It Still Stings: Friends Chickened Out of Its Rachel and Joey Romance

Editor’s Note: TV moves on, but we haven’t. In our feature series It Still Stings, we relive emotional TV moments that we just can’t get over. You know the ones, where months, years, or even decades later, it still provokes a reaction? We’re here for you. We rant because we love. Or, once loved. And obviously, when discussing finales in particular, there will be spoilers:

There are certain well-trodden romantic sitcom tropes that are there for good reason, like the fake date that turns real. There’s something magical about seeing two characters who thought they had no interest in each other find themselves—ironically, at first—in a romantic setting, only to slowly discover that there is indeed a spark between them. The characters may be in denial about that spark, but that’s just part of the fun.

Such was the pleasure in “The One Where Joey Dates Rachel,” the Season 8 episode of Friends where Joey (Matt LeBlanc) takes a pregnant, stressed-out Rachel (Jennifer Anniston) out for a fun night at a romantic restaurant. The two talk candidly about their first-date strategies, developing a begrudging respect for each other’s different moves to seduce a potential lover. Both of their strategies are fairly shallow, and when laid out openly, they don’t paint either friend in a flattering light. Joey’s trick of pretending a fan has sent him flowers should be embarrassing, just as Rachel’s talk of her body’s changes throughout her pregnancy should be a turnoff for the notorious womanizer Joey, but it isn’t. The two grow closer with each unflattering secret they share, and the closer they get, the more they realize there’s something here they can work with.

Then comes the infamous scene post-date where Rachel and Joey talk about how they would go about kissing their date good night, and we can see the idea of genuine romance finally flash across both characters’ minds. For me, first watching this episode long after it actually aired, this was a magical unexpected moment, reminiscent of Peggy and Stan’s sudden over-the-phone realization in the finale of Mad Men, or that casual reveal in Lost Season 5 that Juliet and Sawyer were now together. Maybe the best comparison was that early episode of Community where, after half a season of trying to force Jeff and Britta together, the show played around with a Jeff and Annie romance on a whim, only to surprise everyone when it turned out to be a much stronger fit.

The end of “The One Where Joey Dates Rachel” was a moment where everything clicked into place: after eight seasons of unending misery with Ross (David Schwimmer) and Rachel, Friends seemed to have stumbled upon a delightful final act twist. Maybe Joey is Rachel’s real soulmate, the episode wondered, and neither of them knew it until now. It’s a scandalous idea, sure, but isn’t it exciting?

General audiences at the time didn’t feel the same way, and neither do audiences 20 years later. For most, the storyline came across as a forced attempt at a love triangle, another sure sign that Friends’ best days were already behind it. Season 1 of The Good Place expressed these sentiments most clearly, with a depressed Michael  declaring that he’s feeling like Season 8 of Friends, “When they were out of ideas and forced Joey and Rachel together even though it made no sense.”

But it did make sense. Rachel spends most of the show with a jealous, insecure Ross who has never really respected her career, to the point where even in the series finale he’s forcing her to choose between him and her exciting new job. Her choosing someone like Joey, a straightforwardly supportive, nonjudgmental man with little of Ross’ neurotic tendencies, would serve as natural growth for her character. Rachel doesn’t deserve someone as annoying as Ross—nobody does—so her ending the show with Joey could have been the surprise happy ending we didn’t know she needed.

Meanwhile, Joey spends the first eight seasons as the group’s shallow womanizer; the fact that he falls for Rachel at a time where Rachel feels herself to be at her ugliest is genuinely moving, as well as a massive step forward in Joey’s character development. With Rachel, Joey has finally found a woman he likes for her personality, not just for her looks. Why would Friends throw that away so soon?

Maybe most importantly for Joey is that after seven seasons of the show dumbing him down for quick laughs, this romance with Rachel was the first time in a while that he was written like a real person. This storyline rescued him from being a caricature, allowing him to have a whole handful of brain cells again instead of just two or three. In the show’s final seasons, both characters became more interesting, enjoyable people when they were around each other.

But most audiences hated it, and the show itself was too afraid to follow through with the storyline. Joey and Rachel spend a season and a half going back and forth on whether they like each other, culminating in early Season 10 when they finally break it off before they ever even have sex. This last-minute storyline, where Joey and Rachel are incapable of sleeping together because they think it’s just too weird, feels like a cop out more than an organic conclusion to their budding romance.

The reason it feels like a cop out? Well, because it was. The writers drew a line in the sand early on, and they never let themselves cross it. “[Writers] Kauffman and Crane understood that the Joey-Rachel relationship would end before it really began. They would never have sex or say the L-word; that would be too much to recover from,” wrote Kelsey Miller in her 2019 book I’ll Be There For You, the definitive retrospective on the show. “Once they actually hooked up, the characters (like the audience) would be too weirded out, and preoccupied with Ross.”

For Joey/Rachel shippers, this is frustrating to hear. It proves that Joey and Rachel were denied the chance to genuinely explore a relationship, seemingly just to appease Ross’ insecurities, or the audience’s. It’s like the writers thought that Rachel sleeping with Joey would somehow taint her, that it would pre-emptively ruin the eventual Ross and Rachel happy ending. As a result, Friends brought into Joey and Rachel’s storyline a level of over-importance to sex that felt at odds with the fairly-liberated perspective the series had on it throughout its first eight seasons.

It’s a storytelling choice that would be responded to with the next decade’s big sitcom, How I Met Your Mother. Like Friends, HIMYM started off with Ted and Robin as their main couple, and they (quite infamously) chose to keep Ted and Robin as their endgame couple. It’s the same basic approach Friends took, but met with far more disastrous results, because HIMYM’s attempt at a Rachel/Joey romance was actually a success. Ironically, HIMYM’s downfall was that it did too good a job with its alternate couple.

There are a lot of reasons why Barney and Robin were a more successful pairing—the show planted the seeds much earlier in its show’s run, for one—but the big reason is that HIMYM was never afraid to fully follow their romance, to explore how it would naturally unfold without any concerns about how 2030 Ted might feel about it. There is no implication that Ted and Robin’s reunion in the finale is somehow spoiled by Robin being with Barney. And throughout Seasons 5 through 9, when Ted finds himself pining after Robin once again, there’s no indication that her sexual relationship with Barney is something Ted struggles to “recover” from. As much as HIMYM may have gone down as the sitcom with the worse finale of the two, it’s also a show with a far more mature perspective on love and sex, at least when it comes to the show’s major relationships.

Of course, HIMYM also understood that viewers might be weirded out by Barney and Robin, much like Rachel and Joey before them. The difference is that HIMYM took the time to unpack those concerns, to let the characters move past them, and allow Barney and Robin’s dynamic to still play out naturally. In other words, the show didn’t give up on the two before they could even begin.

Maybe Friends’ attempt at the same thing would have ended in another disaster, robbing viewers of the chance to enjoy the simplistic, inoffensive Friends finale we ended up getting. But even if Joey and Rachel would have been a mess, it sure would have been nice if Friends had the courage to explore it just a little bit more. They didn’t need to be an endgame couple; they just needed to be given a chance.

Michael Boyle is an entertainment writer for /Film, with bylines in Paste, Slate, The Daily Beast, Digital Spy, Polygon, and more. You can find him on Twitter at @98MikeB

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