The Janice Problem

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Those who weren’t around (or weren’t watching) in the early 2000s might struggle to understand the extent to which the TV show Friends, which turned 30 last weekend, permeated people’s lives. Where I was growing up in the U.K., it was as much a cultural phenomenon as a soundtrack; a background hum, a bit like the constant sound of traffic when you live on a busy street. 

So important was it to have seen the latest episode that when it aired each week, I’d sneak into my parents’ bedroom after bedtime to watch it, lest I be excluded from the only conversation at school the next day. 

Rachel, Monica or Phoebe?

Friends provided tweenage girls with a handy choice of frameworks around which to build their personalities: Rachel (hot, but princessy), Monica (hot, but neurotic) or Phoebe (kooky, still quite hot). I was tall and blonde and crop tops weren’t my thing, so I cultivated my persona with tie-dye and quirky non-sequiturs. When a boy I liked said “Wait—I’ve just realized who you remind me of. You’re so like Phoebe,” it felt like all my hard work had paid off. 

Rewatching the show three decades on, I discovered many of the jokes land as well today as they did back then. It still feels fresh—partly because the fashion has come back around (hello, claw clips and crop tops) and partly because, for its time, Friends was surprisingly forward-thinking. There were three male characters, Ross, Chandler and Joey, and three female characters. Rachel, Phoebe and Monica—who easily notched up half the screen time—discussed life and friendship and work and what to do if a jellyfish stings you (and yes, sometimes romance). In that respect, Friends aced the Bechdel test.

But then there was Janice.

Janice, played by the actress Maggie Wheeler, appeared in 19 of a total 236 episodes of Friends. Her debut comes toward the beginning of the first season. During this appearance, she is more of a punchline than a character; her very existence a surprise to the audience. We didn’t know Chandler had a girlfriend—but here she is. Chandler has grown weary of their relationship. He knows the right thing to do is to break up with her. But breaking up is hard, and he is a wimp. And therein lies the problem.

‘Human Problem’

It’s clear, when Janice walks in, why Chandler needs to break up with her. She’s a walking stereotype; loud and nasal with a honking catchphrase, “Oh My Gawd.” She wears big, gaudy pearls and a huge gold watch. She is tacky and brash. And—gasp!—she is needy: She’s had “the most supremely awful day,” and she is going to tell you alllll about it. 

But Janice isn’t there as a receptacle for audience empathy; she is there so Chandler can overcome his fear of breakups. Amy Mason, a comedian whose own sitcom is currently in development, tells me Janice is “an impediment, a human problem.” 

“Every episode in a sitcom has something that messes things up,” she says. “They start off by hoping they're going to do something like have a dinner party or have a date or a haircut, and something happens that goes wrong. Janice is [the] impediment.”

In other words, Janice, who has romantic relationships with two of the three male leads (and a sort of love-hate relationship with Joey), has one role: to reflect the male characters’ flaws.

It’s partly a consequence of the medium. “You have to make things visual in TV,” says Suchandrika Chakrabarti, a writer and comedian. “You can't have Chandler just having a fight in his head. He has to have a human woman to bring out his insecurities, to work through things.”

And that’s fine. But did they have to make Janice so—different? Because she isn’t like the other women on Friends. While four of the six principle characters have had conspicuously affluent upbringings, Janice’s imperfections and inability to fit in suggest that whatever background she did come from (nobody ever asked), it likely wasn’t privileged like theirs. 

Looking at Janice through a 2024 lens is an even more uncomfortable experience. That’s because in Friends “they are always intolerant of outsiders,” explains Mason, though they don’t really discriminate on who they discriminate against. Take Carol, Ross’s wife at the start of the series, who leaves him for a woman.

“She is literally a joke,” says Mason. And Ross is a joke for having married her in the first place, she continues. 

There are countless moments of homophobia, like when Joey and Ross realize, to their horror, that they’ve fallen asleep together on the sofa. Even when the show’s writers did grudgingly embrace gay characters, like the wedding between Carol and her long-term partner Susan, it’s done with a fair degree of discomfort. We never actually see the two brides kiss. 

“It instilled a deep sense of shame in somebody who grew up during that time,” says Mason who is queer and left her ex-husband. “I still have internalized homophobia, and it's partly because we just laughed at gay people.”

The same can be said for people of color. They weren’t punchlines, per se, but they weren’t really present, either. In 10 seasons there were only 27 Black characters, and only one, Ross’s girlfriend Charlie Wheeler, played by Aisha Tyler, had a recurring role. 

Tyler, whose career has included roles in Criminal Minds and as the host of Whose Line Is It Anyway, says people still shout “Black girl from Friends!” at her in the street. “Friends was also reflective of a whole business that thought that only white stories sold,” she has said. “I mean, that’s just been the attitude in Hollywood for a long time.”

You Can’t Marry a Janice

Should we be surprised? The show, after all, is a period piece; it was peak “don’t ask, don’t tell;” a product of its time. 

Chakrabarti explains: It hinged on this idea of romantic comedy “which, in the 90s, was very conservative.” There was absolutely a prevalent idea that a woman, no matter how liberated, was simply waiting—indeed, longing—for a man. 

And that brings us back to Janice.

Janice longs for a man to complete her. But, wonders Chakrabarti, can Janice complete a man? It’s unlikely: “The male writers are going, what if you date this woman and then she expects you to marry her? You can’t marry a Janice.” 

And there’s the rub. Janice’s character—played so magnificently by Wheeler—was created expressly to punch down. And in the late ‘90s and early 2000s, when LGBTQ folks and blonde women and women with big hair or big noses or loud laughs were a punchline, and the comedy world honestly thought there were instances when blackface was acceptable, cheap laughs like that were fine.

“Punching down is something we talk about a lot more these days,” says Chakrabarti. Of course it still happens, but many of the most successful comedies of the 2020s either aim for gentler laughs (think Ted Lasso) or “punch up” by interrogating those in power (Succession, Schitt’s Creek).

So who, or what, shall we blame for Janice?

Was it a writers’ room that was so famously bro-tastic that a (failed) discrimination and harassment lawsuit brought against the show by a female writers’ assistant is still referenced by Hollywood HR departments today? Was it simply the culture at the time? 

Who’s to say? 

As for Janice, she may have largely disappeared from our televisions, but she lives on, representing something bigger in our cultural lives: To some people, women will always be a punchline.