Friends/YMMV

• Abandon Shipping: Many, many fans abandoned Ross and Rachel in Seasons Three and Four. They still kept a fanbase, but nowhere near as big as the writers believed.
• Base Breaker: Did Ross cheat on Rachel?
  • I'm so so sorry for this, but I can't possibly resist. Ahem. THEY WERE ON A BREEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEAK!
• Crazy Awesome: Phoebe. Case in point, Monica and Phoebe were supposed to plan Rachel's surprise birthday party together. Monica naturally makes all the decisions about the way the party will go, leaving Phoebe with only cups and ice. Phoebe ends up making cups and ice the dominant theme of the party, to the point where Monica's finger food is dismissed over Phoebe's snow cones.
• Dry Docking: People of both sexes did not want Ross and Rachel to be together, so they could have that couple for themselves.
• Ear Worm: Sing the first line to "Smelly Cat" to any Friends fan. Listen as they sing the next few lines with the emphases in just the right places.
  • Even worse, sing the opening theme "I'll Be There For You". Expect claps.
  • Also, the "Freud!" song.
• Family-Unfriendly Aesop: Oh, dear Lord, the episode in which Phoebe thinks a stray cat is her reincarnated mother. After learning the cat belongs to a little girl, Monica, Rachel, Chandler, and Joey all wimp out at telling Phoebe, and Ross alone goes through with it. When Phoebe decides to keep the cat because she has to respect her mother's wish to be with her, her friends all wimp out again, and only Ross insists on putting an end to this. For this, Ross gets chewed out for being a bad friend, because he wasn't supportive of Phoebe, like the others were. The problem with that is that Ross was supportive of Phoebe, and only stopped humoring her when he found out about the little girl. The only real difference between Ross and the others was that he was unwilling to let Phoebe keep the cat at the little girl's expense. So, apparently, being a good friend means you have to support somebody unconditionally, even when they're totally wrong, when they're being selfish, or when their actions would actually hurt an innocent child.
  • By the way, just so the whole thing makes NO sense at all... After Ross apologizes, Phoebe does a complete 180-degree turn and returns the cat. What happened to respecting her mother's wishes? The episode gives no explanation for Phoebe's abrupt change of heart, nor does it note that if she had just agreed to do that to begin with, her fight with Ross wouldn't have happened at all.
• Fanon: The opening credits with the whole cast dancing in a park fountain with strings of lights everywhere is canon, and actually from a photo-shoot Joey was modelling in which needed five other good-looking extras in a pinch.
  • Highly unlikely. If that situation arose, they wouldn't have included Chandler.
    • They were really, really desperate for six people for the sake of symmetry.
• Fetish Fuel Station Attendant: Phoebe, a ditzy blonde whose identical twin sister is a porn star.
  • And given that we learn Phoebe is quite kinky in the sack herself...
• Funny Aneurysm Moment: In earlier seasons, Chandler makes multiple jokes about not being able to have children...
  • Chandler's smoking addiction wasn't very funny later on when Matthew Perry went into rehab to control his drinking.
  • A Season 2 episode showed Monica getting Chandler to get in shape reflecting Matthew Perry's later weight problem.
• Germans Love David Hasselhoff: James Michael Tyler (Gunther) was so popular in Dubai that he got offered to be the spokesman for a local coffee brand but NBC botched the deal (they wanted more money).
• Harsher in Hindsight: In Season 3, Monica considers getting pregnant from a sperm donor. It's played for laughs and the rest of the cast thinks it's a dumb idea (though largely because she's single). At the end of Season 9, Chandler and Monica turn out to be incompatible so they have to consider surrogacy or a sperm donor.
  • Related to this. In the episode where they go to the beach, Chandler comments on Rachel's gigantic hat by saying "I was taken aboard that hat! Now I can't have children."
  • In Season 8, Brad Pitt appeared as one of Ross's old high school friends, who hated Rachel to the point that he was president of an Anti-Rachel club in high school. At the time, it was a funny Casting Gag over the fact that Brad Pitt was married to Jennifer Aniston in real life; the joke became a lot less funny after Pitt divorced Aniston after apparently cheating on her with Angelina Jolie. Oh the cringe!
• Hilarious in Hindsight:
  • Season 5 ends with Ross and Rachel getting married while drunk in Vegas. Ross promises he'll get it annulled, but he doesn't want to have his third marriage fail as well, so he ends up lying to Rachel about it. Rachel finds out three episodes later that they're still married, and she furiously asks Ross, "When were you going to tell me? After the birth of our first secret child?" Two seasons later, she gets pregnant with Ross's child, and Ross is the last one to find out.
  • When Joey auditions for the lead of a new detective show, he tells his friends not to get their hopes up, as he isn't sure if he's good enough to carry his own TV show. Turns out he was right.
  • When Carol and Susan get married, someone asks who is the most likely to get married last and everyone looks at Chandler. He actually marries Monica a few seasons later, while other main characters are still single.
  • The already hilarious couch moving scene ("Pivot!") is even better after you've seen David Schwimmer as Drill Sergeant Nasty Herbert Sobel in Band of Brothers.
  • In "The One with All the Resolutions", Ross says "no divorces in '99!/Just the one divorce in '99!". He ends up Divorcing Rachel less than a year later in "The One with Joey's Porsche" (which aired on October 21st, 1999) making his 'resolution' hilarious indeed.
  • Joey asked Rachel "How you doin'? You all right?"? in the Season 2 premiere. Who would have thought that that would be his catchphrase?
  • Invoked in universe during the One with the Thanksgiving Flashbacks when Ross brags about Carol playing "for both teams".
  • The episode where Rachel was freaked out that Ross has been planning their future, down to the name of their kids. The first he came up with was Emily.
• Hollywood Homely: A lot of people give Monica a lot of crap for being ugly, while she is just as attractive, if not more, than Rachel and Phoebe.
  • Those instances are rather minimal when it comes to Monica. Plenty of people see her for how attractive she is. But Ross and Chandler are definitely this. Especially Chandler in the first few seasons where all women seem to treat him like he's repulsive when actually he's quite cute and very funny. It gets better when the writing focuses on how he's socially awkward rather than unattractive.
  • On a more notable level, Fat!Monica.
• Ho Yay: There have been more marriage/romance/infidelity metaphors surrounding Chandler and Joey's relationship as roommates than is possible to count.
  • Also occasionally between Ross and Joey, especially in "The One with the Nap Partners".
    • Ross also gave Joey a passionate kiss when he needed to audition for a role that involved having to kiss another man. Joey remarked that Rachel was a lucky woman.
  • Phoebe was shown to have Les Yay tendencies in "The One with Ross and Monica's Cousin" where she ends up starring longingly at Cassie and she even thinks "Ask her out! She's not your cousin!"
  • Chandler once kissed Ross while drunk.
  • The Ho Yay between Joey and Chandler even continue into the What Could Have Been episode in Season 6, where Joey hires Chandler (now a struggling comedy writer) to be his assistant. And then there's this line:

