Friends is widely regarded as one of the most popular sitcoms of all time.
Unfortunately, some aspects of the show don't exactly hold up in modern times, as an increasing
number of off-color jokes have caused a stir in more recent years.
These are the most controversial moments on Friends.
In the 1996 episode "The One with the Lesbian Wedding," Ross' ex-wife, Carol, marries her
girlfriend, Susan.
The episode aired nearly two decades before the United States Supreme Court's 2015 ruling
that legalized same-sex marriage at the federal level, and NBC was bracing themselves for
an onslaught of complaints from the sitcom's 31.6 million viewers.
In reality, the hubbub was thankfully minimal.
It wasn't until years later that people started scratching their heads over the nuptials.
Why?
The couple didn't even kiss.
"Go ahead, get married.
Go, go."
In fact, it was forbidden.
Jane Sibbett, who portrayed Carol throughout the series, told Metro in 2017:
"We weren't allowed to kiss, and we were disappointed by that.
It wasn't not allowed, it just wasn't filmed, that segment of the wedding.
People were worried that that was going to happen."
In addition, Sibbett explained that although the controversy wasn't enormous, the episode
had originally been banned by stations in both Lima, Ohio and Port Arthur, Texas.
She saw the unfortunate snub as a tiny blessing, saying:
"That kind of press was the best thing, and we were grateful for it actually, because
it really brought the conversation to the table about it…this is about love, do you
understand that?"
Friends has gotten flack for its misguided portrayal of Chandler's transgender parent
Charles, who's played by Academy Award-nominated and cisgender actress Kathleen Turner.
Even before Turner appeared on the show in 2001, her character's gender identity was
a long-running punchline.
Throughout the series, Charles is consistently misgendered and referred to as a gay, male
drag queen, which makes even less sense considering Friends co-creator Marta Kauffman created
the character to be a transgender woman.
Chandler's treatment of Charles is so uniquely awful that more than a decade later Slate
still called it, quote "especially appalling."
As Them points out, the most gutting comment comes during "The One with Chandler and Monica's
Wedding Part 1," when Chandler's mom asks Charles:
"Don't you have a little too much penis to be wearing a dress like that?"
In a Gay Times interview, Turner admitted her character didn't age well.
She said:
"How they approached me with it was 'would you like to be the first woman playing a man
playing a woman?'
I said yes, because there weren't many drag/trans people on television at the time."
The character was indeed groundbreaking despite the unfortunate portrayal, and Kauffman later
told USA Today that she'd rethink the transgender jokes if she made the episode today.
If we needed any more proof that David Schwimmer's Ross was the most insufferable, inappropriate
member of the Central Perk crew, look no further than "The One with Ross and Monica's Cousin,"
the episode where he literally tries to get together with his own relative.
Incest is never a good look.
In 2001, the world was a very different place.
We were fresh off the heels of Y2K and network TV's favorite paleontologist got an entire
episode dedicated to his quest to bed his cousin, Cassi, who was played by Denise Richards.
At the time, most of us didn't even raise an eyebrow.
In that era, we let a lot of things slide.
Decades later, think pieces galore questioned Ross' infamously creepy pass at his fam.
"What the hell are you doing?"
"Say something clever."
All of the friends are seemingly aware of Ross' desires and don't care.
Perhaps they're cool with marrying cousins, which was legal in 19 states at the time.
Either way, this is one episode that deserves a second look.
It isn't really Monica's day, month, year, or decade when she realizes that her first
kiss was with older brother Ross.
The pair have a notoriously close relationship, which some would argue is even bizarrely intimate.
Decades after the show first aired, the bond between Ross and his little sister has raised
more than a few eyebrows.
"The One Where the Stripper Cries" is perhaps the pinnacle of the pair's distasteful brother-sister
bond.
It kind of checks off all the controversy boxes: incest and Danny DeVito as a stripper.
Strangely enough, the latter seems like a welcome breath of fresh air after learning
that Ross and Monica locked lips.
"Well, then who was on my bed?"
