Harsher In Hindsight / Friends

• At least six moments become less funny due to Chandler and Monica's infertility later on in the series:
  • In earlier seasons, Chandler makes multiple jokes about not being able to have children.
  • In season 3, Monica considers getting pregnant from a sperm donor. It's played for laughs and the rest of the cast thinks it's a dumb idea, largely because she's single.
  • In season 4, immediately after Phoebe agrees to be Frank and Alice's surrogate, Monica asks Rachel if she'd be a surrogate if Monica asked her to.
  • At Monica and Chandler's wedding, in an extended scene Judy Geller mistakenly thinks Monica is pregnant and gives Monica the cold shoulder when she discovers the truth.
  • After watching Pete (Monica's ex boyfriend) getting beaten up Ross quips: "Well, this is ironic. Of your last two boyfriends, Richard didn’t want to have kids, and from the looks of it, now Pete can’t." Her next boyfriend is Chandler and...
  • In an episode of season 6, Chandler and Ross are arguing over which of them came up with a joke that Ross got published, and ask Monica to adjudicate. In an effort to get her on his side, Ross appeals to family loyalty, while Chandler points out that he's her boyfriend and "I'm your only chance to have a baby".
  • The storyline itself would become harsher after Jennifer Aniston revealed that she never had kids because she was unable to conceive despite trying several methods(including IVF).
• Chandler's smoking addiction wasn't very funny later on when Matthew Perry went into rehab to control his drinking.
• "TOW Nana Dies Twice" has a gag where Ross takes too many pain pills for a muscle spasm and starts acting stoned. Funny for him, not so funny for Matthew Perry after he hecame addicted to pain meds.
• A season 2 episode showed Monica getting Chandler to get in shape reflecting Matthew Perry's later weight problem.
• When Joey auditions for the lead of a new detective show, he tells his friends not to get their hopes up, as he isn't sure if he's good enough to carry his own TV show. Joey was cancelled after only two seasons. However this is less harsh with Matt LeBlanc's Career Resurrection in Episodes.
• In season 8, Brad Pitt appeared as one of Ross's old high school friends, who hated Rachel to the point that he was president of an Anti-Rachel club in high school. At the time, it was a funny Casting Gag due to the fact that Brad Pitt was married to Jennifer Aniston in real life. The joke became a lot less funny after Aniston and Pitt's very, very public divorce.
• Likewise, the Season 6 opening credits added 'Arquette' to everyone's names and end with a dedication to Courteney Cox and David Arquette 'who did get married'. The couple have now divorced. Not as bad as Aniston's case, as they ended amicably and are still good friends but it still stings.
• In "TOW Five Steaks and an Eggplant", after an awkward conversation about Phoebe, Joey and Rachel not having much money, Chandler changes the subject with "So, the ebola virus. That's gotta suck, huh?", which is played for laughs. Come the 2014 global outbreak of this same virus which infected and killed thousands of people, it becomes ten times more awkward.
• Part of dragging out the Ross/Rachel subplot involved Rachel getting pregnant with Ross's child before they finally reconciled. This becomes a lot less funny when years later one of the reasons cited for Jennifer Aniston's divorce from Brad Pitt reportedly boiled down to Pitt wanting to start a family and have children while Aniston wanted to focus on her post-Friends acting career, which led to Pitt hooking up with Angelina Jolie, having children with her and becoming a father to the children she had already adopted. On top of that, Aniston has been plagued by rumors ever since that she's allegedly desperate to have children of her own(in 2022 she would later confirm that was unable to conceive kids despite trying multiple methods including IVF) and has gone through multiple celebrity boyfriends, with the tabloids publishing bombastic articles about how she's finally on the verge of yet another dream wedding and starting over.
• In "The One With the Male Nanny" Freddie Prinze Jr. plays an ultra nice guy that gets hired to serve as Emma's nanny, but despite how much of a hit he is Ross is weirded by how sensitive he is and decides to let him go, which Rachel compares it to firing Elmo. It's a bit harsher after 2012 when Elmo's voice actor and puppeteer Kevin Clash was hit with several accusations of eliciting sex from minors, which would eventually cause him to quit Sesame Street.
• "The One with Rachel's Book" features a quip about Chandler not having told his parents yet that he's engaged. "The One with Chandler's Dad" would later show he has a very distant relationship with his dad and wasn't originally going to invite him to the wedding until they reconciled.
• Ross's quip in "TOW A Dozen Lasagnas" about casually wanting to call immigration on Paolo is a lot less funny in the 2010s, with US immigration enforcement agencies being criticized over apparently indiscriminate deportations and cruel policies regarding treatment of immigrants.^note Though the agency that has received the most attention over these controversies, ICE, did not exist when the episode aired.
• Possibly overlapping with Hilarious in Hindsight: When Joey's Days of Our Lives character was killed off in season 2, he mentions that the damage was so bad the only neurosurgeon who could have saved him was himself. Years later, a very similar case of Death by Irony occured on Grey's Anatomy with the death of Derek Shepherd, played completely straight.
• Early on in season 2 Monica becomes friends with Ross' then-girlfriend Julie and goes shopping with her, something that Rachel gets upset over when she finds out. The ensuing argument is meant to sound like Monica cheated on Rachel, including phrases like "it meant nothing to me" and "I never meant for you to find out". Hilarious at the time. A little less hilarious (or more, depending on how seriously you take the show) when Ross and Rachel have almost the exact same argument about an actual accusation of infidelity.
