She squeezes his arm, cooing: “Hello, Mr. Bicep!” Phoebe shamelessly vamps for Chandler’s benefit, seducing him in capital letters so large that even he cannot miss them: “You know how sometimes you’re looking for something and you just don’t even see that it’s right there in front of you, sipping coffee? Oh no, have I said too much?”
Monica’s enthusiasm for this transformation of romance into a competitive sport is palpable: “They think they are so slick messing with us. But see, they don’t know that we know that they know.” Chandler joins in the excitement: “The messers become the messees!”
The remainder of “The One Where Everybody Finds Out” is transformed into an extended staring contest, with no one among the hypercompetitive gang willing to blink first. Chandler and Monica call Phoebe with a proposition, which she reports to her compatriots: “He wants me to come over and feel his bicep and more.” Rachel is initially shocked, then suspicious: “Joey, do they know that we know?”
Phoebe memorably summarizes the state of play: “They don’t know that we know they know we know.” She is sent back over, approaching Chandler in her slinkiest fashion, but her stilted choice of words indicates that the idea of sex with Chandler Bing is not much of a turn-on: “I’m really looking forward to you and me having sexual intercourse.”
Phoebe and Chandler feel pressured into following through on their date, with Monica preparing her boyfriend by spraying Binaca in his mouth. “I want this to happen,” Phoebe murmurs, and Chandler agrees. Each unwilling partner silently drinks more and more wine as they wait to see who will give in first. “When you say things like that,” Phoebe says, elevating the stakes, “it makes me want to rip that . . . sweater vest right off.” Chandler suggests moving to the bedroom, and Phoebe assents, although she says, “First I want to take off my clothes and have you rub lotion on me.”
The hilarity of “The One Where Everybody Finds Out” stems from its air of reversal, of transforming the feverish excitement that persistently surrounds all mention of sex on Friends into something awkward and nauseating. There is a near-incestuous sense that Chandler and Phoebe’s mock flirtation is a violation of the rules of propriety. Joey suggests that Phoebe show Chandler her bra, since he is afraid of them, and she dutifully follows his suggestion. “Come here,” Chandler responds. “I’m very happy we’re going to have all the sex.” “You should be,” Phoebe says, proud as ever of her erotic skills. “I’m very bendy.”
Both Phoebe and Chandler are visibly fighting off their natural revulsion while continuing forward with their charade. He stiffly puts his arm around her waist. She grabs his butt, and he reaches out awkwardly for her breast before losing his nerve and settling for her shoulder. Chandler shudders as he kisses Phoebe, his lips pushed out awkwardly in an attempt to keep her as far as possible from the remainder of his body, then pulls back, deflated: “OK, OK, OK, fine, you win! I can’t have sex with you.” “And why not?” asks Phoebe, intent on extracting the truth from him.
And here Friends executes one of its favored maneuvers, choosing a moment of maximal hilarity to unfold a new layer of emotional nuance. Chandler responds to Phoebe by saying, “Because I’m in love with Monica.” Monica comes out of the bathroom, where she was hiding for the entirety of Chandler and Phoebe’s abortive date, and the newly minted couple say “I love you” to each other for the first time. (Or is it? Chandler blurted it out earlier in the season, in “The One with All the Thanksgivings,” and while he attempted to walk it back, later Internet wags would judge Friends as having goofed. But the first “I love you” was more of a playful “thank you” that Monica treated as a telling flub by her boyfriend, and the second was meant to be more serious.)
“The One Where Everybody Finds Out” was an unexpected fulcrum for the show, neatly dividing what came before it from what emerged afterward. Before its surprisingly fulfilling conclusion, we had assumed, right alongside Chandler, that this was a humorous and diverting fling, with little resonance for the show at large. But one thing Friends never receives enough credit for is its ability to introduce genuine shifts in its tenor—with abiding consequences for its characters. When Monica walks out of the bathroom and embraces Chandler, Friends embraces a new relationship—one that will, in some ways, supersede the heretofore-ubiquitous Ross and Rachel.
