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‘Friends’ Continuity Error That Somehow No One Spotted Until Now

By Stacey Cole
Published on: 05:17 PST, Mar 21, 2016

Friends was a classic TV sitcom that ran for an amazing 10 seasons. With fans from many different generations, Friends stays as one of the most beloved and treasured TV shows of all time. The show had a colorful cast that had chemistry with each other on and off the set. Putting six actors’ careers on the map, the show left a big impact, making the stars arguably more famous by their Friends onscreen names than their real names.

Sometimes, though, Friends had a tendency to be offensive, especially when viewed today. Maybe it wasn’t offensive intentionally, but it did poke fun at some topics that today are bound to stir up some attention. According to SBS News, one of the many things about the show that might’ve been a little offensive was how Chandler Bing reacted to being mistaken as a gay man.

One of the roots of the recurring jokes on Chandler’s sexuality is his very own father. His father on the show is a transsexual man played by Kathleen Turner. The director of entertainment media for the LGBT advocacy organization GLAAD, Ray Bradford, weighed in on the situation and eventually dismissed it as not even being close to offensive.

Ray Bradford spoke on his stance on the transsexual character of the show.

“Images don’t exist in a vacuum – you look at where they were at that time of progression of TV and our country, and also where we are now and the standard. When I looked at Kathleen Turner’s character, there was nothing tragic about it. It was not a story line depicting her as a killer or a psychopath or a sex worker or anything like that.”

The cast of the show wasn’t based on how they looked or where they came from, but how they were together. Co-creator Marta Kauffman kept in mind the most important part of casting an ensemble: the chemistry.

Marta Kauffman spoke on how she cast the six Friends and the supporting world around them and, in particular, the lack of diversity within the six main characters.

“That is a criticism we have heard quite a bit. When we cast the show, we didn’t say to ourselves, ‘This is going to be an all-white cast.'”

She added that the mission was to “find the cast that suits and elevates our writing in such a way that we see something in the characters that we hadn’t seen before.”

“These were the six best actors for the material.”

Here’s a very interesting fact about Friends. Did you know the show had a very obvious continuity error hiding in plain sight, according to Mirror?

The window in Monica’s apartment would sometimes have a brick wall beyond it, and sometimes it’s an open view! Is it magic? Nope, just a continuity error that somehow took even the most diehard Friends fans all this time to notice.

What is magic, however, is how the show managed to run for so many years. The show was so successful that each of the six main cast members were earning $1 million per episode, according to Fortune. And perhaps even more magical for Friends fans is that a decade later, the cast still remains friends just the same way that they were friends in Friends.

Courteney Cox and Jennifer Aniston have found success in movies over the years, both coming a long way from B-movies and music video cameos, and they remain best friends.

David Schwimmer went on to lend his voice for the Madagascar movies, while creators David Crane and Marta Kauffman went on to create more shows and even worked on a couple together, Dream On and Veronica’s Closet. While some of the original cast found a new home on the big screen, some of the others found some more screen time on the small screen. Matt LeBlanc, Lisa Kudrow, and Matthew Perry have all had hit TV shows.

Friends might not have lasted forever, but these Friends are going to be here for a very long time. In another show or a movie, you’ll always remember these stars from one of the most beloved sitcoms of all time.

[Photo by Handout/Getty Images]

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