Joey Tribbiani and his love for food and women is an undisputed element in the ‘Friends’ galaxy. With the casting of the six characters, fans were of the notion that it would be Phoebe and Joey just as it was Ross and Rachel then Chandler and Monica, but no, that didn’t happen. Despite their ineffable sexual chemistry, the duo throughout the comedy series never released the water from the dam despite innumerable flirting, a kiss and even a proposal.
In fact, the chemistry is so strong with the two characters that even Lisa Kudrow and Matt LeBlanc reportedly wanted the pair to become friends with benefits at the very least, which didn’t happen? So, what made them hold back from crossing the friend’s boundary?
David Crane, who wrote and produced the classic 1994 sitcom alongside long-time partner in crime Marta Kauffman, told the Metro.co.uk exclusively that out of all of the six Joey and Phoebe could never be more than friends.
‘It all would have been too tidy and too complete. When your goal is to keep the six character in stories together, it would be really easy to go down that road but I think we all felt it would be a mistake’, David explained.
Digressing from taking the same path as a predictable Ross and Rachel, Monica and Chandler and Joey and Pheobe, the writer said that the genius of Friends was its talent of never risking becoming repetitive.
‘Because we’d done Ross and Rachel we had to give Monica and Chandler another set of challenges,’ Crane continued.
‘And so their whole journey of how they ended up together and having babies it needed to be different. I think that’s the biggest challenge of doing a show for 10 years.’
First aired in 1994, the season with 236 list of episodes has one of the biggest fan-following ever. It stars Jennifer Aniston as Rachel, Courtney Cox as Monica, Matt LeBlanc as Joey, Lisa Kudrow as Phoebe, Matthew Perry as Chandler and David Schwimmer as Ross.