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When it comes to bingeable TV, there's nothing quite like Friends.
NBC's hit sitcom has been off the air for well over a decade, but for some fans, it's
still number one on their streaming queue.
From jokes that never fail to land to emotional moments that resonate just as much as ever,
Friends is an easy show to watch with a lot of payoff packed into each episode.
Even so, there are some scenes that don't hold up quite as well as others, and maybe
never did.
For better or worse, mostly worse, here are the parts of Friends that are impossible to
forget for all the wrong reasons.
Ross hits on Cassie
Let's face it.
Ross could be a bit of a creep sometimes.
Never was that more true than when his cousin Cassie comes into town for Monica and Chandler's
wedding, and Ross can't control himself.
It's bad enough that he once kissed Chandler's mom and went on a date with Rachel's sister,
but making a move on his own flesh and blood?
His inner monologue is about as gross as it gets.
"Oh, I know that look.
Forget it.
I want it.
She wants it.
I'm going in."
Pretty hard to root for him to find true love after that foul flirtation.
Phoebe's rat babies
Phoebe has had some pretty cringeworthy moments on the show, but perhaps the most insufferable
is when she adopts a litter of rat babies that are delivered in her kitchen cabinet
after Mike terminates their mother.
Mike tries to play nice about it all..
"Yeap.
We have rat babies now."
But the part when he has to explain to her that the rats will mate with one another irrespective
of their sibling status is too ditzy to endure.
"That's math I can't even do!"
Joey can't speak French
Joey has a lot of moments of doing dumb things, and most of the time, it's hilarious.
"Can I just stop you for a second.
When people do this...I don't really know what that means."
But the show takes it too far when Joey tries to learn French from Phoebe and can't even
repeat the simplest of phrases.
"Great!
OK, faster.
Je."
"Je"
"Ma"
"Ma"
"Pelle.
Je m'appelle!"
"Me poo poo!"
Sure, Phoebe's frustrated reactions are comedy gold …
"You're not … again … you're NOT SPEAKING FRENCH!!!"
But dumbing him down this much is pretty low, even by Joey's standards.
Rachel pretends to smoke
Smoking was a pretty regular subject of Friends, thanks to Chandler quitting and picking back
up the habit so many times throughout the series.
But things go pretty off the rails when Rachel decides to take it up to spend more time with
her boss and co-worker so that she doesn't get edged out of work decisions.
Not only is it frustrating to watch her debase herself to impress others, but it doesn't
even work.
"So, okay.
So you'll come with me on the Paris trip."
"Aw, man!"
So much for her being a role model.
Joey and Rachel try to do it
Rather than giving fans what they really wanted between Ross and Rachel, things went bananas
altogether in the final seasons as Rachel and Joey struck up a romance.
It's awkward enough when Joey falls in love with Rachel while she's pregnant, but when
she eventually returns his affection and they try to make something of it, well, the chemistry
is not convincing at all.
The only good thing that comes out of it is Ross' drunken rant about being totally okay
with it ..
"To love… ahh love."
They try and fail to take their hook-up to the next level.
"I'll show you how we do it."
"No, no, you kneed me in my misters."
It might've been the 10th season, with the showrunners saving Ross and Rachel's reunion
'til the very end, but this was a major misfire and is almost unbearable to watch.
Of course, those were only five bad moments in a show full of truly excellent moments.
So how do you pick the top five most excellent scenes from Friends?
We're going to try!
The one where they don't know they know
Friends was usually at its best when all six characters were huddled together on the orange
couch or hanging out in the big purple apartment.
But every once in a while, they broke off into individual adventures that were downright
hysterical.
Early on in Season 5, Chandler and Monica are desperate to hide their budding romantic
relationship from the others because they fear talking about it might ruin everything.
Poor Joey has to spend weeks covering for them, but eventually, Rachel and Phoebe figure
things out for themselves....
"Chandler and Monica!
Chandler and Monica!"
"Oh my God!"
"Ahhh!
Chandler and Monica!"
"Oh my God!"
"Oh my God, my eyes!"
"Phoebe!"
Instead of merely confronting the couple for keeping this a secret, Phoebe pretends to
be interested in starting up her own tryst with Chandler.
Monica realizes they're being toyed with right away, and decides to play along.
"They don't know that we know that they know, so..."
"Ah, yes.
The messers become the messees!"
