in that well with the others at all. She's the odd-ball who sabotages Joey's guitar lessons, almost ruins the reputation of Monica's restaurant, and even mugged Ross once upon a time. Plus, she hardly ever makes sense, and is the kind of girl who ditches her friends for her boyfriend. She's hilarious, but IRL would she really be a Friend?
11 And Is She Really Bilingual?
When Phoebe tries (and fails) to teach Joey French, we find out that she's basically fluent. Plus, she accuses Monica of butchering the French language during the debacle with her grandmother's lost cookie recipe that turns out to be Nestlé Toll House. But in The One With Rachel's Date, it's revealed that Phoebe has no idea what 'sous chef' means.
Can you really speak French without knowing a basic term like that?
Heck, many strictly English-speaking people know what it means! Also, seeing as Phoebe seems versed in French culture as well as the language, you'd think she'd definitely be familiar with this terminology.
10 Ross Is Actually A Terrible Boyfriend
The entire relationship between Ross and Rachel is complex and emotionally exhausting, and yet they still manage to be one of TV's most beloved and iconic couples of all time. Rachel definitely isn't perfect by any means, but looking at Ross in particular, he's not really a great boyfriend. He's pretty possessive of Rachel, marking his territory by sending extravagant gifts to her work, and gets super jealous of her male friends that aren't Joey and Chandler. And Ross isn't just a bad boyfriend to Rachel. Remember when he abandoned Mona at the movies? And said Rachel's name at the altar with Emily?
9 The Friends Don't Seem To Actually Work
We know that all the Friends do work-Joey's an actor, Rachel works at Ralph Lauren, Monica is a chef, Phoebe is a massage therapist, Ross is a paleontologist and Chandler works in statistical analysis and data reconfiguration. But considering all the time that they spend lounging around Central Perk or in their apartments, you have to wonder whether they actually work. If Joey's a struggling actor, shouldn't he be auditioning every chance he gets? And being a head chef, Monica should have basically zero time to hang out.
Adulting is hard-whatever job you have, it's hard to align the schedules of six friends to hang out!
8 Joey And Phoebe Are Supposed To Be Broke…
Speaking of work, Joey and Phoebe's jobs aren't exactly steady. There's a time when Phoebe is working in a spa instead of as a freelancer, and Joey makes it big on Days of Our Lives but is then written off the show. Considering how inconsistent their jobs are (and for Joey, when he's not on Days of Our Lives he's hardly bringing in any income at all), shouldn't they be broke? Or have a lot less money than they seem to have? We know Joey does often have money trouble and needs Chandler to give him loans, but would he still be able to afford rent in that spacious New York apartment?
7 Joey Is A Total Player
None of the Friends are perfect, which is what we love about them. But Joey is such a player that truthfully, if he were real, he'd be hounded online for being such a sleazeball. And we can't help but wonder that if a man who was less conventionally attractive were treating women that way all the time, would it be as funny?
We all laughed when Joey heated up his apartment to try and entice Janine to walk around in her underthings, but really, that's kind of creepy.
That said, a lot of the things these characters do would be totally unacceptable in real life.
6 By The Later Episodes, Joey Is Unbelievably Dim
From the beginning, Joey is fleshed out as the least intelligent character on the show. We love a good character arc, but Joey goes from being sarcastic, competent and a little thick to being a total simpleton with basically no brain power. His endeavors to learn French made for one of the funniest episodes ever, but would a functioning adult (without a hearing problem) really not be able to hear that he sounded completely different from the French speaker on the tape? And would he really think that the recorded messages on the tape are live and personally aimed at him? Probably not.
5 Rachel's Trifle Dilemma Would Not Have Played Out Like That
For those that missed it, Rachel's first attempt at making a traditional English trifle is a disaster when she accidentally combines the recipe with the savory shepherd's pie and includes beef sautéed with peas and onions.
It's hilarious as the gang tries to stomach her dessert and make up various excuses as to why they can't eat it, but the premise is a little unrealistic, even for a sitcom.
Rachel's not so silly that she wouldn't be able to tell from their faces and their odd behavior that she messed up the trifle, and the Friends and Mr. and Mrs. Geller wouldn't go along with eating it anyway.
4 Emma Is Just A Plot Element (When It's Convenient)
Emma is one of the cutest babies in TV history, but if we're being honest, it does seem like she's just a plot element to make the relationship between Ross and Rachel all that more complex.
After she's born, she doesn't really become a core character on the show like we'd hoped, and is instead often with a grandparent or a babysitter. Any parent knows that a child is a full-time thing, not a convenient thing. And when Rachel is planning on moving to Paris and is going to have her mom bring Emma, she doesn't even discuss it with Ross. Um, is that even legal?
3 The Friends Never Really Have Alone Time
We get it: if the Friends weren't always together, we wouldn't have a show to watch. It's only when we put our thinking caps on and analyze the show (which admittedly sucks some of the fun out!), that it becomes obvious that the group hangs out together an awful lot, to the point where the characters don't really have that much alone time. They're always hanging out or showing up in each other's space, even in the early hours of the morning. We guess they could all be extremely extroverted, but in real life, you'd probably be sick to death of your friends if you saw them that often.
2 Ross Has Some Old-Fashioned, Problematic Ideas
Many fans watch Friends for entertainment purposes only, and don't take much of what the characters say and do to heart. But for those who do, it's easy to see how Ross actually has some old-fashioned ideas, particularly about gender.
He can't stand the fact that Ben likes to play with dolls, and even has a problem hiring Sandy as a nanny for Emma because he's a guy.
In this episode, it's pointed out that although Ross himself “didn't just come back from branding cattle”, he secretly has a problem with guys that are too sensitive and/or feminine.
1 Ross Isn't Honest About How Many Partners He's Had
In the first season of the show, we find out that Ross has only ever been with Carol, his ex-wife. When he hits it off with Rachel, he tells her that she's the second person he's ever been with. However, things change in Season 7.
Ross accuses Chandler of having some 'bedroom time' with the cleaning lady in college, but as it turns out, Chandler reveals that it was actually Ross who was with her.
We guess it's possible to forget something like that, but it would be a lot more likely if it were Joey forgetting someone he'd been with, rather than Ross.