‘The Reunion’ allows us to relive the iconic show’s best moments and celebrate with the stars
Ladies and gentlemen, can we have an OMG? And all the tissues! It’s Friends: The Reunion! Also known as The One Where They Get Back Together, which is streaming on Showmax.
Now in their 50s, Courteney Cox (Monica), Jennifer Aniston (Rachel), Lisa Kudrow (Phoebe), Matt LeBlanc (Joey), Matthew Perry (Chandler), and David Schwimmer (Ross) bring us all the feels as they return to the iconic comedy’s original sound stage for a real-life unscripted celebration of the beloved show.
The line-up of guest stars and celebrities goes from host James Corden, Reese Witherspoon, David Beckham to Justin Bieber. Friends is at number two on the most popular TV list, and is at 53 on IMDb’s top rated TV of all time — 17 years after the finale aired in 2004. During its run, the comedy series won 77 awards, including six Emmys.
“He not only remembered pretty much every episode and moment but also, it seemed, got the biggest kick out of revisiting Joey.”
“How you doing?” Joey’s catchphrase/pick-up line has become part of the English language and it’s the question the Friends stars try to answer in Friends: The Reunion.
Somewhere between the laughter, the tears and the revelations of the cast’s long-awaited catch-up, Joey Tribbiani just became the world’s favourite uncle during its premier last week, with many fans saying he had “won” Friends: The Reunion.
“The rest of the world should know that for the last 24 hours, Irish Twitter has become obsessed with how much LeBlanc looks like everyone’s uncle/cousin,” Irish comedian Dara Ó Briain tweeted.
And, as the meme-verse went into overdrive, another social-media user, @peterjmcgann, nailed it with the tweet: “How *you* getting on?” Glamour magazine, meanwhile, said: “If someone were to ‘win’ the Friends reunion it would be LeBlanc.
“He not only remembered pretty much every episode and moment but also, it seemed, got the biggest kick out of revisiting Joey.”
Naive and not too quick on the uptake, Joey was a ladies’ man and a joke-ster. That he was often also the punchline is a ‘moo’ point, or as Joey once explained: “It’s like a cow’s opinion. It just doesn’t matter. It’s moo.”
One of the highlights of The Reunion is a quiet moment where LeBlanc and Perry are ensconced in their old Barca-Loungers and Perry says: “Aw, Matty, it’s good to see you, buddy.”
We know how he feels. LeBlanc has come armed with all the goodies — the story of an almost broken nose, the tale of a dislocated shoulder, and the one about a badly-timed bender. In the The Reunion, he reveals the poor decision that ended up landing him the part of Joey, reprises a show-stopper costume with the line: “Could I BE wearing any more clothes?”, and delivers a mic drop “Bullsh*t” to one bi-i-ig confession.
“For years and years, I barely left the house,” he said in an interview with the Mirror. “I was burnt out. I wanted to not have a schedule, not be somewhere. I was in a position to do that. My agent was bummed. Most actors call their agents and say: ‘What’s going on?’ I’d call mine and say: ‘Please lose my number for a few years.’ It was a very dark time. I almost had a nervous breakdown.”
Speaking to People magazine, he said: “It’s funny, when we do get together, it’s like no time has passed. We pick up right where we left off.” On where his character would be today, LeBlanc says Joey “would have opened a chain of sandwich shop. And eaten all the sandwiches,” Perry quips.
For his part, Schwimmer says Ross “would’ve invested in Joey’s sandwich shop and lost a lot of his savings for his kids [with Rachel, obviously].”
“Dinosaur-themed sandwich shop!” LeBlanc chimes in. “Bronto-burger!”
In real life, LeBlanc has been far too busy to open any sandwich shops (though we would totally live there if he did). Unlike his co-stars, many of whom worked hard to break the stereotypes of their iconic Friends characters, LeBlanc learned, with a few bumps along the way, to leverage the heck out of the series that defined his career, proving himself a consummate entertainer along the way. After Friends ended, he threw himself into the two-season Golden Globe-nominated spin-off series, Joey, that saw his character move to Hollywood to pursue his acting career.
When the show was cancelled, he crashed.
“For years and years, I barely left the house,” he said in an interview with the Mirror. “I was burnt out. I wanted to not have a schedule, not be somewhere. I was in a position to do that.
“My agent was bummed. Most actors call their agents and say: ‘What’s going on?’ I’d call mine and say: ‘Please lose my number for a few years.’ It was a very dark time. I almost had a nervous breakdown.”
Luckily for us, he got his mojo back in 2011. Sticking with the Matt-goes-to-Hollywood theme, the actor took on the hilariously meta five-season comedy series Episodes (co-created by Friends’ David Crane), which earned him a Golden Globe for playing himself, and gifted us a mini-reunion when Schwimmer popped in to play himself in one episode.
LeBlanc also guested in five episodes of Kudrow’s comedy series Web Therapy, where he played gambling addict Nick Jericho.
In 2016, LeBlanc took the plunge and dispensed with characters altogether, joining the popular British series Top Gear as a co-host (and sometime adrenaline junkie) for three years.
The acting bug has a way of biting back though, and in 2016, he signed on to a role that would be his biggest departure yet, to play old-school dad Adam Burns in the sitcom Man with a Plan, which he also executive produced.
The series ended in 2020, having won the People’s Choice Award for Favourite New TV Comedy in 2017. Over the course of his almost 35-year career, LeBlanc has been nominated for seven Emmys (three for Friends and four for Episodes) and five Golden Globes, winning best actor for Episodes. Along the way, he also married British-born American model Melissa McKnight in 2003. Their daughter, Marina, was born a year later. Although Marina suffered seizures, thought to be a form of dysplasia, as an infant, the condition subsided by the time she was two.
LeBlanc and McKnight stayed together until 2006, when they divorced, citing irreconcilable differences. In an interview with former NBC president Warren Littlefield on shooting the final episodes of Friends, LeBlanc said: “We were so aware that our time together was coming to an end.
“‘Yes, I’ll talk to you. Yes, I’ll always know you, but I won’t know you like this. I won’t see you every day, all day … To have this awesome, awesome experience every week. It’s coming to an end.
“So in those final two weeks, we would steal away these little moments. ‘Hey, let’s go hang out. Let’s go sit in my room.’
“It was really … a lot of Kleenex. There are only five people in the world who know exactly what being on Friends was like, other than me … David, Matthew, Lisa, Courteney, and Jen. That’s it.”
And that’s what we get to see on The Reunion, six friends who shared that a once-in-a-lifetime experience with us. After all, they were our friends too.