"Oh!
Oh!
Oh!"
"No!
No!
No!"
Friends takes place in New York City, which you'd think would be ethnically diverse just
by looking at the city's actual demographics, but you'd never know it hanging out at the
Central Perk.
The beloved sitcom is famously white-washed, and Aisha Tyler's Season 9 role is controversial
if only for the reason that it took producers nine entire seasons to cast an African American
woman as a recurring character.
Tyler kicked off her run with Friends in the 2003 episode "The One with the Soap Opera
Party," where she plays Charlie Wheeler, a paleontology professor who later becomes Ross'
girlfriend.
Prior to that, Gabrielle Union's Season 7 appearance marked the first time a black actor
was even given a speaking role.
Complex, which lambasted the series as one of the most racist TV shows of all time, reported
that actress Holly Robinson Peete briefly called for a boycott in 2003 because of Friends'
lack of color, but Tyler actually considered her role groundbreaking.
She told In Style:
"I think why it worked was that they didn't make it into a 'very special episode of Friends,'
where the friends suddenly confront issues of race, or try to somehow counterbalance
the previous eight seasons' relative lack of diversity.
I was just a character on the show, with her own appeal and quirks and foibles."
Unlike Friends' more recent controversies, which involve alleged homophobia and a lack
of diversity, the Ross and Rachel "on a break" incident instantly polarized fans.
It's been more than 20 years, and people are still debating what went down.
The whole thing begins with the Season 3 episode "The One Where Ross and Rachel Take a Break."
"Oh, I'm making this too hard, okay, what do you want me to do?"
"I don't know, I don't know, look.
Maybe we should just take a break."
Ross is led to believe that this means they're broken up.
He gets drunk, sleeps with another woman, and Rachel is livid the next day when she
finds out.
Really, though: less than 24 hours and Ross has already moved on?
That's cold.
Whether or not the pair was actually broken up has been subject to such controversy that
Cosmopolitan brought in a group of relationship therapists to analyze the situation 22 years
later, the results of which were inconclusive.
BuzzFeed even ran a poll, with the results being pretty mixed.
"We were on a break!"
For many Friends fans, "The One Where Joey Dates Rachel" should have never, ever happened.
We were much more willing to witness Ross try to hook up with his cousin than grapple
with the friends' will-they-won't-they romance for two entire seasons.
The whole thing just felt weird, and The Guardian even claimed the fling, quote, "killed off
the sitcom" in Season 10.
We're not the only ones who felt that way.
Apparently, the cast was adamantly against it.
In an interview with Digital Spy, executive producer Kevin S. Bright admitted that Matt
LeBlanc was less than thrilled about his character's new romance with Rachel, saying:
"In the beginning, Matt LeBlanc did not want to do that story.
He was very firmly against it, saying that he's Ross' friend, and that the type of friend
that Joey is would never go and take someone else's girlfriend."
Today, it remains one of those things we completely forget happened unless we're rewatching the
series.
Perhaps we've blocked it out of our collective memories for the better.
For a moment, let's try to forget the fact that Brad Pitt absolutely eviscerated Jennifer
Aniston's heart when he ran off with Angelina Jolie, and remember that there was once a
time where things were all good and Pitt nabbed a guest-starring role alongside her.
Unfortunately, that role also drummed up some controversy.
Pitt graced Friends fans with his grand presence in "The One with the Rumor," where he starred
as Will Colbert, an old high school pal who admits he founded an "I hate Rachel" club
with Ross.
"So you were in an I Hate Rachel club?"
"Yes, he was."
"No, no."
The running punchline is that he hated Rachel so much he started a rumor that she was intersex
and her parents flipped a coin to decide her sex.
At the time, the Intersex Society of North America slammed the episode as "hurtful" and
"offensive" and published a letter by intersex ally Devon King, who said:
"Your Thanksgiving episode (the one featuring Brad Pitt) was ignorant, insulting, degrading,
and absolutely unprofessional."
Ultimately, co-creator Marta Kauffman later admitted the joke was ill-advised.