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There were two available perspectives on Friends: the exterior and the interior. These often overlapped, although insiders knew far more of the nuts and bolts of how the show was made, and outsiders might remember more of the show’s plotlines, treating as gospel what the show’s cast and crew often could hardly remember the next week. It was likely only the people on the set, week after week, who would think of an episode like “The One with Chandler’s Work Laugh,” from the fifth season of the show, as particularly sad. To watch Chandler on television was to laugh at someone who was consistently amusing; to observe Matthew Perry at work in the late 1990s was to bear witness to something else entirely.
Perry had dreamed of being a star since he discovered acting as a teenager newly arrived in Los Angeles—since before that, even, when he was practicing his backhand as a ranked Canadian junior tennis star and imagined himself as the next Jimmy Connors. Perry was only twenty-four when he was cast on Friends, and the show’s success rocketed him from an up-and-coming but mostly anonymous supporting actor on series like Silver Spoons and Growing Pains to a star whose face was splashed across the covers of magazines everywhere.
The accolades were appreciated but ultimately unfulfilling. The emptiness, he would later say, had gotten him to take his first drink, and then made drinking a regular habit in the evenings, when work was over. Perry didn’t drink to act out at parties or lash out; he drank quietly, steadily, and privately. And after a jet-skiing mishap in 1997, Perry was prescribed Vicodin for the pain by a doctor.
The pills swept away all manner of pain, and even after Perry had healed physically, the Vicodin was a constant friend. Later, Perry would acknowledge that the middle of Friends’ run was mostly a blur, saying it was hard to remember much of anything that had happened between the third and sixth seasons of the show.
Perry had made a promise to himself that he would never drink or do drugs on the Friends set, and he held to that. But he would regularly come to work hungover. Perry did his utmost to keep his struggles with addiction a secret from his colleagues and costars, but the truth was that those travails were etched on his face. Some weeks, he would appear bloated, his face puffy and his chin sagging under the weight of formerly invisible jowls as if he had been doing nothing but bingeing on French fries and doughnuts since the last episode. Other weeks, Perry was painfully thin, looking like a man who had gone through an extreme diet or been stranded on a desert island for some unspecified amount of time.
Perry would come to set to shoot his scenes while craving the next high, and his costars were forced to acclimate themselves to the sight of Perry shaking and sweating while trying to remember his lines. The seventh season of the show would be the hardest. Perry was in denial about the extent of his problems, and the offers of assistance from his costars were routinely dismissed. Lisa Kudrow would later describe the experience as “just hopelessly standing on the sidelines.”
There was a rehab visit in 1997, for the pills, and another in 2000, for both the pills and the drinking, but neither took. In May 2000, Perry was hospitalized with pancreatitis, a condition exacerbated by heavy drinking or drug use. It took until 2001 for Perry to get clean, when a third stint in rehab proved successful at weaning the actor off his dependence on alcohol and opioids.
Perry’s fellow cast members were mostly understanding. He was their friend, and he was going through torments of his own, and they wanted to do everything they could for him. Friends was also their livelihood. All their good intentions notwithstanding, it was incredibly challenging to work with a fellow actor who was coming to work
while still noticeably under the influence. Perry was hurting himself, but he was also jeopardizing the future of their show. At times, Perry’s coworkers on the Friends set were sad over his plight, and at other times, they were angry about what he was forcing the rest of them to cope with.
There was kindness in the show’s care for Perry, as well as an innate caution about the potentially dire consequences to Friends’ future if they ignored Perry’s health. The show was a family, they believed, and they would not abandon any member of their family in a time of need. For some, drug addiction was a moral failing; for Kevin Bright, it was simply a disease, and one that benefited from love and attention and treatment.
There were moments when Bright, Kauffman, and Crane were faced with an agonizing question: Should Matthew Perry be fired from Friends? It was a question of the health of not only the show but one of their lead actors. Was it good for Perry to be the star of a hit TV show? Friends’ ensemble model meant there was no real way to replace any one of them, nor could the show carry on in a cast member’s absence without doing severe damage to its established model. Bright worried that fame had given Perry so much but also prevented him from taking stock of how much damage he was doing to his body. Each of these conversations ended in the same place: They were committed to Matthew Perry. He was integral to their show, and they could continue to look out for him as part of their television family.
