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10 dark reasons why Friends doesn’t stand the test of time.
Friends was a cultural touchstone of the 90’s (1994-2004). Despite receiving some deserved criticism in recent years about its lack of diversity among the all-white, heterosexual, cis-gendered cast, and accusations of transphobia, homophobia, and fatphobia. Friends remains a shining beacon of comfort TV for millennials, such as myself, who never quite got over the dream of living in a brightly painted loft with their best friends.
There are many unbelievable aspects of the show. For example, people with demanding careers like those of the Central Perk gang seem to have a lot of free time to hang out, altogether no less! But like so many sitcoms behind the canned laughter, if you really analyse certain aspects, it becomes… dark. Twisted some may say. Here are ten of the darkest aspects of Friends:
10. UGLY NAKED GUY
The titular across-the-street neighbor of Monica (Courtney Cox) and Rachel (Jennifer Anniston) is rarely actually seen in the show and even when we do it’s brief glimpses of who seems to be a large and hairy man. Despite the character’s ambiguity, he is discussed many times throughout the series. Putting aside the fact that six people have made a habit of watching his private moments for years, that’s not the most disturbing part. In Season 3 Episode 8 ‘The One with the Giant Poking Device’ the Friends gang constructs a poking device made of chopsticks to rouse their naked neighbour whom they believe is dead. When they eventually rouse the ugly naked guy via this method, Rachel makes a comment about the ‘Ugly Naked Guy’ showing them his “poking device”. Not only that in Season 2 Episode 11 Rachel’s visiting mother (Marlo Thomas) makes a comment about an “unattractive nude man playing the cello” Rachel quips that she should be glad he isn’t “playing a smaller instrument”. So, dear readers what is implied here is that ‘Ugly Naked Guy’ is not simply a thoughtless man who forgets to shut his blinds but is in fact indecently exposing himself.
9. JOEY ALONE
This one is more sad. The finale of the decade-long series sees Monica and Chandler (Matthew Perry) moving to their dream house with newborn adopted twins. Joey (Matt Le Blanc) is still living in the apartment across the hall alone. Of all the main cast Joey had the least growth throughout the series run (except arguably getting stupider). Monica and Chandler found each other, Chandler got over his commitment phobia and even laterally discovered his dream career. Rachel grew from a spoiled, selfish young woman into an accomplished career woman. Ross (David Schwimmer) and Rachel got back together (yet again). Even Phoebe married her dream man. If we discount his spin-off show ‘Joey’ (can we please?!) Joey ends in pretty much the same place he started; a jobbing actor having multiple one-night stands.
8. CHANDLERS CHILDHOOD
Funny man Chandler admits he uses his self-deprecating humour as a defence mechanism. The few stories he tells from his childhood we are left wondering how he is as well-adjusted as he is. The tragedy of his most famous characters childhood is made even sadder by the revelations of Matthew Perry’s untimely death in October 2023. Chandler makes no secret that his father was gay (and possibly trans) leaving the family home for the families ‘house boy’. This is traumatic enough, but Chandler tells even more disturbing tales of the sexual games both his parents played with the household staff that young Chandler was not only aware of, but actually witnessed. In Season 6 Episode 24 ‘The One with the Proposal: Part 1’ Chandler jokes “I once walking in on both my parents making love to the same guy!” He also remarks (Season 8 Episode 12 ‘The One where Joey Dates Rachel’) “by age 7 kids have already seen orgies…was that just me?” Engaging in sex acts in front of a child is abuse.
7. JOEY’S SEXUAL FAVOURS
Hear me out. In Season 2 Episode 10 ‘The One with Russ’ jobbing actor Joey gets an audition for a small part on soap opera Days of Our Lives. After his audition, the female casting director implies, that he would get the part if he slept with her. After much deliberation, Joey decides he wants to succeed in his talent rather than his sex appeal. However, he ends up sleeping with the casting director anyway as she then offers him a ‘series regular’. But Season 2 is not the only time Joey trades sexual favors to get his way. In Season 8 Episode 19 ‘The One with Joey’s Interview’ Joey sleeps with a journalist in order to stop her from writing a scathing article about him. Two episodes later while attending a cooking class with Monica Joey receives an ‘A’ and excitedly proclaims that it’s the first ‘A’ he’s received since high school, and he didn’t have to sleep with the teacher this time.
