Friends: Are There Really Two Different Versions Of The Show?

For nearly 30 years, "Friends" has aired on television in a near-endless loop. So diehard fans have likely seen every single scene in the series' 234 episodes, right? Well, not exactly. The "Friends" episodes that are shown on TV aren't exactly the same as those available on streaming sites or DVDs. While the general gist of the show remains the same — six friends, Central Perk hangout, and that controversial "break" that nearly broke Ross and Rachel — some scenes didn't make the cut for TV or streaming but appeared on DVD releases.

IMDb lists multiple scenes that appear in DVD versions of "Friends" but not in the original television show. The site notes that the pilot episode alone contains 10 extra minutes of footage that fans never saw when the NBC sitcom premiered in 1994. TV viewers and streamers missed out on Chandler (Matthew Perry) accidentally ripping his mother-in-law's dress while dancing with her in the episode "The One After I Do," but DVD buyers saw the cut scene in a package that was edited for international television distribution.

The 2001 episode "The One Where Rachel Tells..." originally included Chandler making a joke to airport security about bombs. The episode aired on October 11, 2011, exactly one month after the 9/11 terrorist attacks, but Chandler's joke about bombs was cut. The storyline was later included in a DVD package with the message, "As part of the history of the show, we hope that the scenes can now be viewed in the spirit [in] which they were originally intended" (via YouTube).

Almost twenty years after "Friends" aired its final episode on NBC, the series airs in heavy rotation on Nick at Nite and can be streamed on HBO and Netflix. Fans have noticed the glaring omissions on platforms that stream edited versions of the episodes. Reddit user u/Jeffie101225 wrote, "Okay so I have the original copies of every friends season on dvd, with both Netflix and HBO they have cut SOOOOO much out and it's the absolute worst thing ever. I wanna watch the show of my childhood at its fullest potential without having to swap discs very frequently."

But while the DVD versions include that deleted footage, the complete Blu-ray set released in 2012 does not. In an interview with TV Guide, producer Kevin S. Bright explained that the Blu-ray boxed set featured the original, classic TV episodes, which are still longer than syndicated versions, because many fans hadn't seen those first-run editions. "These [syndicated] versions are substantially shorter than the original episodes to make room for more commercial time. Sometimes the tags are cut altogether," Bright explained. 

He added that after looking at all the options, producers decided that the classic version of the show was what they wanted to preserve in a digital time capsule. "The deleted footage was, frankly, added specifically for one home video release," the "Friends" EP added, noting that the missing material amounts to just three and a half minutes per season.