Friends has been a big part of my life since its original run on NBC that started 30 years ago, and through endless rewatches of the series with my HBO Max subscription, I’ve thought a lot about each character and the situations they get themselves into. Admittedly, I love them all — Ross, Rachel, Chandler, Monica, Phoebe and Joey — despite their sometimes-obvious faults, but I happened upon a thread criticizing Jennifer Aniston’s character, and I have to admit some good points were made.
Every Friends fan has their favorite and least-favorite characters. There are people who think Matt LeBlanc’s Joey is too obsessed with food or that Lisa Kudrow’s Phoebe is unrealistically off-beat. Many agree that David Schwimmer’s Ross is simply the worst. For one fan on Reddit, however, Rachel Green is the biggest offender, as they began a thread titled “Rachel from Friends is a pretty awful person who just got away with things because she was pretty,” and wrote:
Seriously, she is just the worst. They make this whole deal about her growing so much as a person but she never stops being awful. That thing with Ross? She wanted the break and she literally had another guy come over to her apartment 5 minutes after. As in, the same guy Ross was upset about is just there, and she gets to bitch, ‘Oh he slept with another woman,’ and she never once admits it?
I’m sorry, I was unaware that Will Colbert (co-founder of the “I Hate Rachel Green” Club) was on Reddit.
It’s a fair point, though. While Rachel does show more emotional maturity than her sisters Jill and Amy (portrayed excellently by Reese Witherspoon and Christina Applegate), there’s no questioning the character’s privilege and spoiled tendencies.
Even Jennifer Aniston has admitted Ross and Rachel were on a break during the Friends: The Reunion special, and it was pretty bad form to let Mark come to her place after he was the central figure of her and Ross’ argument. The fan continued:
The whole breaking Ross up from Julie, a GOOD person who was more compatible with him? Same thing. And Bonnie? Ok so maybe it was just a rebound, but what right did Rachel have to keep interfering? She is just an awfully entitled creature who got away with everything for her looks.
I’ve always thought that Rachel convincing Bonnie (Christine Taylor) to shave her head was one of the character’s more diabolical moves (though I also blame Ross for being so repulsed by his girlfriend just wanting to live her best bald life). And yes, breaking up Ross and Julie was awful, because they were happy (they got a cat!), and Lauren Tom’s character was nothing but an angel.
Rachel was known to get in the way of pretty much every one of Ross’ other relationships, whether she was calling the baby store saleswoman a “horny bitch” for flirting with Ross or straight up flying across the globe to try to stop him from marrying Emily.
Phoebe even called her out for the baby store slut-shaming, exclaiming, “Oh my God! A woman flirting with a single man? We MUST alert the church elders,” and others on Reddit sided with House star Hugh Laurie when he guest-starred as a passenger on Rachel’s flight to London. AgeofVictoriaPodcast wrote:
Yeah and it was great when she sat next to House on the plane and he tore her a new one over her evil plans to interfere with Ross’s wedding.
Even for the most loyal Rachel fans, it’s hard to think back on how she behaved in several situations of one of the best sitcoms of all time and not admit that she sometimes acted like an awful person. But that’s not going to stop me from loving her or the show in general.
All 10 seasons of Friends can be streamed on HBO Max, while you can catch Jennifer Aniston on The Morning Show, whose fourth season just premiered on the 2025 TV schedule and is streaming with an Apple TV+ subscription.
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