As America said goodbye to ten years of Friends on May 6, 2004, and
Greek-America said goodbye to perhaps our most prominent primetime presence in
Jennifer Aniston, we started asking ourselves, how would Friends have
been different if Jennifer Aniston’s character on the show was Greek-American?
The closest mention of anything remotely Greek-American was back in the first
season when the girls were supposedly spying on George Stephanopoulos who was in
a building across the way, and of course who could forget how they almost needed
to borrow a Greek-American priest from the Anastassakis wedding for Monica and
Chandler’s wedding. (Incidentally, Anastassakis is Jennifer Aniston’s real
Greek last name before her family shortened it.) But what if the writers of the
show decided that Rachel (and we can’t think of a Greek name for her that
starts with an “R”, so we won’t even try) was a 20-something
Greek-American girl living in Manhattan? Would the show have made it out of the
first season? Would the Greek-American Rachel have become a pop-culture icon?
Would Ross and Rachel ever have been Ross and Rachel?
We’re starting with the assumption that you would make Rachel a
Greek-American because, besides Joey, it wouldn’t make sense to have had any
other character as a believable Greek-American. You could easily make Joey a
Greek-American instead of an Italian-American, with his love of food, women, and
references to his large family, but honestly, it’s hard to find a Greek guy
who’s that dumb at times… Although, remember the episode where Joey tried to
find a guy who looked just like him to pass him off as his twin so he could
participate in a medical study? The actor that they cast in that part who was
even dumber than Joey, was the same actor who played the brother, Nick, in My
Big Fat Greek Wedding, who was about as dumb and sweet as Joey’s character
on Friends. As for the rest of the characters: Phoebe – too crunchy and too
ditzy to be a Greek girl; Monica – too obsessive compulsive to be a Greek
girl; Chandler – too witty but also too self-deprecating to be a Greek guy.
Finally there’s Ross. The Ross of the first season was too depressed and whiny
to be a Greek guy. There was some possibility of his passing as a Greek guy when
he grew a backbone in the second season and during the middle of the show, but
for the last few seasons he’s been too much of spaz to be a believable
Greek-American.
Having cast Rachel as our Greek-American character, we’ll now turn to a
season-by-season look at how Friends would have been a much better show when you
put a little Metaxa into those oversize coffee cups at the Central Perk.
Season 1
The show opens with Rachel having left her fiancé at the altar, (who we’ll
also make Greek-American for argument sake as well), and shows up at a Manhattan
coffee house (presumably she wouldn’t have had to go a long way to escape
Astoria) and finds her old high school friend, Monica, and the rest of the group
that unbeknownst to her would become her friends for the next 10 years. There’s
that memorable scene at the end of the episode, where the rest of the gang makes
her cut up her daddy’s credit cards and become an adult in the real world. As
a Greek-American girl, she’d never have done that but the end result may have
been the same, when her parents would have probably disinherited her on the spot
for embarrassing them in front of the whole community and leaving them to pay
for the Greek band and the rest of the overdone reception, while trying to
wrestle back any the vestiges of a prika that they’d already
surrendered to her fiancé. Rachel’s fiancé would probably not have taken
that honeymoon trip with her maid of honor because more than likely it would
have been a sister or a first cousin of Rachel’s, and those types of family
bonds can’t be broken in the Greek community. Rachel would still have gone on
to waitress at Central Perk, because as everyone knows, every Greek girl has or
should have some food service experience at some point before turning 30 (and
the really lucky ones get to have it their entire lives, because they grow up to
own and manage restaurants!) and she would have definitely had second thoughts
about having done the right thing to leave a man who she didn’t love instead
of marrying for money and security. Towards the end of the first season, her
fiancé returns claiming he’s still in love with her, and they briefly get
back together. (If they’d gotten back together for good that would have been
the end of the show, so thankfully she didn’t do it, and rightfully so.
Remember girls, if a Greek guy treats you like crap there’s no going back to
him just because he’s Greek.)
As for the beginnings of Ross and Rachel, their first quasi-date would not
have been in a Laundromat, because no Greek mother, no matter how much of a
princess her daughter is, would have let her make it past elementary school
without teaching her how to do laundry. The whole Rachel and Paolo thing still
would have happened because she’d would have be going through her
Greek-girl-dating-hot-guys-who-are-wrong-for-them phase, which she should have
gotten out of her system before even thinking about settling down and getting
married, so it just would have been a late onset of the condition. Ross would
continue to pine for her throughout the course of the first season, but another
classic episodes would not have happened, like the time when Ross let Rachel win
in poker because she didn’t get the job at Saks. (Anyway, everyone knows that
growing up in a Greek family she would have received at least a working
knowledge of gambling through her father, enough to win without needing Ross to
have thrown the game.) The season finale would have had her finding out about
Ross’s feelings for her, but as a lovingly stubborn and prideful
Greek-American girl, Rachel doesn’t go to the airport to meet him, because
that smacks of too much effort, and she figured if he wanted her, he would have
needed to get up the nerve to actually ask her out one of those times.
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