How The Audience Changed The Fate Of These Two Friends Characters
For 10 seasons on "Friends," fans watched Monica (Courteney Cox), Joey (Matt LeBlanc), Phoebe (Lisa Kudrow), Chandler (Matthew Perry), Rachel (Jennifer Aniston), and Ross (David Schwimmer) navigate their complicated love lives. Ross and Rachel are often at the center of things, until the Season 4 finale in London, in which Monica and Chandler hook up just before their friend's big wedding.
After Ross busts into Chandler's hotel room screaming in excitement for his nuptials to Emily Waltham (Helen Baxendale), Monica pops out from under the sheets. Obviously, the fans absolutely lost their minds at the time. In Season 5, the couple hid their relationship from their pals, before eventually revealing the ruse in Episode 14 ("The One Where Everybody Finds Out"). The pair becomes engaged in the Season 6 finale, wed in the Season 7 finale, and parents to twins in Season 10.
Believe it or not, Chandler and Monica's love story was not supposed to pan out this way. It wasn't even supposed to be a story. You can thank the audience for that, whose reaction in the London scene changed the course of the show forever.
Monica and Chandler were supposed to be a one-off hookupv
It was the hook-up no one saw coming, and the impact it left at that moment would change "Friends" forever. Producers of the sitcom, Marta Kauffman, David Crane, and Kevin Bright, attended the "Friends: The Reunion" special and noted how the audience's response to that surprise hook-up changed their plans for the duo. It turns out Monica and Chandler were supposed to be a one-night stand sort of situation, with the pair questioning what they had done at the beginning of Season 5, and moving on as singles.
"The way the audience reacted, we realized there's more to this, and we need to pay attention," Kauffman noted. "That was the end of the season so we had time to really ruminate and think about it, but it was such a powerful moment that we knew we had to explore it more." And explore they did, as Chandler and Monica became the central love story in "Friends" from Season 5 on, especially since Ross and Rachel were stuck in a perpetual will-they, wont-they situation.
Kauffman also admitted it was that scene where they listened to the audience more than any other time on the show. She remembered them going "insane," and it made her, Crane, and Bright rethink the entire future for the couple.