Once Perry returned from rehab, Bright, Kauffman, and Crane considered it part of their job to keep an eye on their actor. Were there any signs of his relapsing? What could be done to keep Perry protected from his own worst impulses? It was a testament to the character of Friends’ creators that they remained loyal to Matthew Perry for ten seasons.
* * *
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There was not a singular moment of realization for David Crane that the path of the show had been reoriented by Chandler and Monica. Instead, there was a snowballing sensation, where one successful episode after another unspooled from the writers’ room, and there was an increasing consensus that wondered, “Why stop?” Pairing off Chandler and Monica, Crane felt, gave the show new life, and many of the writers who worked on the later seasons agreed.
What had begun as a temporary plotline for the show kept expanding, taking on added dimensions until two characters on Friends were declaring their love for each other, and those characters were not Ross and Rachel. The emotional tenor of Chandler and Monica’s relationship was distinctly cooler than Ross and Rachel’s. It was placid where theirs was stormy, convivial where theirs was frequently abrasive, and solid where theirs was porous. While there was never a moment when particular decisions were made about how Chandler and Monica’s relationship might work, there was a general agreement that there was only room for one Ross and Rachel on Friends.
Crane still worried about how Chandler and Monica could avoid what he feared could be a fatal domesticity. He was worried that fans would grouse at a world that seemed to only contain six characters and forced them to pair off with each other in increasingly illogical combinations.
Chandler and Monica had to be something different, to contribute a different tone to the show. Crane felt that the show had to earn Chandler and Monica, to make it worth the audience’s while to spend time with another couple. Chandler remained a hopeless relationship doofus, and Monica was controlling and inflexible, but there was an easy warmth between them that had only intermittently existed for Ross and Rachel. Chandler and Monica acted as if they were sharing a private joke, and that air of quiet intimacy pervaded the entire series. With Chandler and Monica’s relationship, Friends became a more mature show than it had ever been before.
Chandler, in Crane’s estimation, had always been flip, inclined to keep the world at bay with a protective shield of humor. Dating Monica exposed him to the intensity of his own feelings and forced him to confront everything he had previously sought to avoid. Chandler remains inept when it comes to knowing what women want. He blithely declares that the best reason for a couple to get married is pregnancy. (Being sorry comes in fourth.)
He is still terrified of commitment, but a sense that his relationship with Monica is protected from the dings of the outside world keeps it going. He tells Monica he is ready for commitment, then clarifies the truth for Phoebe’s ears: “Still terrified. I’ll take care of it. No problem.” And Monica struggles to think of Chandler as an object of erotic or emotional contemplation. When Rachel cracks a joke in “The One in Barbados Part 1,” at the end of the ninth season, about how she was “just lusting after Chandler,” Monica responds with a sarcastic “Yeah, right.”
There is a tenderness between Chandler and Monica that was heretofore absent from the show—with the possible exception of some of the gentler moments between Chandler and Joey in the early seasons. Ross and Rachel feel fated in the stars and woefully mismatched here on planet Earth; Chandler and Monica feel like an odd match in theory but work wonderfully well in practice.
Chandler and Monica flirt with marriage in Las Vegas before their thunder is stolen by a drunken Ross and Rachel (about which more later). Instead, they return home and proceed carefully through the stages of relationship intimacy. Chandler suggests unpacking at Monica’s, and she remains clueless about his not-so-hidden meaning until he spells it out fully for her. They break the news to Joey, who assumes that Monica is pregnant. Chandler balks, then hilariously looks over to Monica for confirmation. Monica fruitlessly prods the emotionally inert Chandler to get him to cry. (In a clever coda, he finally cracks when pondering the emotional roller coaster of Rachel and Ross: “I just don’t see why those two can’t work things out.”)