6. ROSS THE CREEP
Dr Ross Geller has arguably been given the title of most problematic character. Anyway, we could pick through Ross’s myriad of faults, but I would rather focus on his assorted creepiness. There is obvious examples like while being a professor Ross dates a student (Alexandra Holden). She wasn’t a student in his class during their relationship, but still a student of the university, so it could be seen as inappropriate and an abuse of power. Not only does Ross date Elizabeth (the student) he becomes jealous of her spring break plans. Ultimately, he follows Elizabeth and her friends to Daytona Beach, where a thirty-something-year-old professor partying with a bunch of students.
5. ROSS AND RACHEL’S RELATIONSHIP
No matter what sitcoms might say; ‘on and off again’ relationships are usually toxic. This is particularly true of Ross and Rachel. With Ross’s controlling nature and Rachel’s somewhat cruel attempts to sabotage Ross’s romances (the head-shaving incident anyone?), their relationship is hardly healthy. When Ross was trying to decide between being with Rachel or Julie, in Season 2 Episode 8 ‘The One with the List’, he compiled a list of each of their pros and cons. Rachel’s cons include being “just a waitress” and being vain. Something I personally hated Ross for was during this episode when Rachel finds the list and is rightly upset about his cruel critique Ross asks her “Is this over yet?”. So not only is she insulted by someone who claims to care for her but she is not even allowed to be hurt or discuss it. This is not the only time where Ross undermines Rachel’s career. In Season 3, Ross’s ire is triggered by Rachel’s focus on her new job. It is clear that he still doesn’t consider Rachel’s job as legitimate, or at least not as legitimate as his.
4. BENS DISAPPEARANCE
Ben is Ross’s son with ex-wife Carol. Carol and Ross co-parent Ben. Many fans have remarked how Ben just seems to disappear after Season 8 Episode 12.
The audience was present throughout Carol’s pregnancy with Ben, his naming arguments, the first time he kicked, his birth, and even his first words. Then Rachel gets pregnant and Ben gets cruelly side-lined. We don’t even get a cute first meeting of Emma and Ben.
Fans have speculated why this is. Many pointed out that Janice (of all characters) foreshadowed this. In Season 8 Episode 20 ‘The One Where Rachel Has a Baby: Part 2’ the two new mothers Rachel and Janice talk in the hospital about Janice’s experience. Janice raised a child alone and she warns Rachel that Ross will only be there for their child until he meets someone and begins his ‘real’ family. Is that what happened with Ben?
Even Ben’s grandfather appeared to have forgotten about him. In the Season 9 Episode, Ross’s dad comments on Emma being his first grandchild until Ross corrects him.
One fan theory proposed is that Carol and Susan deemed Ross an unfit father after his breakdown consequently keeping Ben from him. However, the timeline doesn’t really support that theory, however, it leads me nicely to…
3 ROSS’S BREAKDOWN
After saying the wrong name at the altar Ross is getting divorced for the second time at only 30, his soon-to-be ex-wife had him evicted from his apartment and someone at work ate his sandwich! The last one seems slight but we’ve all had the straw that broke the camel’s back moment. However this particular straw, er sandwich, cost Ross his career at the museum. We are meant to laugh at Ross’s misfortunes but the titular scene of Ross confronting his colleague about his missing sandwich; Ross sounds unhinged, disturbed even. We can’t help but wonder just exactly how Ross was acting at his work to earn the nickname ‘Mental Geller’.
2 MONICA’S EATING DISORDER
One major modern criticism is the inclusion of ‘Fat Monica’. A 90’s/early 00’s staple of comedy: fatphobia. Spectacularly svelte Courtney Cox dons a fat suit in order to play her character’s, Monica’s, past self. Many, many jokes about Monica’s past self are littered throughout the show’s ten years. The first time seeing ‘Fat Monica’ on an old home movie Joey exclaims; “some girl ate Monica!” (Season 2 Episode 14).
