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The Unfortunate Problem with Friends' Joey Tribbiani
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May 19, 2025
Friends is one of the most iconic sitcoms of all time, with unforgettable characters like Ross, Rachel, Monica, Chandler, and Phoebe all undergoing major growth over the show’s 10-season run. But what about Joey Tribbiani? Despite being one of the most beloved characters, Joey ends the series almost exactly where he started—still chasing acting gigs, single, and largely unchanged. So why did Friends leave Joey behind?
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I play Al Pacino's butt
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All right? He goes into the shower, and then I'm his butt
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This is Joey Tribbiani in the first season of Friends. Seems smaller somehow
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Has it always been purple? And this is Joey in the series finale almost 10 years later
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If you don't see much of a difference outside of his looks, well, that's half of the problem. But there's a lot more to the downfall of one of TV's
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most well-known characters than his surface-level stagnation. NBC's Friends, which ran from 1994 until 2004
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is an undeniably important cultural touchstone. Over the course of the 10 award-winning seasons
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we watched their interests develop and their careers begin, end, and reach new heights
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We watched them fall in love, get married, and have children. We watched everyone grow up
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Everyone except Joey, that is. Oh my god! Look at me! I'm Chandler
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Could I be wearing any more clothes? At best, one could make the argument that the lovable, carefree, and somewhat clueless Joey Tribbiani
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played by Matt LeBlanc, remained exactly the same during his run on Friends
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He started the series as a slovenly actor looking for love in all the wrong places
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and though he ends the series with more experience in all areas, that description remains the same
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its stagnation masquerading as a character arc. When we're introduced to Joey in the pilot episode of Friends
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we get the sense that he's a bit of an air-headed womanizer. Joey, stop hitting on her
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It's her wedding day. What? Like there's a rule or something? Someone who skates through life with very little in the ways of goals or ambitions
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outside of the vague star-shaped dream of becoming a famous actor and finding love
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or at the very least, finding a date. How you doing? Throughout the show's early days, we learned that while he's not exactly a well-educated
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man of the world he is at least passively intelligent He is socially competent and he generally behaves like a normal adult who loves his friends and wants to indulge in life simple pleasures
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Are we still talking about sex? He was relatable. He was funny. He was charismatic and easygoing
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He was a fierce protector of the people he cared about. And yes, he could be a little bit dumb
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sometimes. Please move on. Go to China. Eat Chinese food. Of course, there they just call it food
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it all added up to a character that fans adored and they couldn't wait to see where the show would
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take him but as time went on his personality was paradoxically exaggerated and diluted while his
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story was stuck mostly in place his cluelessness was magnified while every other aspect of his
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personality was pushed to the distorted outer edges he was barely recognizable when compared
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to his past self, and his friends often had no choice but to treat him like a child
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Sure, Joey was never supposed to be the smart one in the friend group. I say punch him, Joey
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Yeah! Yeah! Punch him! But this degeneration of his intelligence felt almost mean-spirited on the part of the showrunners
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Now, the same can be said to some degree about most of the main cast
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Friends was built on familiar character archetypes, and as the show got progressively more popular
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the showrunners and writers played up the more bombastic traits of each character
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because they were the ones that got the most reaction from the audience. Ross got more neurotic and awkward
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Monica's controlling nature was often pushed to the extreme. Phoebe became cartoonishly eccentric and so on
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But none of the characters were hit as hard by this as Joey
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And that's because Matt LeBlanc played Joey's idiocy with a level of charm that made him extremely likable
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And that's Joey. Hey, how you doing? Don't you? But instead of focusing on that charm
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the showrunners decided the idiocy was more important. This effectively ruined a perfectly good character
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for the sake of a few cheap laughs It hard to pinpoint exactly where this change started happening or who to really blame because it was so gradual And as early as season three we see Joey absent on the incline
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when he seems completely unaware of Chandler's annoyance with him while he's building the
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entertainment system. And then there's the bit in season seven where he thinks America
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has at least 56 states and doesn't understand how a globe works
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First of all, Utah? Dude, you can't just make stuff up. These moments, which were originally used sparingly, eventually became the norm for Joey's character
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The loyal, lovable man that had been established in season one had been replaced by an empty-headed stand-in
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And it happened so slowly that it was almost unnoticeable, until it was unignorable
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Friends was an ever-changing show where the creative heads were constantly testing out new ideas to gauge audience interest
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Sometimes that resulted in extremely iconic moments. Other times, it served to muddy up characters and slow plot progression to a crawl
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Joey played parts in many of the best and worst of these little experiments
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But by season 10, it was clear that Joey's excessively stupid personality would not be reversed
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Anyone still holding out hope by episode 13 when Phoebe tries to teach him to speak French
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had to come to terms with that. Joey's character has been so thoroughly ripped to shreds that he can't even repeat basic
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French sentences. Like a toddler, he resorts to straight-up gibberish that sounds nothing like what he's supposed to be saying
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And while the combined comedic experience of Matt LeBlanc and Lisa Kudrow make this bearable to sit through
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it's such a glaringly obvious demonstration of how he became a parodied version of his worst self
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When you pair that with the fact that Joey is also the only friend to end the show in practically the same place he started
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his story is almost tragic in hindsight. From the very beginning of the show
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Joey was characterized as wanting nothing more than love, fame and the companionship of his friends By the end Joey has been so dumbed down and personified that what he wanted wasn really narratively important anymore Unlike the rest of the cast the majority of
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Joey's story development would be offloaded onto the poorly received spinoff TV show. That meant
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that Joey was forced to watch from the sidelines as Ross, Rachel, Phoebe, Chandler, and Monica
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moved on to new and exciting eras in their lives. You can imagine that after the Friends series finale, when the gang leaves Central Perk after getting their final coffee, everyone got to return home to their children and spouses
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But Joey went home alone to his same old empty apartment. Nothing changed for him
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While everyone else got a wrap-up, his story was abandoned. That depressing blow might have been lessened if the Joey spinoff was any good
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But it wasn't. While he simply does eventually find love, he is more isolated from his friends than ever before when he moves to L.A
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He spends most of the show as a jaded, bitter jerk. I was nominated for a Daytime Soap Award again
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Can I go? I wish I could take it, but seating's limited. Which is somehow a worse character assassination than the one he went through on Friends
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Even at his dumbest, Joey on Friends was always an optimist. But spinoff Joey couldn't be further from that positive, carefree guy fans fell in love with
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And none of it actually matters because NBC and Warner have tried their hardest to sweep the whole show under the rug
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Even if you wanted to, it would be very difficult to watch that part of Joey's life unfold
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The spinoff isn't available on any streaming services and doesn't air anywhere else
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It's almost like they want us to forget it ever happened. Sure, yeah
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How can you not remember me? Because of that, we really just have the Friends finale to look back on
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The one where Joey is both fundamentally unchanged from a story perspective
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and yet demonstrably worse off as a character. And that's a really unfortunate problem
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