The emotional floodgates now presumably opened, Chandler gets teary eyed when a jewelry-store clerk mock-proposes to him with the ring he is considering purchasing for Monica. Friends knows that we know, and we know that they know we know, what emotional markers lie in wait for us. Chandler and Monica’s relationship is studded with false starts and surprise developments. Chandler plans an elaborate proposal at a fancy restaurant in “The One with the Proposal,” only to be derailed by the unexpected presence of Monica’s ex-boyfriend Richard (Tom Selleck) at the next table. Chandler squelches his proposal and begins talking excitedly of antimarriage websites and the unnaturalness of monogamy to throw Monica off the scent. Richard’s mere presence alone is enough to rattle Chandler.
Monica winds up having one last flirtation with Richard. Chandler hears she has left Manhattan and is staying with her parents. He enters their apartment to discover that Monica has filled the room with candles: “You wanted it to be a surprise.” Monica proceeds to get down on one knee, beginning to propose before getting teary and calling for help: “There’s a reason why girls don’t do this!” The slightly sexist moment ends sweetly when Chandler gets down on one knee and fills in: “I thought that it mattered, what I said or where I said it. Then I realized, the only thing that matters is that you make me happier than I ever thought I could be. And if you let me, I will spend the rest of my life trying to make you feel the same way.”
The show is at its worst in the run-up to Monica and Chandler’s wedding, and with its inept handling of Chandler’s transgender father. Monica and Chandler travel to Las Vegas to ask Chandler’s father, Charles (played by Kathleen Turner), to attend their wedding in “The One with Chandler’s Dad” and act like clueless rubes at the drag show where Charles performs as Helena Handbasket. “Waiter?” Monica tentatively calls to the (presumably) trans server. “-tress?” Rarely have Friends’ characters felt squarer than they do here.
Having Elliott Gould’s Jack Geller express interest in meeting his daughter’s future in-law by saying, “I’ve never seen one before,” is tacky and cruel in the extreme. Similarly, although perhaps slightly more justified as a catty remark from an ex, Chandler’s mother (Morgan Fairchild) wonders if Charles has “a little too much penis to be wearing a dress like that.”
Mo
nica may insist she is incapable of handling the work of proposing marriage, but there is a pleasing egalitarianism to her relationship with Chandler. Being a kind of mismatched couple from the outset, they silently agree to make it up as they go along, with no set pattern of gendered expectations necessarily determining who will do what. Monica craves children, but Chandler is the one who unspools an elaborate fantasy about a house in the suburbs with kids on bicycles, a cat with a bell, and an apartment for Joey above the garage. (Note the reversal from earlier seasons, where Chandler pleads with Joey to be invited to his family’s future celebrations.) Monica begins the process of getting engaged, and Chandler finishes it. Chandler, clueless as he is in the matter of relationships, must take his cues from Monica, and from his oft-defective instincts about how men and women relate to each other.
While Chandler and Monica’s squabbling, about the perils of smoking or Monica’s intensity while playing Ping-Pong, was a constant, it was often resolved with quiet acceptance rather than anger or a sense of betrayal. In “The One with the Red Sweater,” just after their wedding, Chandler is busted for taking fake photos to replace the disposable cameras he lost, and Monica is caught in the act of opening all the wedding presents, and they agree to call it even.
In “The One with the Sharks,” Monica surprises Chandler in his hotel room during a work trip to Tulsa and believes she has seen him “molesting himself” to “shark porn.” Rather than dial her divorce lawyer, Monica rents a video and pops it in the VCR: “Do you want me to fast-forward to something toothier?”
Chandler eventually corrects Monica, telling her that he was actually pleasuring himself to “old-fashioned American girl-on-girl action,” but what stands out is Monica’s act of trust in her husband: She tells him, “Let me be a part of this,” even as she believes that “this” is, as Rachel describes it, getting his jollies to Jaws. The episode is exaggerated even by the standards of Friends (does anyone get their jollies to Jaws?) but underlines a crucial point about Chandler and Monica: that they are willing to go out on a ledge for each other.
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