Even the Cast of ‘Friends’ Hated the Joey/Rachel Romance

This week marks 30 years since Friends first premiered, which is either a fun fact, or a painful reminder that you’re getting old and also Marcel the monkey is long dead. 

To mark the occasion, there have been various Friends-themed events, including an auction of Friends props, as well as a line of limited edition Krispy Kreme donuts that presumably taste like beef trifle and Ross’ infidelity.

This week The Guardian spoke to some of the creatives involved with the show, including writer Adam Chase, who was nominated for three Emmys for his work on the show. Chase shared a number of interesting behind-the-scenes tidbits, including how the staff once dared a writer to eat “a 2.3kg can of beans for $3,000” during an all-nighter. Hey, we didn’t say they were glamorous tidbits. 

On another occasion, a writer tried to avoid a rewrite session by “hiking up a bush-covered hill outside the Warner Bros. lot with a machete” while the rest of the team watched them with binoculars for some reason. Somehow “The One With The Machete-Wielding Hiker” never became an episode.

Chase also confirmed that one of the most controversial plot lines didn’t go over so well with the cast. As you may recall, in later seasons of the show, there was a whole arc involving a romance between Rachel and Joey, probably because Monica and Chandler’s coupling somehow worked, and the writers were desperate for material. But it was weird and arguably just straight-up bad. If the concept wasn’t awkward enough, their first kiss was played for soapy drama and set to an Interpol track.

Some fans have claimed that “Joey and Rachel’s fling killed the sitcom,” and argued that this storyline was when the show jumped the shark (although it does have its defenders). It turns out that the actors weren’t fans of this idea, either. “The cast was very much against it,” Chase recalled. “It felt very incestuous to them.”

As recounted in I’ll Be There For You by Kelsey Miller, when Friends creators Marta Kauffman and David Crane first pitched the idea of Joey developing feelings for Rachel to the cast “everybody balked.” The actors were concerned that it could come across as “desperate” (it did) and disturbing (sure). Crane countered that it was “like playing with fire.” Um, isn’t that a bad thing?

Matt LeBlanc also pointed out that “everyone knows that Ross and Rachel are supposed to be together, and we’ve spent 10 years keeping them apart.” But Kauffman and Crane insisted that the Rachel-Joey thing was only temporary, and they “would never have sex or say the L-word” because that would be “too much to recover from.”

So while it probably didn’t kill the show, Rachel and Joey’s romance is unlikely to be honored with its own donut any time soon.

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