10 Ways Friends Was Almost Completely Different

2. Joey And Rachel Were Meant To Be An Item

Friends Joey Rachel Ross
NBC

As mentioned elsewhere, Joey Tribbiani most certainly put it about for ten seasons of Friends, going from one-night stand to one-night stand, casually dumping or outright ignoring ladies once he grew tired of them.

While there was the aforementioned discussion of having Joey and Phoebe to be revealed as long-time lovers, one other 'nearly' for the Joey character was that he was initially planned to be in a relationship with Monica.

In an interview with The Hollywood Reporter, co-creator Marta Kauffman revealed that Monica and Chandler were supposed to only be a brief relationship, before Monica then entered into a long-term relationship with Joey.

Once audiences reacted so strongly to what they'd seen between Monica and Chandler, Kauffman and the minds behind Friends decided that those Joey plans had to be shelved, for people clearly wanted to see more of Monica and Chandler as a couple.

Additionally, there was also an early plan to have Joey and Rachel become a proper couple way before their brief moments of flirtation and romance that followed towards the show's later years. Again though, the notion of Joey and Rachel as a formal couple was something else that was disregarded during those early seasons.

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