[This post originally appeared at Bitch Flicks.]
I recently indulged in some Friends-related nostalgia with a good pal of mine over a rainy weekend. We took fifteen episodes over two days and I was reminded why I was obsessed with this show during my first two years in high school. I loved Chandler, Lisa Kudrow, the chemistry among the cast members, Chandler, the way the show made typical sitcom cliches seem original and funny, the “comfort food” nature of the show, and Chandler.
One thing I did NOT love was the aspect of Friends that most people were obsessed with: the on-again, off-again relationship of the TV sitcom supercouple, Ross and Rachel.
I’ve spent some time looking at different romantic comedies and the cliches that are used and re-used in cookie-cutter scripts, and I finally pinpointed the reason why Ross and Rachel always bothered me as a couple: over ten years (seriously, ten years!) of a will-they-or-won’t-they relationship, they managed to cover almost every single one of my least favorite rom-com cliches.
He loves her. She’s oblivious until he’s with someone else, and then he’s oblivious. In the pilot episode of the series, Ross tells Rachel that he had a crush on her since high school, and she admits that she already knew. He asks her if he could ask her out sometime, and she seems receptive to the idea, and it’s a cute moment between them.
But we can’t have something as simple as a man asking out a woman in episode two, her saying yes, and seeing the two of them date over time and eventually fall in love, now can we? No, we must insert drama and other complications. In this case, this drama results in Rachel conveniently forgetting that Ross liked her and becoming completely oblivious while he mooned after her for an entire season, making her look stupid and unobservant and him look pathetic. When she re-learns that he has a crush on her, she decides that she likes him too, but whoops – he’s moved onto someone else, and now, instead of a season of Ross whining, we’re treated to six episodes of Rachel being jealous and bratty to his new girlfriend.
When Ross is pining for Rachel, he’s a whiner. When Rachel is pining for Ross, she’s a jealous brat. Why am I supposed to root for them to get together?
“We’re still in love (during season premieres and season finales).” Unfortunately, this “we only like each other when we’re with other people” trend doesn’t end after the second season. Ross and Rachel finally date, and then they break up, and then Rachel realizes that she’s still in love with Ross when he moves onto Phoebe’s friend Bonnie. Then she realizes she’s still in love with Ross, again, at the end of the fourth season and runs off to ruin his wedding. She tells him she still loves him at the beginning of season five, but then gets over it for some reason. Then they get married in Las Vegas at the end of the fifth season, and Ross doesn’t annul the marriage because it’s implied that he still has feelings for Rachel, but then conveniently forgets about those renewed feelings at around episode six. Then they have a baby together at the end of season eight, and they consider getting back together at the beginning of season nine, but that desire is forgotten by episode two.
Is there something about the months of May and September that make Ross and Rachel fall back in love? Or is there something wrong with my suspension of disbelief, as I simply don’t buy that the same two people can fall in and out of love with each other that many times?
Jealousy is romantic. The worst thing that Ross ever did in his relationship with Rachel was become a jealous, possessive jerk after she got a new job. (I consider that worse than his sleeping with the copy-shop girl when he and Rachel “were on a break”). The worst thing that Rachel ever did in her relationship with Ross was run off to England to stop his wedding even though he had happily moved on to someone else.
To be fair, Friends was initially honest about these issues and showed why the characters were in the wrong. Monica criticized Ross for being jealous, and his inability to get over his jealousy cost him his relationship with Rachel. Phoebe (and Hugh Laurie, in a great guest appearance) criticized Rachel for being selfish and wanting to end Ross’s wedding.
But then Ross says Rachel’s name at the altar. And at the end of the series, Rachel chooses Ross over a great new career opportunity in Paris with no apparent job to fall back on.
In the end, it doesn’t matter that Ross lost Rachel when he was jealous, or that Rachel realized it was wrong to break up his wedding. In the end, Ross wins Rachel over her career, and Rachel gets to be with Ross instead of watching him marry someone else. Getting them together in the end seems to retroactively reward them for their previous bad behavior, justifying their actions as okay because they were really in love the whole time!
“Uh-oh. The placeholder love interest is more likable than the endgame couple. I know – we’ll turn them into jerks!” I can’t be the only one who thought Emily was a much better match for Ross than Rachel was. Ross and Emily had more in common than Ross and Rachel and he was more likable when he was around Emily – more genuinely romantic, more energetic, and she seemed to appreciate his geeky side more than Rachel did.
This was not a good thing for the Friends writers, apparently. Ross and Rachel were meant to be the endgame couple no matter what. The only thing to nip the Ross/Emily relationship in the bud was to turn Emily into a jerk who made him stay away from Rachel and move out of his apartment.
Why did they like each other, anyway? What did Ross and Rachel have in common, aside from being two decent human beings who have the same friends? He had no respect or interest in her career and she had no respect or interest in his. He thought she was selfish and spoiled and she thought he was a geek and an intellectual snob. Yes, opposites sometimes attract, but sometimes I didn’t know why they even liked each other, much less loved each other.
The chase to the airport. They actually had a chase to the airport in the last episode. I mean, really?
“Oh, wait a minute,” you might be saying. “You’re telling me that you weren’t moved by the last scene where they got back together for real?”
Well, of course I was moved. I’m not made of stone, people. She got off the plane!
Yes, I “aww” and I tear up at their last scene together, as ridiculous as it is. To me, that’s a testament to how much Schwimmer and Aniston sold every step of the relationship. No matter how contrived the writing was, they committed to those romantic moments. Sometimes they made me forget how much their relationship got on my nerves. But when I’m re-watching old Friends episodes and indulging in some nostalgia, I tend to fast-forward the dramatic Ross and Rachel scenes, because those are too many cliches for me to handle with one couple.
