“Joey,” the 2004 Matt LeBlanc “Friends” spinoff, has now been completely restored to life on the Friends YouTube channel, including eight episodes never aired in this country, the NBC series having been canceled in 2006, two-thirds of the way through its second season. For most, there will be no difference between the episodes that aired and the ones that didn’t — they will be equally unseen. For some, this is a shoe that took 19 years to drop. I can find no record of what I thought of it at the time, but I took this occasion to look back, look anew, and assess the series out of the shadow of what then was its just departed mothership. Viewing from here, I’d call it a pleasing, funny show, easy to invest in and a reminder that you can’t judge a show by its ratings.
The series follows LeBlanc’s Joey Tribbiani to Hollywood — or “Ollywoo,” per his obstructed view of the Hollywood sign — where his acting career will sputter out of and into life. (After many blown auditions, he will do well enough finally to appear on “The Tonight Show,” “Ellen” and “The Actors Studio.”) “I was happy in New York, OK,” Joey tells his sister Gina (Drea de Matteo), living in Hollywood before him, “and I tried really hard to keep things from changing. But everybody else got married and had kids and moved on — they all changed, so I’m giving change a shot.” Though “Friends” gives “Joey” a valuable running start, making moot the question of why we should believe in this doofus, that quote and nods to Joey’s old “Days of Our Lives” role as neurosurgeon Dr. Drake Ramoray are the only references to the earlier show. It’s a new career in a new town.
It’s not really fair to compare “Joey” to “Friends,” which ended with 10 years of momentum behind it and an ensemble of co-headlining peers that provided a model for subsequent hang-out series, none of which will ever attain its legendary status, deep library (236 episodes) or intergenerational appeal. “Joey” was something different, and also more usual, a gathering of oddballs around a main character on a set that found them all a place to sit. Along with De Matteo, fresh from being murdered on “The Sopranos,” but keeping Adriana alive within Gina, the first-rate cast included Paulo Costanzo as Michael, her 20-year-old son; Andrea Anders as lawyer neighbor Alexis, a hot-and-cold love interest for LeBlanc; and Jennifer Coolidge, abundantly present as Joey’s agent, Bobbie, putting an exclamation point at the end of every sentence. (“It’s the dumbest script I’ve ever read! It’s going to be huge!”)
The series is slightly marred by bouts of (already dated) Swinging Bachelor Comedy, but it also feels constructed as a corrective to that very thing, with Joey regularly put in his place by women smarter than he is. (Appearing on “Inside the Actors Studio,” he is faced with an audience of unhappy ex-girlfriends.) Indeed, a certain amount of failure is written into the character, with his mix of optimistic naivete and self-puncturing pride, a combination LeBlanc is skilled at bringing to life. His face is a conversation between his pleased smile and astonished eyes, expressions pushed just far enough into caricature to register as comic, but never so much as to violate the integrity of the character. Among the zaniness there’s an emotional arc, a dance of personal growth and backsliding, and depending on what the scene requires, he might be the dumbest guy in the room or the wisest.
Although “Joey” is accurately described as short-lived, there are 46 episodes on the YouTube playlist, which would amount to six or seven seasons of a current streaming comedy. A broadcast sitcom is a living thing; the long season allows for a wealth of variations, sidetrips and experiments; characters and relationships are in continual flux, revised in light of ratings and network notes, and now and again one senses the series trying to find itself. The second season added Miguel A. Núñez Jr. as Zach, an actor friend for Joey (which also had the benefit of bringing a Black person into the famously white “Friends”-phere) and, halfway through, Adam Goldberg as Jimmy, a tightly wound childhood friend of Joey’s who’ll learn he’s Michael’s father, and whom Joey will hire to work at his new production company, which he names “Yes I Am a Bird Productions,” because he imagines it’s an anagram of Joey Tribbiani. The newly seen episodes devote much time to the Gina-Jimmy relationship — which consists largely of arguing and sex — as Joey and Alexis continue to fail to define their ambiguous relationship. It all heads toward “Joey and the Wedding,” which serves well as a long-in-coming series finale.
That TV shows end is something we are oddly poor at accepting, given how often they do; as with the real people we love, we want as many minutes with them as possible, so it’s doubly sad when we know there are finished episodes just beyond our reach. It’s like being ghosted, but ghosts do sometimes return, bringing closure.
This story originally appeared in Los Angeles Times.
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