From eating all the Girl Scout Cookies she was supposed to sell as a child to pie-eating competitions, young Monica ate a lot. She worked hard to lose the weight but it’s clear her relationship with food is not healthy. In Series 1 Episode 13 Phoebe is dating a psychiatrist (Fisher Stevens) who the gang hates for pointing out their emotional weak spots. When Monica is moodily eating a plate of cookies he says to her “Mon, um, easy on those cookies ok? Remember, they’re just food, they’re not love”.
So, like a lot of compulsive overeaters, Monica is substituting food for love. But why wouldn’t Monica feel love in her childhood? In the show, Monica has a fraught relationship with her mother (Christine Pickles). We know this mother let her daughter binge eat but did she encourage it? In Season 5 Episode 8 during a past Thanksgiving Monica’s mum tells young Monica to eat the two leftover pies as she hasn’t any room in the fridge. An offhand joke to be sure but it paints a much darker picture.
1 PHOEBE’S PAST
A surprise to nobody, the darkest aspect of Friends is…Phoebe’s past. Watching Phoebe’s fun quirkiness and spicy comebacks it’s hard to reconcile a dark past with this golden-haired songstress. It is established early in Season 1 that Phoebe has an identical twin who she doesn’t speak to and their biological dad walked out on them and their mother shortly after they were born. Throughout the run of the series, we discover that Phoebe’s mother killed herself. In Series 1 Episode 10, Phoebe sings one of her autobiographical songs of a time she was building a snowman not realizing her mother was dead in the kitchen (we will find out later her mother committed suicide by putting her head in the oven). Building on the implications of her song; did Phoebe find her dead mother as a preteen?
When her mum died and Phoebe ended up living on the streets of New York City. At 18 she lived with a man named ‘Cindy’ who was possibly experiencing some kind of psychosis (talked to his hand). She spent her ‘sweet sixteenth’ being chased around a tire yard by an escaped mental patient who, in his own words, wanted to kill her or whatever. Phoebe also developed hepatitis when a pimp spits in her mouth.
Phoebe used to beg for money and speaks about a time a man offered to buy her food and exchange for sex, she doesn’t confirm whether she did or not. When giving an example of how to beg for money she does a ‘sexy shoulder wiggle’ and excitedly exclaims “Wow, still have it!”.
In Season 1 Phoebe is living with her maternal grandmother (Audra Marie Lindley), where was this grandmother when Phoebe was homeless and being abused on the streets of New York? Where also was Ursula during this time?
Phoebe Buffay is an icon. She spent 10 years showing the audience you can approach life differently from your peers and still be happy.
For a (roughly) 23-minute sitcom Friends leaves the audience with a surprisingly deep message; no matter your past or personal hang-ups you are still worthy of love and friendship and creating a good life for yourself.
The film is half a recollection of displaced Vietnamese kids who fled to America after the Vietnam War creating a community of their own around the super-popular New Wave music movement, and half a biographical journey of filmmaker Elizabeth Ai’s dive into her unexamined past and personal traumas.
We all know the Vietnam War had a ton of repercussions, both in Vietnam and here in America, affecting soldiers and civilians alike for generations to come. What isn’t often discussed, much less even acknowledged likely due to vast amounts of shame, is the displaced Vietnamese children who, with their parents or not, escaped to America to flee the war. These children tried extremely hard to find some sort of place they belonged here in the good old US of A, and while their parents were carving out places for themselves by basically working themselves to death, the children had to build their own place to belong. This is where the New Wave music craze began, and these are their stories.
There was no market for Asian singers in general, much less focused on Vietnamese performers, and so born-to-sing kids like the infamous Lynda Trang Dai took destiny into their own hands and began to cover the 80’s mega-hits from superstars like Madonna. The Vietnamese-language variety show Paris By Night began to showcase Lynda and others performing cover songs of the most popular hits too, and suddenly Lynda Trang Dai was at least a Vietnamese household name.
