Friends Admitted To Its Most Glaring Plot Hole With This Perfect Joey Line In Season 6

In season 6 of Friends, Joey drew attention to the most glaring plot hole in the whole series with one brilliant, scene-ending line. In the 30 years since Friends first premiered in 1994, the beloved sitcom’s legacy has managed to maintain longevity by continuing to entertain new and longtime viewers to this day. It is still the standard for sitcoms in many ways, due to the main Friends cast’s inimitable chemistry and impeccable comedic timing and delivery. Despite its reputation as one of the best sitcoms of all time, Friends was ridden with plot holes throughout its 10-season run.

The plot holes in Friends ranged from inconsistencies like all the main Friends characters’ ages and birthdays, both independently and in relation to each other, to continuity errors like Rachel and Chandler having multiple first-time meetings. However, one plot hole could be detected in almost every episode of Friends. This near-everpresent plot hole was so glaring that the show even cleverly acknowledged it when Joey made a very valid point about the gang’s collective leisure habits in one season 6 episode.

Joey Mentioned The Central Perk Plot Hole In Friends Season 6

Joey Pointed Out How The Group Is Always At the Coffee House In The Middle Of The Workday

In season 6, episode 8, “The One with Ross’s Teeth,” the friends are sitting in their usual spot at Central Perk when Rachel mentions in conversation that her boss doesn’t like her very much. Monica and Chandler agree that they don’t think their bosses like them either, to which Ross speculates that it might just be “a universal thing.” Joey then makes the valid point that “maybe…it’s because you’re all hanging around here at 11:30 on a Wednesday!“ A moment of realization falls over the group as they all get up to head to work, promptly ending the scene.

Joey’s point would still stand even if this was a one-time thing, but the comedy of acknowledging it comes from the fact that hanging out at Central Perk on a workday was a frequent occurrence on Friends. It was unrealistic enough that their group of friends always sat on the same couch at Central Perk (although this was proven to not actually be a plot hole in Friends), but it was simply implausible that a group of six 20-to-30-something-year-olds would be able to comfortably lounge at a coffee shop in the middle of the day on a regular basis.

Although their occupations and job statuses change over the course of the show, there is never an instance where they’re all unemployed. At any given point, more than half of the group have day jobs, some of which would take place during regular office hours. This scene even clarifies Rachel’s job in this season of Friends to set up the borderline meta joke, drawing even more attention to how bizarre it is that none of them are at work right now. Rather than attempt to reconcile this plot hole, Friends merely winks at it with this observation from Joey.

Why The Central Perk Plot Hole Was Necessary For Friends

The Friend Group Needed To Frequent A Central Hangout Spot For The Sitcom To Work

As the title suggests, Friends is about the core friend group and their relationships with each other. For the premise to work, the show needed a central meeting location for them to frequent so they could catch up on the events of each other’s lives, even if that meant they could somehow afford to hang out daily when they would realistically be at work. Of course, they also hung out at Monica’s a lot, and Central Perk was on the ground floor of their building, so the element of convenience made a little more sense for those who lived there.

Still, even in the ’90s, it was unrealistic for a group of adults to spend that much time together in the first place, let alone on workdays at a secondary location. Had the show focused more on the individual characters’ day-to-day lives, it might’ve been more realistic, but it would’ve been a different show that might not have been as successful. Ultimately, Friends had to sacrifice a degree of believability to put the gang in the same room in almost every episode. Besides, the Friends theme song did say from the get-go that their “job’s a joke.”