Writes Devon Ivie at Vulture about this segment of the "Ellen" TV show, which Aniston guest hosted on Friday:
"[S]he squatted behind the famous couch and jumped out to scare those unsuspecting tourists [who were visiting the 'Friends' set]— but by the sixth round of people declaring their love for every Friends character besides Rachel Green, we can’t help but feel Aniston herself is the one being pranked here. (Someone even said Ross is their favorite. Ross!)"
By the way, Ross is my favorite Friend.
ADDED: I watched the Aniston guest-host show, and it gave me a lot of respect for Ellen. It's hard to seem natural in the phony-baloney role of afternoon-talk-show woman. Aniston just won a Screen Actors Guild for playing the role of a TV-talk-show woman in some Apple TV series called "Morning Show" or some generic title like that. And Aniston's "Ellen" appearance was completely scripted, so all Aniston needed to do was to be a TV actress, which she most certainly is, at the highest level. But I could feel the fakeness. I guess fiction shows have an understood fakeness to them. The additional ease and naturalness that Ellen enacts is not something Aniston was able to achieve.
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By the way, Ross is my favorite Friend.
He's clearly the most boring.
Ross wins in my book if only for "They're still not coming off, man, and the lotion and the powder have made a paste!"
I liked Rachel. Not as much as Pheebs, but more than Courtney Cox.
I mean "They're still not coming on..."
He's trying to get his pants on.
Her comic movies are good but she's an airhead. Or playing to airheads.
My least favorite is Courtney Cox. I just don't find her funny. I think the sum total of everything she ever did on the show has less comic effect than they way David Schwimmer said "paste."
Things women like.
Matt LaBlanc plays himself in the series “Episodes” wherein he claims that none of the rest of the cast likes him, and spoiler: The only actor he can get on his attempted Friends reunion is the guy with the crush on Rachel who worked at the coffee shop. I think there was quite possibly some truth there. I think they played a lot with the truth of the central actors’ lives quite a bit in Friends.
I would say that Ross was so much of a mensch in that show, willing to appear so ridiculous, that he hurt his post Friends career, but I guess I would put him and Phoebe as the ones, at the end of watching all the episodes, that I still had positive feelings for.
First time I saw Courtney Cox I thought “What a hottie” but by the end, it was like, man am I glad I am not the man married to her.
Chandler was like the normie. He is the one without "celebrity face” and I could never figure out why he was on there.
This is my pose as I announce that I've never seen Friends: "And the only person I'd recognize is Aniston because she looks like the crazy sister."
The great thing about Friends is that there are so many of them that you never have to see too much of one of them. They're always switching off. The roles are (almost) equally weighted. In the original idea of the show, Joey and Phoebe were going to be lesser characters, but they changed that and tried to make it equal, maybe because it was obvious that Lisa Kudrow was so funny and Joey was so handsome (and both were just really adorable).
Anyway, I like them in the order that I think the actors made the most of the lines they were given in this big 6-part sharing: Ross, Phoebe, Rachel, Joey, Chandler, Monica.
Ross is the Shemp of Friends.
The only actor he can get on his attempted Friends reunion is the guy with the crush on Rachel who worked at the coffee shop.
Gunther! My favorite Friend.
David Schwimmer was so annoying as Capt. Sobel in Band of Brothers that it's hard for me to find him likable as Ross.
If people don't like Rachel, it could be because the whole Ross and Rachel thing went on for too long - or because Jennifer Aniston is the one friend who really made it big in Hollywood (and on magazine covers each week).
Worrying every week about whether she has finally found happiness has been such a big strain on people.
Sincerity. If you can fake that, you've got it made.
As only an occasional viewer, I agree with Ross and Phoebe as the top two, but by no means in that order. Maybe Ross requires more commitment.
I think that Phoebe was related to John Lovitz and he thought she was so funny in real life that he said she should get into show business.
Good jingle jangle theme song. Very Gin Blosommy 90's. It's stood the test of TV time. I have an entire section of mp3 tv themes on my phone and on long road trips I'll blue tooth that file to play in the van and play the game of guess that tv show. Friend's, Cheers, Mash, Bonanza Peter Gunn, et al.
I guess fiction shows have an understood fakeness to them
What they have is multiple takes.
"Gunther!"
It's interesting: Big Bang Theory had Stuart, the comic book guy who was basically the same pathetic, but they able to stretch him out into his own story lines.
There are a number of outtake compilations on YouTube, well worth watching. Matt LeBlanc, when not in character, comes off as intelligently funny, with a knowing smile that makes his dumb guy act as Joey all the more impressive - he wasn't just playing himself.
DeNiro played a late night talk show host in Joker, and came across very stiff, no sense of the rhythm of such a role.
Phoebe is the best. Chandler gets second only because his well you’re gonna! has retained its freshness within our household.
David Swimmers was great in Band of Brothers as Capt Sobel and the OJ mini series as Bob Kardashian.
"he wasn't just playing himself.”
Except that his post Friends career could have easily been Joey’s post Friends career.
declaring their love for every Friends character besides Rachel Green,
can we assume, they were all guys? (or, liars?)
Two of the best things on the show belonged to Jennifer Aniston
They were why guys watched
I also appreciate Zeppo.
that he is done watching his assignment, and said...
For Not picking her, they All seemed pretty darn happy to see her
I certainly hope that Jennifer and Brad get back together. That would really show those cynics who think Hollywood is full of phonies and pervs. They just look so right together and that would really show Angelina what's what when it comes to true love.
Sean Hannity, a personal hero of mine, played a clip the other day of Alec Baldwin trying to do a radio talk show.
