3 ‘Friends’ Storylines We Could Totally Have Lived Without

Friends had one of the most illustrious runs in television history. The series aired over 200 episodes across 10 seasons before Joey Tribbiani, Monica Geller, Rachel Green, Ross Geller, and Pheobe Buffay put their house keys on the counter for the last time. During those 10 seasons, fans watched countless storylines play out. While most of them were great, there were a few Friends storylines that we absolutely could have lived without.

The reason for Monica and Pete’s breakup made absolutely no sense

When Monica met a millionaire, Pete Becker, she didn’t initially like him. He persisted, and eventually, Monica figured out that she did want to date him. They were pretty cute together, and overall they appeared like a good couple on paper. Monica and Pete’s relationship is one of our favorite Friends storylines. Their break up was not.

The cast of ‘Friends’ | NBCU Photo Bank/NBCUniversal via Getty Images

We understood that the couple needed to break up, but how it happened was infuriating. Pete, a technology mogul, became a mixed martial artist, citing a desire to conquer the sport. Monica decided she couldn’t deal with watching him get beat up. Pete wasn’t willing to give up his pursuit of becoming the Ultimate Fighting Champion, so they parted ways. The entire storyline felt implausible. There were better ways to break them up.

Rachel and Joey’s romance wasn’t organic enough for the show

By the end of Friends, it felt like the writers were grasping at straws. Surely, the show’s writers put Joey and Rachel together as a couple to make things interesting. While Joey’s initial realization of his feelings injected some light drama into the series, the overall relationship felt forced, and the characters had no chemistry.

We think Joey and Rachel, as a possible couple, would have made a lot more sense early on in the series. When they got together in season 8 of Friends, Rachel’s character had matured from vapid and dim to driven and smart. In contrast, Joey’s character appeared to devolve. In the show’s early seasons, Joey was considered less intelligent than his friends but still socially adept and understanding. By season 8, Joey had fallen to Flanderization, and his stupidity was highlighted in almost every episode. To make the characters work together, Rachel seemed to backslide, and we hated that for her. Ultimately, we were happy to see the relationship go nowhere, but really we didn’t need to see it at all.

We don’t see the point of this season 9 Friends storyline

It has been years since Friends last aired. While we understand most of what happened in the show, one Friends storyline is almost completely inexplicable to us. Chandler’s season 9 move to Tulsa, Oklahoma, made absolutely no sense.

The cast of ‘Friends’ | David Bjerke/NBCU Photo Bank

In season 9 of the series, Chandler fell asleep during a meeting and accidentally agreed to move to Tulsa for work. Instead of trying to fix the miscommunication, he moved. Monica and Chandler carried on a long-distance relationship that was surely meant to be funny but felt artificial instead. Eventually, Chandler quit the Tulsa job, which proves it never needed to happen in the first place.