Forget Ross and Rachel, This Is ‘Friends’ Best Will-They-Won’t-They

The Big Picture

• Rachel and Joey’s relationship added a new obstacle to Ross and Rachel’s romance in Friends, prolonging the will-they-won’t-they tension and providing fresh dynamics to the show.
• The idea of Rachel and Joey as a couple defied conventional viewer expectations and challenged the trope of the nerdy guy getting the popular girl, offering a more thought-provoking storyline.
• If Rachel and Joey had ended up together, it would have explored the evolution of feelings and questioned the assumption that having a baby means a couple must stay together, providing a more interesting and unconventional ending.

Time sure has done its number on Ross Geller (David Schwimmer). The farther away we get from 2004, the year in which the last episode of Friends aired on NBC, the more fans of the show realize that he wasn’t such a great guy. His alleged happily-ever-after with Rachel Green (Jennifer Aniston) has been revisited over and over again by fans who now mostly agree he kind of did her dirty by stopping her from moving to Paris and advancing her career. Still, for about 11 years, Ross and Rachel were the go-to will-they-won’t-they of every single sitcom fan out there, and everyone was rooting for them to get together in the end. But maybe now that we have started to look at Friends through different lenses, it’s time to recognize that there was a much more interesting will-they-won’t-they in the show: the messy two-seasons-long relationship between Rachel and Joey Tribbiani (Matt LeBlanc).

Look, we know what you’re thinking. For decades now, the short-lived romance between Rachel and Joey has been much maligned by fans of the show. The reasons vary from it standing in the way of the Ross and Rachel of it all to it possibly ruining their friendship to it being a poorly thought out attempt by showrunners Marta Kauffman and David Crane to add some spice to a show that, narratively, was starting to lose some of its steam. Reportedly, even the cast of Friends absolutely hated the idea of Joey and Rachel getting together.

But, looking at it coldly, far from the atmosphere of the early 2000s, it’s not hard to notice that Rachel and Joey as a couple do add a lot of interesting elements to Friends. For starters, it complicates things between Ross and Rachel at a moment in which they seem bound to each other by the miracle of childbirth. Secondly, the couple was a real will-they-won’t-they, unlike Ross and Rachel, who were destined to be with one another by a decades-old trope. Finally, had Kauffman and Crane really moved forward with this idea, they would have ended up with a show that questions a lot of our preconceptions about friendship, family, and love. Would it have been an unsatisfying ending? Perhaps. But it would certainly be a lot more thought-provoking.

When Did Joey and Rachel First Get Together on ‘Friends’?

The whole thing between Joey and Rachel started in Season 8, in the twelfth episode, aptly titled “The One Where Joey Dates Rachel.” In it, after a conversation with a very pregnant Rachel in which she admits that she misses going out on dates, Joey decides to take his friend for a romantic night out. This is preceded by a brief conversation in the previous episode, “The One with Ross’s Step Forward,” in which they jokingly consider the idea of having a one-night stand. With that in mind, Joey gets home from his date with Rachel only to realize that his feelings for her have morphed into something other than friendship.

This is all complicated by the fact that, at that point in the show, Rachel is living with Joey after Chandler (Matthew Perry) has moved out to be with Monica (Courtney Cox). Joey struggles with his feelings for a few episodes until he decides to put them all on the table in Episode 16, “The One Where Joey Tells Rachel.” Though she initially rejects him, not before worrying that this might put a dent in their friendship, Joey telling Rachel is just the beginning of a plot that would go on up until the first few episodes of Season 10.

Season 8 ends with Joey accidentally proposing to Rachel with Ross’ ring after she gives birth to Emma, and the situation gets all the more complicated when she says yes due to the stress of having a baby. The following season sees the two characters juggling their feelings for one another, now with a newborn and a new romantic interest, Charlie (Aisha Tyler), thrown in the mix. By the end of Season 9, however, Joey and Rachel share a kiss during the gang’s trip to Barbados. But while Season 10 begins with Rachel and Joey excited to start this new adventure together, their fling comes to an end in Episode 3, “The One With Ross’s Tan”, in which they find themselves unable to consummate their mutual crush and decide to remain just friends.

