“It was a bad start”: Joey is 20 years old and the creators of Friends still don't accept this spin-off

So shameful that even Warner Bros. doesn't dare to broadcast it on its streaming platform, Joey, the only spin-off of Friends, will have only lived two seasons and 46 episodes. But how did we get here? Twenty years after the pilot aired, here is the short story of a television nightmare.

” We would have been completely unable to predict when Friends began, but as the series progressed, Joey emerged as the character America loves. The audience wants to know what the rest of his life looks like. » It's 2003 and Jeff Zucker, then president of NBC Entertainment, proudly announces the development of Joeyspin-off of Friends where Matt LeBlanc will reprise the role that made him rich and famous. American television is such that it can't help but capitalize on a success: after all, ten years earlier, Frasier had become a real cash and Emmy Awards factory, building itself on the ashes of the very popular series Cheers…

Not unhappy with what he thinks is the coup of the century, Zucker promises that LeBlanc is the only one of the six actors in Friends to have been contacted. This is obviously false: the network first turned to Jennifer Aniston, a superstar at the time. She was at the top of the list “, executive producer and director Kevin Bright would recall years later, who embarked on the Joey adventure without the help of his colleagues David Crane and Marta Kauffman. It was obvious. But Jennifer wanted to do movies and TV didn't interest her anymore. And then we also toyed with the idea of ​​a series about Monica and Chandler but, strangely, while Courteney Cox and Matthew Perry had loved their years Friendsthey didn't want to play those roles anymore. »

We saw Joey again: 10 years later, the Friends spin-off is still a failure

The spin-off therefore fails Matt LeBlanc, who ” loved Joey and had no problem playing him again ” Scott Silveri and Shana Goldberg-Meehan, screenwriters who worked on Crazy about you before integrating the writers room of Friendsare hired to oversee this spin-off series. Despite their initial reservations about the concept (” History must be king, not the market “, Silveri would say in 2017), they developed a pitch that couldn't be more classic: Joey decides to leave New York to settle in Hollywood, in order to try to get his acting career off the ground. Bye friends, he finds his very angry sister Gina (Drea de Matteo, notably seen in The Sopranos) and moves in with Michael (Paulo Costanzo), his nerdy, gifted nephew. His days are spent between meetings with Bobbie, his Hollywood agent (the always excellent Jennifer Coolidge) and interactions with his attractive neighbor, Alexis Garrett (Andrea Anders), who also happens to be his landlady.

The first episode aired on September 9, 2004, just a few months after the end of Friends and at the same time slot. Enough to attract 18.55 million curious and certainly missing American fans. A nice score, but the ratings quickly faded. At the end of the season, Joey lost 10 million viewers. Critics are not holding back: a journalist from the Los Angeles Times thus slammed the series by writing that it ” feels like a subplot desperately searching for its main story “.

Obviously, the spirit of Friends is far away and the spin-off indulges in scenarios and dialogues worthy of a sitcom from another time. With the exception of a few more or less funny references (“JI thought you and Chandler were going to come to LA a lot sooner. The gay scene is super vibrant here. » « Chandler and I are not a gay couple! “), Joey Tribbiani's New York life is almost never mentioned. Moreover, his former colleagues refuse to make any cameo appearances, and only David Schwimmer will set foot on the set, but only to direct two episodes.

Embarrassed by the situation, NBC still decided to renew the series for a second season where the writers did what they could to “fix” Joey, notably by multiplying the secondary characters. A vain effort, especially since the network decided to confront the program with the very unifying American Idol (the original format of The New Star). A kamikaze decision, which can only be read as a silent murder. Logically, a few weeks later, on March 7, 2006, Joey left the airwaves for good with a catastrophic score of 4 million loyal viewers. The remaining eight episodes, although already filmed, will never be broadcast on NBC.

Unreasonable expectations

How did it come to this? Looking back, Kevin Bright explains to First that ” The answer is quite simple: people liked a very specific character, Joey from Friendswho they knew by heart from having spent a decade at his side. They wanted to see more, except that the writers of Joey made a big mistake: they chose to alter his personality. He became someone else, a guy looking for love who has an adulterous affair with his neighbor's wife. It's very, very far from Joey Tribbiani. I think we lost the essence of the character. And the audience saw it clearly ” Indeed, over the course of the series, Joey is downright ready to get married (his on-and-off relationship with Alexis bears a striking resemblance to the Ross/Rachel dynamic), lands a steady job on a drama series, and when he finally gets fired, lands a job in an action blockbuster. A far cry from the heartthrob and loser actor audiences had grown to love.

Furthermore, Matt LeBlanc has another explanation for Joey's failure: ” In FriendsI shared the 22 minutes of each episode with five other characters. In Joey, almost the entire script came back to me… In fact, the pressure was such that I remember feeling like an elephant was sitting on my chest. “And if he confides having consoled himself by winning 30 million dollars with the series (” The kind of failure I would do again without batting an eyelid! “), his vision of things is shared by David Crane (who surely had more flair than Kevin Bright, but assures that he and Marta Kauffman refused to participate in the adventure because they were ” exhausted “) : ” People thought it would be a sequel to Friendsexcept that by removing the other characters, it's the very essence of the original series that disappears. There are very few examples on television of spin-offs that work. It's very hard to do. And then the audience's expectations regarding Joey were necessarily unreasonable. »

Kevin Bright also paints a picture of a complicated power relationship with the channel, despite its past: ” You know, when you start a new show, it doesn't matter what your reputation is or what you've done before. You're one of the new guys, so you're treated like a new guy and you have to prove yourself to the network. From there, things were looking bad. And then there was too much interference from the top, and I didn't have David and Marta to support me anymore… »

In 2021, he still told the Hollywood Reporter have in mind a much more interesting version of Joey Tribbiani's solo adventures: ” It would have been necessary to make a series in the tone ofEntouragerather than something about his family and having to grow up. Joey would have gotten a part in a pilot and had a blast in LA, getting into some crazy situations. We would have seen other sides of the character, and it would have been a lot more fun than his interactions with a nerdy nephew and a screaming sister.. »

Over time, Joey has completely disappeared from the screens, to the point of not being visible on any streaming platform, not even on Max (owned by Warner Bros.). The 46 episodes are only available for purchase on iTunes, for a somewhat shameful experience that no fan of Friends can't come out unscathed. But if you ever feel like it…