I play Al Pacino's butt.
All right?
He goes into the shower, and then I'm his butt.
This is Joey Tribbiani in the first season of Friends.
It seems smaller somehow.
Has it always been purple?
And this is Joey in the series finale, almost 10 years later.
If you don't see much of a difference
outside of his looks, well, that's half of the problem.
But there's a lot more to the downfall
of one of TV's most well known characters
than his surface level stagnation.
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NBC's Friends, which ran from 1994 until 2004,
is an undeniably important cultural touchstone.
Over the course of the 10 award winning seasons,
we watched their interests develop
and their careers begin, end, and reach new heights.
We watched them fall in love, get married, and have children.
We watched everyone grow up, everyone except Joey, that is.
Oh, my God.
Look at me.
I'm Chandler.
Could I be wearing any more clothes?
At best, one could make the argument
that the lovable, carefree, and somewhat clueless Joey
Tribbiani, played by Matt LeBlanc,
remained exactly the same during his run on Friends.
He started the series as a slovenly actor looking for love
in all the wrong places.
And though he ends the series with more experience
in all areas, that description remains the same.
It's stagnation masquerading as a character arc.
When we're introduced to Joey in the pilot episode of Friends,
we get the sense that he's a bit of an air-headed womanizer.
Joey, stop hitting on her.
It's her wedding day.
What?
Like there's a rule or something?
Someone who skates through life with very
little in the ways of goals or ambitions outside
of the vague star-shaped dream of becoming a famous actor
and finding love, or at the very least, finding a date.
How you doing?
Throughout the show's early days,
we learned that while he's not exactly a well educated man
of the world, he is at least passively intelligent.
He is socially competent, and he generally
behaves like a normal adult who loves his friends
and wants to indulge in life's simple pleasures.
Are we still talking about sex?
He was relatable.
He was funny.
He was charismatic and easygoing.
He was a fierce protector of the people he cared about.
And, yes, he could be a little bit dumb sometimes.
Please, move on.
Go to China.
Eat Chinese food.
Of course, there, they just call it food.
It all added up to a character that fans adored,
and they couldn't wait to see where the show would take him.
But as time went on, his personality
was paradoxically exaggerated and diluted while his story
was stuck mostly in place.
His cluelessness was magnified while every other aspect
of his personality was pushed to the distorted outer edges.
He was barely recognizable when compared to his past self,
and his friends often had no choice
but to treat him like a child.
Sure, Joey was never supposed to be the smart one in the friend
group.
I say punch him, Joey.
Yeah!
Punch him.
But this degeneration of his intelligence
felt almost mean-spirited on the part of the showrunners.
Now the same can be said to some degree
about most of the main cast.
Friends was built on familiar character archetypes.
And as the show got progressively more popular,
the showrunners and writers played up
the more bombastic traits of each character
because they were the ones that got the most
reaction from the audience.
Ross got more neurotic and awkward.
Monica's controlling nature was often pushed to the extreme.
Phoebe became cartoonishly eccentric and so on.
But none of the characters were hit as hard by this as Joey.
And that's because Matt LeBlanc played Joey's idiocy
with a level of charm that made him extremely likable.
And that's Joey.
Hey, how you doing?
Don't!
But instead of focusing on that charm,
the showrunners decided the idiocy was more important.
This effectively ruined a perfectly good character
for the sake of a few cheap laughs.
It's hard to pinpoint exactly where this change started
happening or who to really blame because it was so gradual.
And as early as season three, we see Joey's absentmindedness
on the incline when he seems completely
unaware of Chandler's annoyance with him
while he's building the entertainment system.
And then there's the bit in season 7
where he thinks America has at least 56 states
and doesn't understand how a globe works.
First of all, Utah?
Dude, you can't just make stuff up.
These moments, which were originally used sparingly,
eventually became the norm for Joey's character.
The loyal, lovable man that had been established in season one
had been replaced by an empty-headed stand-in,
and it happened so slowly that it was almost unnoticeable
until it was unignorable.
Friends was an ever changing show
where the creative heads were constantly
testing out new ideas to gauge audience interest.
Sometimes that resulted in extremely iconic moments.
Other times, it served to muddy up characters and slow
plot progression to a crawl.
Joey played parts in many of the best and worst
of these little experiments, but by season 10,
it was clear that Joey's excessively stupid personality
would not be reversed.
Anyone still holding out hope by episode 13
when Phoebe tries to teach him to speak French
had to come to terms with that.
Joey's character has been so thoroughly ripped to shreds
that he can't even repeat basic French sentences.
Je m'appelle Claude.
Dada plee bleu.
Like a toddler, he resorts to straight up
gibberish that sounds nothing like what
he's supposed to be saying.
And while the combined comedic experience
of Matt LeBlanc and Lisa Kudrow make
this bearable to sit through, it's
such a glaringly obvious demonstration
of how he became a parodied version of his worst self.
When you pair that with the fact that Joey is also
the only friend to end the show in practically the same place
he started, his story is almost tragic in hindsight.
From the very beginning of the show,
Joey was characterized as wanting nothing
more than love, fame, and the companionship of his friends.
By the end, Joey has been so dumbed down
and personified that what he wanted
wasn't really narratively important anymore.
Unlike the rest of the cast, the majority
of Joey's story development would
be offloaded onto the poorly received spinoff TV show.
That meant that Joey was forced to watch
from the sidelines as Ross, Rachel, Phoebe, Chandler,
and Monica moved on to new and exciting eras in their lives.
Why, God?
Why?
We had a deal.
Let the others grow old, not me.
You can imagine that after the Friends series finale, when
the gang leaves Central Perk after getting
their final coffee, everyone got to return home
to their children and spouses, but Joey went home alone
to his same old empty apartment.
Nothing changed for him.
While everyone else got a wrap-up,
his story was abandoned.
That depressing blow might have been lessened if the Joey
spinoff was any good, but it wasn't.
While he simply does eventually find love,
he is more isolated from his friends
than ever before when he moves to LA.
He spends most of the show as a jaded, bitter jerk.
I was nominated for the daytime soap award again.
Can I go?
Oh, I wish I could take you, but seating is limited.
Which is somehow a worse character
assassination than the one he went through on Friends.
Even at his dumbest, Joey on Friends was always an optimist,
but spinoff Joey couldn't be further
from that positive, carefree guy fans fell in love with.
And none of it actually matters because NBC and Warner
have tried their hardest to sweep
the whole show under the rug.
Even if you wanted to, it would be
very difficult to watch that part of Joey's life unfold.
The spinoff isn't available on any streaming services
and doesn't air anywhere else.
It's almost like they want us to forget it ever happened.
Mm-hmm, mm-hmm, sure, yeah.
How can you not remember me?
Because of that, we really just have the Friends finale
to look back on, the one where Joey is both fundamentally
unchanged from a story perspective,
and yet, demonstrably worse off as a character.
And that's a really unfortunate problem.
Thanks so much for watching this video.
That's all we have for you today,
but be sure to let us know in the comments,
what did you think of Joey's character
by the end of Friends?
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