Wall Banger/Live-Action TV/Friends

Friends has multiple wallbangers:

• The 10th season episode with Greg Kinnear as Charlie's ex-boyfriend. Basically, he is in charge of a committee to decide who gets a grant that Ross is applying for, and he attempts to blackmail Ross into breaking up with Charlie (which Ross calls him out on as being "crazy", but which he insists is "romantic"). When Ross tells Charlie about this and the two of them go to confront her ex, she agrees that it is romantic, and proceeds to leave Ross for her crazy ex-boyfriend, and starts kissing him RIGHT IN FRONT OF ROSS! It's particularly bad because Charlie had been built up for several episodes as ideal for Ross; her ex is said to have broken up with her (which he explains as being due to a fear of committing to her); and it leaves Ross with no dignity whatsoever. It strikes one as a completely contrived incident for the sake of leaving Ross free to be conveniently paired with Rachel at the finale. This also falls squarely into What an Idiot! territory: one wonders why Ross failed to report what was a clear violation of ethics on the part of Kinnear, especially after losing both the grant and his girlfriend. There probably wasn't anything he could have done about Charlie; but if he'd reported Kinnear's behaviour, he could possibly have held onto his grant.
  • While I agree 100% on everything, I'd like to put this in: my personal canon is that Ross did report Hobart (Kinnear's character) to the board and got his grant. I'm not entirely certain, but I'm pretty sure reports like that take a while to get processed and sorted out and whatnot, so maybe it was still going on by the end of the show.
• Monica as Phoebe's wedding planner in "The One With Phoebe's Wedding". Not only is she incessantly rude to Phoebe, even cutting off the speeches at the rehearsal dinner midway through to fit her entirely arbitrary timetable, but she's also shown to delight in Phoebe's struggles after Pheebs (justifiably) fires Monica and has to organise the wedding herself. Hell of a way to treat one of your best friends on what's supposed to be the happiest day of her life.
• 'The One with the Shark', where Monica walks in on Chandler masturbating to porn; he jumps up and quickly changes the channel to a shark documentary. Despite seeing how he panicked and jumped, it never occurs to Monica that maybe he changed the channel; she honestly believes he gets off to sharks! Whaaat?
  • With sharks like these who could blame her?
• The sheer On and off and on and off and on Ross and Rachel.
• Phoebe managed to out-crazy herself and believes that her dead mother returned as a cat. She refuses to return the cat to its rightful owner, an eight year old little girl. When Ross calls her out on this, she gets mad at him for being "intolerant" of her beliefs! The other characters, while they secretly agree with him, do not support him. And, as if Ross wasn't being humiliated enough, he is forced to apologize to the cat.
  • In the commentary for this episode, it's revealed that producer Marta Kaufmann was the one who pushed for that subplot after her own mother passed away, which explains the akwardness of it.
    • It's also been said that others on the writing staff would've normally nixed anything like this, but given the circumstances, didn't have the heart to.

---

Back to Wall Banger

Back to Friends