It’s very easy and also a bit unfair to trawl over old media and then slam it for how un-woke it is by 2019 standards, but it’s hard to avoid in this age of endless streaming television, in which the past remains forever stuck in the present.
And Friends has been guilty of the odd bit of eyebrows raising non-wokeness, especially when Ross encounters anyone non-straight, but that’s not the storyline which the show runners now cringe most about.
Amazingly, it’s a Phoebe one.
And it’s… look, they’re not wrong.
Executive producer Marta Kaufman explained at the 25th anniversary panel that in her opinion the show’s biggest misstep was when Phoebs fell for… “The stalker, David Arquette. We did a lot of rewriting on that to make that work.”
“Work” is a relative term, but if you don’t remember series three’s third episode The One with the Jam, it involves Arquette mistaking Phoebe for her twin sister Ursula (also played by Lisa Kudrow, naturally), and then decided he was a bit of alright, ending with inviting him to stalk her instead.
Yeah. The idea that a guy stalking a woman and this being a cute and flirty sort of a thing is not great. Especially given other things going on in Australia right now.
Incidentally, Kaufman doesn’t dwell on her stalker plot mistake, to the point where she doesn’t even encounter Friends except in the wild and by accident.
“I watch the show once in a while and it’s much harder for me to enjoy the good moments when there are moments in it that I’m just going, ‘Oh my God, we let that happen?’”
So actually, that’s probably the real story here: there is someone on the planet who is apparently not endlessly binging Friends. Who knew?