Sometimes, suspense is overwhelming. Who would win that first season of Survivor? Who would win the presidential election? Will the bread dough rise? Will it rain on your birthday party?
Suspense was not overwhelming when we asked our listeners to rank the friends of Friends from best to worst, at least in one regard: We suspected Ross would come in last and be named Worst Friend. And it was true. Let’s talk about the way our listeners ranked the Friends, beginning with Ross and working our way up to your BFoFF—Best Friend on Friends Forever.
[Just a note: As it turned out, these calculations weren’t complex. The ranking of who received the most votes for Best Friend was the exact opposite of the ranking of who received the most votes for Worst Friend. So Ross received both the most Worst Friend votes and the fewest Best Friend votes, and so on.]
6. Ross
Ross got very mopey over the show’s ten seasons, and he developed a temper at one point and started yelling at his co-workers, and he said Rachel’s name during his wedding to Emily, and it took him forever to stop resenting Susan for being married to Carol, and so forth and so on. But I must say, I was still impressed to see that Ross received 76 percent of the thousands of votes for Worst Friend that came in.
That’s so many! That means that if the other five Friends were statistically similar to our listeners, 3.8 of them would have thought he was the worst one in the group! Hopefully, Monica wouldn’t, since that’s his sister, so out of the four Friends he’s not related to, only .2 people—like, just Phoebe’s arm—picked anybody other than Ross as Worst Friend! Maybe he should have abandoned the Pivot Couch earlier.
5. Rachel
This one surprised me a little more! I grew to appreciate Rachel’s goofy sense of humor, but it’s true that in the beginning, she was presented as spoiled and self-interested, obsessed with shopping and buying and reluctant to abandon her father’s credit cards. Over time, I think Jennifer Aniston’s offbeat comic energy gave Rachel a highly necessary jolt of strangeness, and I will never tire of her warm friendship with Joey, which led to such highlights as their exchanging their favorite books. Putting Little Women in the freezer was maybe the most Joey thing to ever happen, and it was Rachel who understood best that he needed to do it.
4. Monica
I think Monica fell into a little bit of the TV writing problem in which competence, especially in women, is easily exaggerated until it becomes a kind of neurotic unpleasantness (the same thing happened to Rebecca, played by Kirstie Alley, on Cheers). In the early going, Monica was the nurturer, the mom, the host, the adult. Over time, especially after she and Chandler were married (…spoiler alert?), she got kind of mean and critical in a different way I enjoyed a lot less. I think early Monica would have fared better if she hadn’t been saddled with the problems of later Monica, much as I think later Rachel would have done better in our vote without the limitations of early Rachel.
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