The following is a paraphrase, not a direct quote:
'Uh, um, okay, let's go to break, oh wait, I guess it's not time, we have more time okay, um.
Do we have a caller? No, no callers.
Okay. Um... ah... Okay well thank you for listening today ah um..."
I guess saying nothing like that is better than calling his daughter a thoughtless little selfish pig again though.
If her nipples aren't poking out then Aniston is not playing Rachel in that clip.
And I think it was a bad move on her part: her career hasn't stretched very far in the intervening years, so she is playing rather directly against her younger self, with no real dynamic of then-and-now with the in-between years full of interesting changes and life experience, she's just... older.
And an older Aniston can't compete with the younger version. Because Rachel was about the promise, and forgiveness, of youth. She was shallow, but you believed she would learn and grow out of it.
And watching fifty-ish women try to be girly is painful.
She needs to be in a movie where she plays a hot grandma who steals her daughter's boyfriend. And also takes a lot of showers.
Career advice, if she wants it.
I am Laslo.
Naysayer here. Never could understand why anyone had any interest in what a bunch of mostly stupid losers living in a city that makes no sense for most of us to live in, in an apartment that they probably couldn’t afford in real life. Fiends wasn't as bad as Sluts in the City, but it suffered from the same problems. In ask myself whether I would want to hang out with them in real life, and my answer is very much never.
Were there any males in that studio audience?
My least favorite character was Rachel simply because she never even contemplated the idea that she might have been in the wrong in reference to the break up and “being on a break”. Even if she retained her belief that she was the wronged individual it would have given her more depth.
She was self-absorbed...and wrong.
Ellen has a mean streak disguised as impish good fun. Being a (straight) man in her studio audience must be like being the only white person at the Apollo.
This is a link to a partial snippet. Trigger Warning: Alan Colmes comes across as kinda likable.
Schwimmer was the one who got the cast to negotiate as a bloc. These negotiations were very successful. Each cast member was receiving one million per episode at the end of the series. This number is dwarfed by what they now get--twenty million each per year in residuals....The actual fairy tale happy ending--at least financially-- of their lives mirrors the fairy tale life that the show presented. In the show a group of friends get together and with each other's encouragement and support, they seek love and and success in New York. Well, that's what happened. It's very rare that the actual subtext of reality surpasses the theme of a show, but that happened on Friends.
This is a link to a partial snippet. Trigger Warning: Alan Colmes comes across as kinda likable.
Still not as painful as The Alec Baldwin Show on ABC.
My ranking if I ignore the sexual attractiveness element:
(1)Phoebe
(2)Joey
(3)Chandler
(4)Rachel
(5)Ross
(6)Monica
I actually sort of liked Chandler and Monica. When people act too stupidly in comedies over and over again it gets on my nerves, so the more "normal" characters were kind of a relief. The were stupid in their own way, but they weren't as annoying as Joey and Phoebe and Ross could be.
Phoebe was funny, and back then I thought her attractive. Seeing her in her cable series The Comeback made me hate Lisa Kudrow. It was the same stupid joke over and over again. She's clueless and has absolutely no self-knowledge. I get it already, now move on. Plus she was very hard to look at for any length of time (sexist, I know).
By the way, Ross is my favorite Friend.
Of the less than half dozen times I watched the show, Ross was the reason I never watched more.
When I studied acting in college, one of the things I learned was that there is no such thing as "good acting." There is only good reacting. If you're in the zone, the character reacts naturally to everything, even their own thoughts.
"Pivot! Pivot!!"
My now grown children and I have deftly deployed this Ross-ism on multiple occasions. We laugh every time. My husband never watched Friends and when we showed him a clip, he was like "eh".
"There is only good reacting."
Joey: "...one of the most important things in soap opera acting is reacting. This does not mean acting again."
Matt LaBlanc plays himself in the series “Episodes”
Thought I never watched Friends, for some reason I started watching this. Turns out it's one of the funniest shows I have ever seen. And it actually comes to a satisfying conclusion for those wondering if they should start in on it.
Now I think the reason I never watched Friends was I was angry at the show for taking Lisa Kudrow from Mad About You.
And to bring this comment full circle, one of the funniest characters on Episodes was played by John Pankow who played "Cousin Ira" on Mad About You.
I think Matthew Perry and Lisa Kudrow were the two most skilled comedians and played the funniest characters. Of course the Chandler character was written to be the funny one, that probably helps. Ross occasionally got into dweeby mode and seemed to over do it. The call backs to "we were on a break!" were a great ongoing bit.
She needs to be in a movie where she plays a hot grandma who steals her daughter's boyfriend. And also takes a lot of showers.
Nope, Leaving Las Vegas prostitute type role.
Ellen still doing those practical joke things with Matt Lauer?
The one with him in bondage was funny, at the time.
My favorite role by any of the Friends cast was Matthew Perry in The Whole Nine Yards with Bruce Willis and … wait for it … Amanda Peet. I thought it was screamingly funny upon seeing it 20 years ago. I wonder how it has held up.
I second Joey in Episodes.
Yuge coincidence – just this morning I saw a segment about Allee Willis, who co-wrote the Friends theme song lyrics, and who passed away last month. She said the theme song was out of character for her, having co-written such masterpieces as “September” and “Boogie Wonderland” for Earth, Wind & Fire, as well as “What Have I Done to Deserve This?” for The Pet Shop Boys. She is in the Songwriters’ Hall of Fame.
Ellen's career as a stand-up comedian probably has a lot to do with her natural talk-show-hostness.
They did not show The Ones Where They Say "Rachel" because less funny.
Hollywood 101, folks.
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