Chandler and Monica, on the other hand – that’s where the magic was.
Blog Posts
Interviews
Novels, Fiction & Silliness
Reviews
When I watch Friends, which I do quite often because Ellie (my fiancée) and I own all the episodes and watch them when we get bored, Ross and Rachel do frustrate me. There are so many points in which I want to yell out at the screen “for [insert improper language here] just get together already. It is one of the things that I love about Scrubs. Turk and Carla start dating and they have some marriage issues but are still together when the show ends.
In regards to Emily I actually felt bad for her. As Ellie pointed out to me whenever Emily calls she is in her jogging bottoms and her massive jumper, which tv uses to indicate a woman is upset or depressed. She remained sympathetic to me despite the times she acted like a jerk because I could see why. Ross said Rachel’s name at the wedding, then there was this business with the honeymoon. It seems like very much a point that she was driven to.
If I recall correctly, Helen Baxendale was pregnant when they shot season 5, so she was only shown in jumpers and in bed because she was really, really pregnant at the time. In fact, I think she couldn’t film in the US for the same reason Phoebe couldn’t go to Ross’s wedding – she was too pregnant to fly.
But yes, I felt bad for Emily. In most cases, I think it’s controlling and jerky of a person to demand that his/her spouse no longer see an ex-significant other, but Rachel was an ex whose name Ross said at the altar, AND he gave her Emily’s plane ticket to their honeymoon. I think it’s fairly reasonable for a person to want her SO to cut off contact with an ex under those circumstances, at least temporarily.
I also love Turk and Carla, much more than JD and Elliot, as I prefer Chandler and Monica to Ross and Rachel. I just have to admit that I hate off-again, on-again relationships in general. It’s the reason I lost interest in Barney/Robin on How I Met Your Mother.
First time I ever saw an on/off relationship I think I enjoyed it, now whenever I see them I just think “padding”. I think it is indactive of some greater writer mentality in which all the thrill really is in the chase.
Well, also, I think the on-again off-again pairings are popular with viewers. I think you and I are in the minority of viewers, and many many people love the drama of the on-again off-again romances. I understand writers wanting to write what sells. I just wish they’d make the reasons for keeping a couple apart a little more realistic. JD and Elliot on Scrubs actually worked as a couple by the last season, but the season three plotline of JD pining after her all year to suddenly not be interested anymore was completely ridiculous.
A good movie for this in my opinion is the Switch. He can’t tell her because while he was drunk when he did what he it was so awful that you could understand him not saying, that combined with his neuross that was developed throughout the film makes his reluctance believable. On the part of Jenner Anderson’s character you could tell she loved him but due to her age, the fact that she thought she had a child with the sperm donor and the fact that she had clearly waited for the main character to step up painted the picture of someone who wasnt with the one she lived because she didn’t really believe he would start a relationship and was drawn into a relationship which she felt was her last resort (the structure of that movie has always fascinated me)
I had never really thought about it before, but you’re right! This is an amazing breakdown of the different cliches used for their relationship. Do you plan on writing something about how Monica and Chandler worked as a couple, because I think that would be interesting.
I really, REALLY hated Chandler and Monica. They both became horrible caricatures of themselves from the moment their relationship was revealed to the rest of the group. Monica became more obsessed with control and cleanliness, not to mention the fact that she started SCREECHING everything she said, and became literally obsessed with babies and marriage, to the point where she was like a hetero-lifestyle-robot. Before Chandler she was just a normal woman – cool, sexy, funny and going through life in a totally non-unhinged manner.
Chandler, once dry and quietly witty, and in control of his own life so much so that he was really picky with women and would not settle for anything less than The One, or at least somebody that was The One at that time. But when he got together with Monica, he became a submissive and scared pathetic man who was completely and utterly controlled by Monica. Also, he stopped telling jokes, he just made noises and pulled faces.
One last thing, at the beginning of the show they were just 6 friend hanging out together with no obvious gender slant, but C & M’s relationship threw the show some horrendous hetero-normative (all those Chandler-related gay jokes?) and gender binary (see again Monica’s wedding and baby obsession and Chandler’s ‘yes dear’ approach to it) moments.
I agree with you to a point. Chandler and Monica definitely became caricatures of themselves. But I don’t think they were the only characters who suffered that fate. Ross became a complete insufferable snob/nerd, Joey became dumber than a sack of hammers, and Phoebe became really nasty and unpleasant most of the time. Rachel, in my opinion, was the only one who remained a real character – the most fleshed-out human being on the show (when she wasn’t paired with Ross).
Chandler/Monica sneaking around in season five was my favorite arc that Friends ever did, and I still enjoyed them as a couple for about a year after that. I don’t like their devolution as characters anymore than you did, but I don’t think their relationship was the *cause* of their downward spiral. I think the writers started running out of steam for ALL of the characters (except Rachel) at around the same time.
Yeah, you are right that it did happen to all the characters, but it think the devolution of Chandler and Monica’s characters was particularly grating in their relationship as there were two of them, and they egged each other on. But you are right, and I always said the same thing about Rachel, she was the only one who remained sane. Maybe it’s just because Aniston’s a great actor and is incapable of putting on a bad performance! (I love her) Sorry to just barge in by the way, your blog’s great x
No need to apologize – I love getting comments.
Aniston, in my estimation, was the second-best actor on that show (I’d say Kudrow was first). Chandler was my favorite, though, despite his later characterization. He was one of my first fictional crushes.
I just stumbled upon this and I know you may be over the show by now, but if ever you feel like – please write a piece on Chandler and Monica! 😀