DJ Ian Nguyen recalls his rebellious years as a teenager finding out about the New Wave scene being born and deciding he would be a part of it, a much larger part than he ever anticipated. A friend actually built DJ Ian his first real turntable and he would sneak out with his friends to hold impromptu New Wave parties where DJ Ian would spin for hours, sometimes all night, always for free, immersed in the music and freedom of it all.
And somewhere in there, as the making of a documentary-style movie about the New Wave way of life and music scene stretched into years and filmmaker Elizabeth Ai birthed her daughter, uncomfortable questions about her own past traumas began cropping up. Why did Liz’s mother, a Vietnamese immigrant herself who came to America and unhappily became the sole earner for the entire family including those still left back in Vietnam, initially refuse to speak to her daughter about their shared traumatic past? Why would any grandma, regardless of nationality, not want to see her newly-born grandchild? In this instance, I suspect it was because Grandma wasn’t ready to face the very real problems her absence throughout Li’s childhood caused. But children, even the very young ones, pick up on far more than their elders think. And suddenly, the documentary Liz was making about lost Vietnamese-American kids and their musical therapy, was now being turned into a semi-autobiographical journey about Liz’s own personal journey into her past, to find a way to reunite with her estranged mother and a path together in the future.
Uplifting and sorrowful at the same time, a meditation on lost generations of Vietnamese refugees and their stories of loss and redemption through surprisingly good music, plus a very personal story of trauma and reconnection, New Wave will make you want to sing, even through your sympathetic tears!
The amazing 4K restoration of a beloved 1984 classic for its 40th Anniversary, Shanghai Blues tells the story of a pair of star-crossed lovers who are determined to meet up after the war with the Japanese is over, endure all sorts of misadventures trying to find each other some ten years later!
When our soon-to-be-departed soldier and his pretty lady met under the bridge during a raid, they didn’t exchange names. They did, however, manage to save each-other and make a promise to each-other to meet when the war was declared over. I rather doubt either of them expected it to be some ten-odd years later, but hey, fate is fate! Right?
So it’s some years later, and our pretty little nameless lady is now a nightclub singer generally known as Shu-Shu (Sylvia Chang) in Shanghai, older and more experienced and a bit jaded about everything but still kind enough to take in a newcomer fresh from the countryside, calling her Stool (Sally Yeh). Stool is prone to mishaps concerning her money but never shies away from protecting her virtue with whatever is at hand, or even just her bare fists and powerful voice, if it comes to that. Stool is just ripe for falling in love, she’s in love with the idea of falling in love, which by turns both charms and irritates Shu-Shu, for she’s still waiting for her soldier from the bridge to come find her.
It turns out, in this slapstick comedy of errors because of course, that’s what happened, that a would-be song-writer who took a room above Shu-Shu and Stool’s now shared apartment, is the soldier everyone’s looking for, now called Do-re-mi (Kenny Bee). And while he’s desperately searching for his lady from the bridge too, well, lots of other stuff is going on around them – gangsters and singer rivalries in the nightclub, policemen crackdowns on the tiny beggar community of displaced wounded soldiers that took up residence under The Bridge, the never-ending rat race to make enough money to live on, and oh yeah, the all-important search for True Love.
Of course, Stool decides she’s fallen in love and is Meant To Be with Do-re-mi, and her consistently informs Shu-Shu that she’ll get a good job so that it’ll just be the three of them – Do-re-mi, Stool, and Shu-Shu – together forever and always grates on Shu-Shu’s carefully crafted aloof elegance as a nightclub singer. And perhaps as a woman jaded to the idea of fated love, as well. The three of them adorably chase each other round and round, and Stool manages through a series of disastrous mishaps to land the cover photo for this year’s Calendar Queen, catapulting her to instant fame, or perhaps rather infamy.
The series of debacles that was meant to lead to Stool getting molested by the big boss after her Calendar Queen debut party is presented in a slapsticky way, but honestly, one could not get away with such shenanigans in a movie in the modern world today. A series of power outages might have saved the day and Stool’s virtue in theory, but it’s not something we really want to touch on for the sake of comedy.