Rachel and Joey’s Romance Adds a New Obstacle to Rachel and Ross’ Relationship

Despite lasting for almost two whole seasons, Joey and Rachel’s relationship is short-lived when compared to the one between Rachel and Ross. Still, this odd development was enough to put a dent in a romantic affair that seemed to be a sure deal by that point in the show. By Season 8, Ross and Rachel were about to have a child together. Had Ross managed to propose to Rachel like he wanted to, she would’ve certainly said yes, bringing to an end a years-long wait for the couple to finally get together. However, in Season 8, Friends still had two seasons ahead of it, which meant it was not yet time to conclude one of the show’s most important plots. Kauffman and Crane needed something to keep Ross and Rachel apart a little longer, and Joey was the perfect man for the job.

Ross and Rachel have faced many threats over the course of their will-they-won’t-they relationship, most of which took the shape of new romantic interests. By Season 8, the whole thing where Ross and Rachel seemed about to reveal their feelings for one another only for someone new to get in the way was starting to get stale. How do you make that work once more without bringing in a new Paolo (Cosimo Fusco) or Emily (Helen Baxendale) into the equation? Well, you go with someone old, of course! Joey represented, at the same time, an already known and completely new threat to Ross and Rachel as a couple. He was a new romantic interest, but an interest that was coming from the place that they least expected: from inside their friend group. This whole “the call is coming from inside the house” development lends something fresh to an already familiar dynamic, helping the series’ main mystery to retain fuel for a little longer.

Furthermore, Joey seemed more like a real threat to Ross and Rachel getting together than any of the one-time love interests that came before. I mean, he was a core character in the show. If the writers were giving him such a storyline, they must have a reason. Furthermore, after the whole Monica and Chandler thing, pure, untempered friendship was no longer sacred. It seemed like every possible combination of Friends’ characters was game. Ross and Phoebe (Lisa Kudrow)? Sure, why not? Joey and Phoebe? Sign us up! Joey and Rachel? Well…

Rachel and Joey Defied Both Viewer Expectations and Preconceptions

But, of course, Rachel and Joey didn’t make it. By the end of Season 10, Ross and Rachel are once again ready to accept and confess their true feelings for one another, and Friends famously ends with Rachel getting off the plane, giving up on a fancy job in Paris to stay with the father of her child in New York. It’s all very according to plan as well as extremely according to social norms and well-established tropes. Ross is a nerdy boy in love with the popular girl in high school, so of course he has to get her in the end. Ross and Rachel have been catching feelings for one another ever since Season 1, so of course they must have those same feelings for the rest of their lives. Finally, Ross and Rachel have a baby together, so of course they have to be a happy family.

It’s all very squeaky clean, and it makes us wonder just how different and defiant things would’ve been if Kauffman and Crane had decided to make Rachel and Joey endgame. For starters, they would’ve kicked the whole nerdy-guy-gets-the-girl trope to the curb, ridding Friends of one of its most problematic aspects. After all, this is a trope that hardly ever considers the woman’s feelings, painting her own desires and affections as something that needs to be corrected so that she can see that the nice guy that she must be with is the one she hasn’t been paying attention to. And the nice guy is nice just because he believes himself to be, not because of anything he actually does. Perhaps we would even look at Ross with kinder eyes nowadays if he hadn’t ended up with Rachel after everything that he put her through, from the “we were on a break” situation to saying her name at the altar during his wedding to Emily.

But, most importantly, making Joey and Rachel endgame would’ve changed the ending in a much more interesting fashion. For starters, it would have shown that feelings change, that you don’t have to spend more than a decade hung up on a guy that you have tried to get with but ultimately failed in all possible ways. It would have shown that friendship can often evolve into something else. This is something that the series has tapped on with Monica and Chandler, but Rachel and Joey’s relationship was completely different. Instead of bantery, it had a big sister-little brother feel to it, but Joey and Rachel were never actually siblings, so why can’t these feelings morph into romantic love?

Last, but not least, wrapping things up with Joey and Rachel as a couple would’ve shattered the illusion that, just because a couple has a baby, that means that they have to be together. We are trained from infancy to equate having children with marriage, but that is not necessarily true, and Emma wouldn’t have been loved any less if her parents were not married. Perhaps she would even be more loved, considering the role that Uncle Joey would’ve played in her life. With all that in mind, we have to look back and give it to Kauffman and Crane: pairing up Joey and Rachel was a great idea, and it’s kind of a pity that Friends decided not to see it through.

All ten seasons of Friends are available to stream on Max in the US.

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