In a 2019 interview with USA Today, she said:
"I might have not done the hermaphrodite stuff today if I had that to do over in the one
with Brad Pitt."
When Friends first aired in 1994, most of us didn't really take note of Chandler's pathological
fear of being perceived as gay, especially considering his issues with his father.
Nonetheless, the show's poor take on masculinity and homosexuality is something that hasn't
gone unnoticed in subsequent binge-watches.
We see the jokes pour in during the Season 5 episode "The One with Joey's Bag," when
the friends come up with various ways to belittle the actor for wearing a unisex shoulder bag.
They believe it's too feminine, but with a modern lens, we're sort of left wondering
why that even matters.
We see it again when Ross absolutely can't handle having a male nanny in the aptly named
Season 9 episode "The One with the Male Nanny."
He presumes the nanny is gay.
In reality, homosexuality and caring for kids have absolutely nothing to do with each other.
These instances are so prevalent that a YouTuber even made a 50-minute supercut of all the
times masculinity and homosexuality became a punchline.
There's no world in which it's appropriate for a professor to date a student, much less
a teenage student.
Yes, even in the year 2000.
Ross' relationship with Elizabeth wasn't the storyline most of us wanted, but Friends gave
it to us anyway.
It happens during the Season 6 episode "The One Where Ross Dates a Student," and to this
day, fans are still debating the polarizing couple.
News.com.au did the math and figured out that Elizabeth is about 18 years old, while Ross
is in his early 30s.
It's technically legal, but it's still sobering when Elizabeth's dad threatens to contact
the school about Ross' behavior.
The are numerous Reddit threads questioning Ross' creep factor in the moment, and The
Guardian pretty much settled it when they wrote, quote, "Ross is so creepy."
Honestly, this episode was controversial for a reason.
Abuse of power is always a no-no.
In an era where Lizzo is smashing the Billboard charts with self-love and retailers have stopped
retouching their models in favor of featuring real human bodies, watching Courtney Cox dance
around in a fat suit hasn't aged well.
It's no secret that Friends' long-running joke about Monica's weight feels a little
fat-shamey in 2019.
"Well Judy, you did it.
She's finally full!"
Could they have hired an actual overweight actor?
Could they have given Fat Monica the same emotional depth as her thin counterpart?
Probably, on both counts.
Though it only appears in four episodes, the fat suit launched an onslaught of think pieces.
As Glamour put it, Friends frames fatness like this:
"Because, if you're overweight, there is no way anybody will love you."
Though Fat Monica has raised criticism from new viewers and critics alike, perhaps the
most poignant point comes from I'll Be There for You author Kelsey Miller:
"Fat Monica isn't even a person.
She's not Monica, fat.
She's a cartoon character, with a weird, scream-y voice and a totally different personality
(if you can call an affinity for mayonnaise and Kit Kats a personality).
Her entire life is eating and pining and occasionally dancing to disco music with donuts in her
hands for no reason.
She's a clown."
The Friends episode "The One Where Rachel Tells Ross" hardly seems controversial, but
that's only because what was arguably the most controversial joke in the entire series
was deleted before it ever got a chance to air.
For those who need a refresher, that's the episode where Rachel tells Ross that she's
pregnant, and Monica and Chandler get competitive with another couple on their honeymoon, who
seemingly beat them to every upgrade and freebie given out to newlyweds.
In the version of the episode that we remember, we see Monica and Chandler in line at the
airport check-in.
The rival newlywed couple gets an upgrade while Monica and Chandler stand right behind
them and are relegated to economy.
In the original version, Monica and Chandler actually do get a first-class upgrade, but
Chandler ruins it when he makes a joke about bombs in airport security while standing in
front of a sign that reads "federal law prohibits any joking regarding aircraft hijacking or
bombing."
According to Express, the episode was set to air in October 2001, a month after the
9/11 terrorist attacks.
The joke was deemed, quote, "too insensitive for screens," and the episode was given a
rushed rewrite.
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