• Kathy and Chandler developing feelings for each other while she's with Joey looks lot worse after Kathy cheats on Chandler as well. At first it seemed she really fell in love with Chandler and that's why they kissed. Cheating again made her seem like the type who gets bored with guys and moves on from them fast. Hell, maybe she really "cared" about the new guy like she cared about Chandler when she wasn't dating him. It puts the hell Chandler went through in a much grimmer light, given how he honestly thought they'd both fallen in love.
• In the same episode as the above, the gang points out all the couples who worked together who ended up romantically linked: Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman, Tim Robbins and Susan Sarandon, and Alec Baldwin and Kim Basinger, none of whom are together now. Robbins and Sarandon's split seemed pleasant enough, but the other divorces were, unfortunately, quite acrimonious and public.
• Monica and Chandler learning they can't conceive children can get even bleaker with the knowledge that Aisha Tyler, who began guest starring on the show at pretty much that exact time (only one episode prior), struggled with real-life infertility a decade later.
  • Any conversations concerning Monica and Chandler's plans to have children are pretty painful knowing how things turn out. Even sweet moments like Chandler describing the four kids and cat they'll have, the baby onesie he buys before their wedding, their Fallback Children Pact in S1, babysitting the triplets together for 'practice', Monica pretending the sweater they're hiding under her dress is a baby and her excitement when she realizes Chandler is ready to start trying for kids, all start hurting when you realize none of those plans will ever happen. Granted, they do adopt babies and are happy with them, but it's still pretty harsh to realize their dreams of conceiving a child all come to nothing.
• Monica has struggled with body image and worrying about whether Chandler will leave her if she gains weight. Courteney Cox became paranoid about growing older and admitted to getting addicted to cosmetic surgery - a decision she confessed to regretting.
  • Likewise, Monica's compulsive eating as a child and teenager was often played for laughs. Nowadays, it would indicate that she has serious emotional problems and likely needs therapy^note though, to be fair, the show did sometimes suggest that her compulsive eating was a stress-relieving response to Jack and Judy's favoritism of Ross. As would the possibly anorexic way she lost all that weight over the course of just one year.
• Christina Pickles and Courtney Cox had both previously worked together in the infamous 1987 Masters of the Universe film, where Pickles' character The Sorceress healed injuries Cox's character Julie sustained in the battle against Skeletor. In this show, Pickles plays Cox's mother, and their relationship isn't so good.
• In one episode, Joey is offered a role in a soap opera — in exchange for sleeping with the female casting director. In the end, he refuses, only for the director to offer him a bigger role on the same terms, and he does end up sleeping with her. At the time, the entire scenario is played for laughs, as the other five place bets on whether or not he would do it, and Joey's only qualms about the situation are about his pride being hurt that he wouldn't have truly "earned" the role. The Weinstein scandal and the eventual rise in the Me Too movement made this plotline very uncomfortable for viewers.
• Ross' concern that he would regret it for the rest of his life if he didn't tell Rachel how he felt in the finale becomes this when David Schwimmer and Jennifer Aniston were interested in each other but never did anything about it in Friends: The Reunion.
• There's a running storyline through the show that Monica is The Unfavorite. The main reason for this is because the Gellers believed they couldn't have children, so Ross was a huge (and happy) surprise to them. Monica coming along later wasn't such a special event and the situation was made worse by Ross winning lots of scientific awards in school whereas Monica wanted to be a chef which isn't so overtly prestigious. The storyline was always played for bitter-sweet humor, but in the later years of the show, when Chandler and Monica try to have children, they learn they're both infertile. The storyline was triggered by Monica's actress having problems in real life and the writers deciding to address it in the show. With hindsight, knowing the pain Chandler and Monica go through later in the show, the subject of infertility running in the Geller family is even harsher than it was before, and all infertility jokes (including Chandler joking that he's incapable of having children in the final episode of Season 3) are much less funny when rewatched.
• In an episode of Season 2, there's a plot deciding that Chandler is Hollywood Pudgy. This isn't particularly funny to begin with, as he had no idea he'd gained any weight and the plot consists of Monica treating him badly because she needs a project and ending with him making her depression over life worse. But with Perry's weight issues from his drug addiction, ranging from looking like a sunken-in skeleton with skin in Season 3 to bloated in Season 6, it gets even more uncomfortable.
• Matthew Perry's untimely death in October 2023 has made some Friends moments very uncomfortable in hindsight:
  • "The One With Rachel's Other Sister" features a conversation on who would gain custody of baby Emma if anything were to happen to Rachel and Ross. During the ensuing discussion, as Emma needs a diaper change, Chandler volunteers to take care of it, grabbing the diaper bag and accidentally knocking over a chair and breaking Monica's prized china in the process. After an awkward pause, Chandler says "Well, what do you know, I guess I'll be the one who dies first." His death would indeed make him the first of the main cast to pass on.
  • "The One Where Chandler Takes A Bath" has Chandler becoming obsessed with taking baths after previously disliking them, saying in one scene, "I can actually feel my tension just melting, melting away. I could fall asleep in here. I could drown in here. Mmm... drowning."
  • In yet another oddly specific example, "The One With the Engagement Picture" has Monica frustratedly say "Chandler, what's the matter with your face? Like this picture is supposed to say 'Geller and Bing to be married' not 'local woman saves drowning moron.' "
  • Not on Friends but in the iCarly episode "iBelieve In Bigfoot", Freddie is watching Celebrities Underwater and realizes David Schwimmer (Ross Geller) is not moving and has apparently drowned. Matthew Perry drowned in his hot tub.

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