'Friends' creators defend Rachel-Joey hookup

https://www.yahoo.com/entertainment/friends-25th-anniversary-marta-kauffman-david-crane-inside-secrets-character-that-never-was-200305916.html

4. That time that Joey and Rachel were a thing

Speaking of storylines that raised eyebrows, Joey and Rachel’s ultra-brief romance in the show’s final season is often cited by even the most hardcore Friends fans as a near shark-jumping moment. But the creators are ready to leap to the defense of the doomed pair. “We liked it,” Kauffman says. “It felt real. That’s what happens in groups of friends and it was vulnerable for both of them.” Besides, the fact that it felt so wrong to so many viewers is what made it feel right to the writers. “It was wrong in a really cool way,” Crane enthuses. “You get to see them come to that realization, and it let Joey show some emotional colors that he hadn’t up to that point. We liked it because it was dangerous. We knew people would go, ‘You can’t do that!’ and that was one of the selling points for us.” Funnily enough, among the people who went, “You can’t do that!” were Aniston and LeBlanc. “They were a little nervous about it,” Crane admits. “And we had to say, ‘Everything you’re nervous about is exactly why we should do it.’”

That said, they didn’t try to push the actors out of their comfort zones as a rule. “We tried to really listen to them,” Crane says. “If there was something they weren’t comfortable with, we would usually defer to their instinct unless we could really defend it. We were really ruthless with ourselves [in the writer’s room] and threw out a tremendous amount of material, either stuff within stories or whole stories. I’m sure we lost things that were probably better than we thought they were at the time, but that was the journey we were on.”