For everyone who hasn’t seen the first season, or only seen a couple of episodes, I want to start off by running though the major events from the pilot to the season finale! So like I started to say last week, the pilot episode begins with Monica,  Phoebe, Joey, and Chandler drinking coffee and discussing Monica’s dating life. Then we see Ross, Monica’s brother enter very sad and declaring to the group that his marriage was over. Why? He and his wife have one similarity that sort of forces them to end their marriage. They both like women. Well this is awkward…

Anyway, so as if this conversation couldn’t get any stranger, in storms Rachel, Monica’s best friend from high school, and Ross’s first big crush, but more on that later. So Rachel comes in looking for Monica, her old bff who she didn’t even invite to the wedding. Aside from that awkward detail, Monica invites Rachel up to her apartment to clean up. While in Monica’s apartment, Rachel informs her father that she is not marrying Barry, her ex-fiance and she will be staying with Monica since he is “cutting her off”. This becomes the set up for the show. Rachel and Monica live in an apartment. Chandler and Joey live across the hall from them, and Phoebe and Ross have their own places that they pretty much only shower and sleep in considering 90% of the episodes are filmed in Monica and Rachel’s and Joey and Chandler’s apartments.

A few episodes pass and we see Ross find his own place after moving out of his apartment with Carol, his soon to be ex-wife, who by the way is carrying his baby. Rachel begins her first job ever at Central Perk, and we get to see her comically attempt to make a living with no prior work experience serving coffee to strangers, and of course her friends. Phoebe, the offbeat member of the group known for her hippie-type phrases and folk-type “music”, works throughout the first season as a masseuse. She has a serious relationship with a man named David, but it is cut short after his job forces him to relocate to Minsk for career-making research. Joey is seen as a womanizing unsuccessful actor who is trying to claw his way to stardom, usually unsuccessfully, although he almost got to play Al Pacino’s butt. Yeah, you read that correctly. Monica is a chef just starting out but we see her career plummet and rise as the series progresses. Chandler’s main storyline throughout the first season involves Janice, his irritatingly loud girlfriend who he spends an entire episode trying to break up with. But don’t you worry, she’ll be baaacccckkkkk……

Phew! FINALLY, we have Ross and Rachel. Ross is infatuated with Rachel however things keep getting in the way, whether it’s Rachel’s ex husband trying to win her back, an Italian guy named Paolo, and a bunch of other stuff. Anyway, he loves her she’s in the dark. Well after he leaves for a trip to China for work, Chandler lets it slip that he loves Rachel… WHAT? Rachel freaks out, in a good way. She realizes she has feelings for him as well and decides to pick him up at the airport and confess her feelings for him. The season ends with her at the airport with a smile as big as the flowers she’s holding and Ross coming off the plane with his new girlfriend Julie… Yeah, it just got interesting!!!!!

One of my favorite things about Friends is the method the creators used to name all of the episodes. Instead of following other shows’ footsteps and taking a quote from an episode or a song title to name them, Friends uses a method of naming that is unique, but completely relatable. When describing an episode or movie to a friend or acquaintance, you usually say something like, “Have you seen the one where…”. This is how Friends developed their episode titles. For example, the pilot of the series is more commonly known as “The One Where It All Began”.

Aside from the episode’s title, the pilot to Friends was probably one of the best first episodes of a series I have ever seen. Instead of wasting a pilot to introduce the characters individually, the episode starts in Central Perk, the coffee shop where practically the whole series takes place, and sees all of the characters in their element, talking casually amongst each other about Monica’s date. You see the individual traits of the characters form throughout the episode. Monica begins to demonstrate her OCD-like needs for cleanliness, Ross’s marriage falls apart and we see the beginning of his independent life, and Chandler begins to establish his “funny man” image. However, this episode primarily begins shaping Jennifer Aniston’s iconic character, Rachel.

Though this series is called Friends, let’s be honest, it’s the Rachel show. Rachel runs into Central Perk where the gang is having coffee as a runaway bride, literally she still has her wedding dress on, and from that point on, the center of the show, and every fan’s mind, is Rachel. She by far develops the most out of the six and she is primarily in every central storyline as the episodes progress. We see her go from an unhappy runaway bride, to a waitress, to a successful employee of multiple fashion industries. But, I’m getting ahead of myself. Let’s back it up to the very beginning of the series. So….