Thing escalate pretty spectacularly from there, and between the comedic timing of the cast
and the sheer ridiculousness of their commitment to this caper, it's an all-timer.
The one with the Europe story
There are a lot of great scenes surrounding Rachel's surprise pregnancy revelation, from
Phoebe's wacky cover-up effort to the group's hunt to find out who the father is to Ross'
hilarious reaction to the news that their prophylactics of choice didn't work.
But when Ross reveals that he accidentally taped his fateful night with Rachel to settle
the question of who initiated the encounter, well, it's peak TV in more ways than one.
"I'm so happy."
On the day of their hook-up, Ross had been so hard up that he turned to Joey for some
seduction pointers and learned a fake story about a Europe trip that always seems to seal
the deal for Joey. Ross then tries it and still bombs on his date.
"I was hiking along the foothills of Mount Tibidabo."
"I think it's Tibi-DAH-bo."
"OKAY DO YOU WANT TO TELL THE STORY?!"
Joey refuses to accept that it's the story's fault Ross crashed and burned and advises
Ross to practice his lines with a camcorder to review his storytelling skills.
But Ross gets interrupted by Rachel, who comes along to get his help addressing Monica and
Chandler's wedding invitations.
"Did you do it on our invitations?"
Even though up to now everyone's been convinced Ross initiated things, the footage then shows
Rachel starting TO TELL a familiar story...
"Ross, did I ever tell you about the time I went backpacking through Western Europe?"
And the reactions from the couch crowd said it all.
Evolution is a theory
Phoebe Buffay might've seemed a bit ditzy at times, but when she was on, she was on.
Never was that more true than when she decided to challenge one of Ross Geller's most sacred
scientific principles: evolution.
"It's just, you know… monkeys, Darwin.
I think it's a nice story, it's just a little too easy."
Ross can't handle the idea that she doesn't agree with the finding, so he puts on his
Ph.D. cap and starts collecting evidence to prove it to her.
He doesn't get the reaction he's hoping for because Phoebe refuses to budge and insteads
hit back with some surprisingly salient points.
"Wasn't there a time when the brightest minds in the world believed that the earth was flat?"
"You can't admit there's a teeny tiny possibility that you could be wrong about this?"
With so much empirical evidence in her corner, Ross has no choice but to concede, and Phoebe's
reaction is even more humiliating than her mastery of the argument.
"I can't believe you caved."
"What?"
"You just abandoned your whole belief system!"
"Before I didn't agree with you, but at least I respected you."
Ross is defeated and embarrassed, and Phoebe's status as a secret genius is finally revealed.
"That was fun.
So, who's hungry?"
The one with the severed toe
Some of the funniest moments on Friends don't
take place in the present, but rather, are revealed via flashbacks.
In Season 5's Thanksgiving episode, we find out that Chandler's nubbin isn't his only
physical deformity.
The episode features several flashbacks, including one with Joey getting his head stuck in a
turkey and Phoebe losing some limbs in another lifetime.
More importantly, we learn that once-overweight Monica only got into shape after overhearing
Chandler call her fat.
When his reaction to her revenge body isn't punishing enough the following year, Monica
turns to Rachel for some help.
"I want him to be like naked and I want to point at him, and I want to laugh."
"Okay, that we may be able to do."
Rachel gives her some solid tips on how to seduce a guy in simple ways, but Monica must
miss a few key details of the discussion because her attempt to replicate the moves goes horribly
wrong.
Not only does she look ridiculous, but she ultimately drops a knife right onto Chandler's
toe and fails to bring it to the hospital for reattachment.
The best bit comes when we learn of the social damage his injury caused all those years ago.
"That's why for an entire year people called me Sir Limps-A-Lot?"
Ouch.
Ross and Rachel finally kiss
This moment would probably top most Friends' fans all-time favorite lists, and it may well
be one of the most iconic moments of television — ever.
In the show's second season, the chemistry that's been slowly building between Ross and
Rachel finally comes to a head.
Once Ross finds out that Rachel's been harboring a secret crush on him, after he's held a torch
for her for years, the two have a passionate argument and part ways … but then their
connection is too magnetic to deny, and they come right back together again to share a
kiss at long last.
The smooch is long overdue and doesn't even signal the start of anything long-term between
them.
Ross and Rachel's road to forever would prove to be a lot more complicated than just this,
but this was the moment that the two proved they were the endgame couple of the entire
show.
Or as Phoebe later explains …
"See?
He's her lobster."
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