The Best Friends Episodes

Chris: We’ve been talking about doing a TV show in The Ranking for a while. We could have gone for a highfalutin one like Breaking Bad or The West Wing, but we’ve gone for Friends.

The recent reunion reminded me how much I loved this show.

Terri: However my life has changed in the last decade,

Friends is the constant, which is both worrying and alarming.

Chris: So, when no-one told you life was gonna be okay, when your job was a joke, you were broke and your love life was DOA, Friends was there for you?

Helen: When the rain starts to fall?

Terri: Yes. Even though

Friends hasn’t necessarily always aged that well, I think we can agree.

Chris: That is true. Now and again I’ll rewatch an episode and there are some jokes that are perhaps ill-considered when viewed through a modern lens. But by and large, for me it’s still one of the greatest sitcoms of all time.

Helen: It’s a comfort-watch for me. It was an era in our lives when we were still young and things didn’t go sproing when we stood up too fast.

Olly: I can’t think of any other sitcom where any of them could be the lead. There is no weak link. I don’t think, still, that any of them get the credit they deserve for how good they are at comedy performing.

Terri: I think it’s underrated for its dramatic chops. ‘The One With The Morning After’, the episode where Ross… well, he cheated.

Chris: They were on a break!

Terri: That episode, you’ve got comedy going on in the bedroom, and this amazing romantic drama happening in the front room. I think it does drama as well as it does comedy. The way the show evolved is the way our lives evolve.

Olly: It’s weird to me that David Schwimmer was cast first.

Chris: They wrote Ross for him.

Helen: I think Ross is often a whiny little git, but David Schwimmer’s physical comedy is off the charts. His face during ‘The Routine’ is a thing of beauty.

Olly: Towards the end, he went super-weird and it worked.

Terri: I almost put ‘The One With All The Resolutions’ in just for the leather pants. He commits to that physical gag in every single way.

Helen: I have to say, I was a bit of a Ross and Rachel shipper. I never bought them with anybody else.

Chris: You weren’t on board with Rachel and Joey?

Helen: No!

Chris: Every time I watch an episode that has Rachel and Joey in it, every fibre of my being screams, “No! Wrong!” But they are kind of better suited than Ross and Rachel.

Terri: They had no chemistry. The first time they kiss, at Ross’ conference, I felt uncomfortable. They are beautiful, brilliant friends, and I think that show is all about prizing the relationship you have with your friends over most romantic relationships.

Chris: Why did Monica and Chandler work when they didn’t?

Terri: That storyline grew from the initial thing which was meant to be a hook-up. But when Monica popped up from under Chandler’s covers, the reaction from the studio audience was so insane that the writers thought, “There might be something more in this.” It grew organically and out of their chemistry.

Helen: They also have this huge arc, and real drama to their relationship.

Chris: I’m all in on Monica and Chandler. When I was putting my top ten together, I could legitimately have gone for ten Season 5 episodes. I think that’s when the show is at its best, when they’ve started getting together and are trying to hide it. The moment when Joey finds out is one of the greatest pieces of comic acting I’ve ever seen. Matt Leblanc smashes it.

Olly: There’s almost nothing I don’t like about Friends. But I can’t watch any episode where Chandler gets emotional. It’s uncomfortable to watch when he’s being sincere.

Chris: What about ‘The One With The Proposal’?

Olly: Oh God, no!

Terri: When he got with Monica, he suddenly had to become a grown-up and more of an emotionally genuine and robust human being. I’m with Olly. I don’t want that side of Chandler.

Chris: I don’t know how this is received these days, but there are few things in sitcoms more joyful than Courteney Cox playing Monica in a fat suit. That version of that character is glorious.

Helen: Those flashback episodes are pretty hilarious. You have Rachel’s old nose, Ross’ various hairstyles, Chandler’s Flock Of Seagulls hair…

Terri: And that’s partly why ‘The One With The Prom Video’ is the best episode. That’s just a statement of fact. You have that moment when Rachel kisses Ross by the door, which is so romantic, you get to see these characters as teenagers, which is really hard to do, and it gave us, “He’s your lobster,” which is now on greeting cards and T-shirts. It’s become part of culture.

Chris: There’s a general assumption that the show peaked around Seasons 5 and 6, and by the end it was treading water. But I found that Season 10, perhaps because they knew it was the last one, has a fairly decent batting average. I love ‘The One Where The Stripper Cries’ — it has Joey on the game show Pyramid, which is one of the greatest pieces of sustained Joey stupidity.

Olly: For me, it never properly went off the boil. It was still appointment viewing at the end.

Helen: The structure of the show, having six friends, makes it really easy to have an A, B and C plot every time. The writing was kind of miraculous, to keep it that good for that long, and find new things for them all to do without being repetitive.

Chris: Having said that, my favourite episode is one where they jammed most of them into a room together. It’s ‘The One With The Embryos’, which I always think of in my head as ‘The One With The Quiz’, when the girls battle the boys for Monica’s apartment.

Olly: When you talk about how good Monica can be, I don’t think she’s ever been better than in that quiz.

Helen: I went for another bottle episode, ‘The One Where No One’s Ready’, where Ross is trying to hustle them all to an important work dinner and everybody is pissing about. It’s absolutely brilliant.

Terri: You get, “Can I be wearing any more clothes?” You get Monica having a massive breakdown, you have, “Drink the fat.”

Olly: I use that a weird amount.

Chris: I’m pretty sure 99 per cent of things I say have been on episodes of Friends. What did I do before Friends — just grunt at people? But when I was considering my list, I started to think of the moments that almost transcend the show. So I went with ‘The One With The Cop’. It’s a decent episode. But it has, “PIVOT!”, which may be the single funniest moment in all of Friends.

Terri: I took the opposite approach. I had to take out the episodes I put on there literally for a moment. “Pivot!” The leather pants. “My sandwich!” I had to go, “Okay, what is the best episode?” Not just, “What is the best Ross moment?”

Chris: Right, enough squabbling. Let’s vote!