8 Actors Who Knew Their TV Show Was Doomed On Day 1

Trying to follow-up arguably the biggest sitcom ever to grace the world's TV screens is a tall order, whatever way you slice it. Trying to do so just a few months on from its highly emotional finale being taken in by over 50 million passionate fans around the globe was downright insane.

And sure enough, the ill-advised Friends spin-off that was Joey didn't exactly manage to recapture lightning in a bottle despite boasting one of the most loveable elements of that NBC game-changer front-and-centre.

But clearly feeling as though the burden of having to carry an entire episode on his back was "a lot of responsibility" and "the pressure was so much", Matt LeBlanc himself has since confessed to Radio Times:

"It was doomed from the start. In Friends I was sharing a 22-minute episode with six other characters. In Joey the script was all me,"

Going further, LeBlanc would also allude to the showrunner, who had also just finished up on Friends, and himself likely benefitting from taking a year off instead of diving straight into the spin-off.

In the end, though, Joey was savaged by the critics and didn't live past its second season before being canned. LeBlanc would also take a much-needed five-year break from the acting world not long after Joey's cancellation before rocking up in BBC Two and Showtimes' Episodes and eventually winning a Golden Globe in 2011 for playing a fictionalised version of himself.