Shu-Shu has decided to make the ultimate sacrifice and let Stool have Do-re-mi while she effectively sells herself to a plutocrat on a crowded train, but their love is destined, damnit, and Stool is enough of a romantic fool to try and thwart that decision. The 1984 film was lovingly restored in brighter 4K for the showing, and all the voices had been redubbed in more accurate depictions of the various languages – French, Japanese, variations of Chinese, etc – showing the cosmopolitan nature of Shanghai in the films’ timeframe. Full of shlock and joy, the blues of pursuing life and love and continued happiness, Shanghai Blues is an adorable romp of a comedy of errors and everyone should see it at least once!
Inspired by a true story from director Tracie Laymon, after a falling-out with her dad, Lily Trevino makes a connection with another ‘Bob Trevino’ on the internet, and they form a strange and beautiful friendship.
Poor Lily Trevino (Barbie Ferreira) is a people pleaser, a girl who will bend over as far backward as she can to help out others, especially her terrible father. Despite trying to date and have friends, Lily really has no one else other than her awful father, we will call him Dad-Bob (French Stewart) for the purposes of separating the two characters. And Dad-Bob gives a damn about one thing only: which silver-fox woman among many different choices he should exclusively date with the intention of “locking it down”, meaning I guess either getting a ring or getting laid. With Dad-Bob, either option is just as likely; gross.
Did I mention, that Lily Trevino really has no one else? She generally thinks of the woman whom she acts as a live-in caretaker for, Daphne (Lauren ‘Lolo’ Spencer), as a full-time job rather than any kind of real companion, has no other friends to speak of, and Dad-Bob is simply trying to use Lily for whatever she can help him with, including being touted up for his dates. So when Lily’s attempts at wing-womaning Dad-Bob’s selected silver fox go inevitably awry and Dad-Bob blames her for the whole thing, Lily really is left all alone to cry about it while trolling the internet for attention. When suddenly, a misnamed connection presents a whole realm of possibilities.
Bob Trevino (John Leguizamo) is a good man, also a people pleaser but in a smilingly resigned kind of way, especially when his wife Jeanie (Rachel Bay Jones), immersed in her artistic obsession of scrapbooking, gently insists on expensive and fancy paper for her creative things. Bob is a lonely person too, despite being surrounded by others mostly at his construction management job, he and Jeanie haven’t really connected since the passing of their infant son some time ago. Jeanie even made a whole scrapbook for their baby boy, but Bob can’t bring himself to look at it or even talk to her, or anyone else really, about his very real loss as a father, and as a human in general. So when another Trevino starts messaging him about possibly being related after Bob ‘liked’ some of her memorabilia photos, threads of human connection begin to form, for once kind and nonjudgmental.
In an act of desperation due to a badly leaking toilet in Daphne’s place, Bob and Lily meet in person far sooner than expected, and Lily ends up apologetically introducing Bob as ‘her dad’ to Daphne while he’s pretzeled himself into the bathroom fixing the toilet – they do share the same name, after all. Lily and Bob go to lunch after and begin a series of awkward and charming get-togethers, where they exchange life stories and discover bits of what they were missing in their own lives, in each other.
It has to be said just what an incredible job Leguizamo does in the role of Bob Trevino, at once tender and sorrowful, hesitant but compassionate, his character is far more capable of being a dad than he initially thought. Leguizamo’s full range of acting is on gorgeous display in a role you wouldn’t expect to find him rocking like a boss.
Mentioning what goes on to happen to our cast of characters – Lily and her aching loneliness, Bob and his missed opportunities to be a real father figure, Dad-Bob and his self-centered petty bullsh*t, Jeanie and her repressed love for both her gone child and absent husband – would be a huge disservice to the audience. Instead, for a surprisingly genuine feel-good movie about the family we make around ourselves that has nothing at all to do with bloodlines, catch Bob Trevino Likes It now!
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