Joey: (to Chandler) Hey, go take off those pants, they look ready!

• • Rachel and Monica have had break-up moments, the most hilarious one being when Monica was spending time with Ross's new girlfriend Julie and Rachel confronted her about it. The conversation sounded like two lovers having a quarrel over cheating.
• Memetic Mutation: How you doin'?
  • OH...MY...GOD! Someone just created a meme!
  • That dog will lick itself but it will not touch your sandwich, what does that tell you?
  • It's a moo point anyway. It's like a cow's opinion - it's moo.
    • Have I been living with Joey too long, or did that actually make sense?
    • Is it moo, or is it mu?
  • "Noooooo!"; "I KNOW!"
  • "Could this quote be any more memetic?"
  • You know? You know? You don't know!
  • Paper! Snow! A Ghost!
  • Why-why-why, why would you do that?
  • PIVOT!
  • WE WERE ON A BREEEEAAAAAKKK!!
  • They don't know that we know that they know that we know that they know Exacty
• Retroactive Recognition: This trope may just as well be called House on a Plane.
  • Melora Hardin (in the first season) and Craig Robinson (in the last season) both had guest spots on the show, though it would take another sitcom years later before anyone knew who they were...
  • Phoebe had every right to be intimidated by her future husband Mike's parents, considering they are Angela Petrelli and President Logan.
  • Cole Sprouse played Ben in the later seasons.
    • Ben was in the later seasons?
• The Scrappy: Ross and Rachel, more so Rachel, as their Will They or Won't They? plot eventually became the A-Plot to show in later seasons.
• Shocking Swerve: Rachel's pregnancy.
• Squick: In "The One with Joey's Big Break":

Joey: [to Ross] So who would you rather sleep with, Monica or Rachel?

Ross: Dude, you are sick!

Joey: Oh, I'm sorry. I forgot you had that whole Rachel thing...

• • And then add in that Ross actually did kiss Monica once, in a dark bedroom at a college party, where he thought it was Rachel "under a pile of clothes."
  • Don't forget this line from Chandler in "The One with Ross' Tan":

Chandler: "Dude, stop staring at my wife's legs! (beat) No, no. Stop staring at your sister's legs!"

• • In one Thanksgiving episode, Monica considers dating Richard's son. The two actually do get to this point in the end, but by that point, the others have already been squicked out.

"Are you sure you wanna be in a situation where you can say, 'That's not the way your father did it?'"

• • Danny and his sister.
  • The childbirth video, especially for Chandler and Monica.
• Straw Man Has a Point: When Monica's parents tell her they spent her wedding fund, Chandler confesses he has some money saved up and tells Monica how much. She's immediately excited and makes plans to spend it on the wedding, but Chandler refuses to devote all of his savings to what he sees as a one-time party. While we're not told exactly how much money is being discussed, Monica says it's enough to pay for her dream wedding. Considering how she can be it's likely that it's a lot of cash Chandler has, and odds are also that a lot of the stuff she has planned are things she doesn't need. To both of their credit though, Chandler eventually relents but Monica agrees with him.
  • In the final season, when Monica and Chandler move out of New York and start a family you finally learn why he was so reluctant to use that money.
• Tear Jerker: This scene allegedly had everyone in tears during its filming.
  • Courteney Cox and Matthew Perry also reportedly couldn't hold back the tears when filming the scene where Monica proposes.
  • If you don't cry after seeing what Ross did for Rachel on the prom video, and the expression on his face after Rachel leaves, you do not have a soul. A clip can be found here.
  • Seeing Phoebe say goodbye to the triplets and just end up quietly rocking them while the camera panned out.
  • If you've watched every episode of this show, you WILL cry at the very end.
    • Heck, the part that brought tears to this troper's eyes in the finale was of all things the destruction of the Foosball table to rescue the ducklings. THE TABLE!
• Take That, Scrappy!: Hugh Laurie's reams out Rachel.
• Unintentionally Unsympathetic: The former Trope Namer was "Fat Monica", referring to the flashbacks that portrayed the earlier years when Monica was fat.
• The Woobie: Given Phoebe's past and her wide-eyed look on the world, you know you just wanna give her a hug. The fact that she's played by Lisa Kudrow helps, too.