Oh, the Friends Thanksgiving episodes. If there’s anything that captures Friends in a bottle throughout its run, it’s their concept of a holiday episode. The early episodes are definitive holiday episodes for the sitcom genre, full of memorable bits (season 3’s football game) and meaningful character moments (season four’s Joey/Chandler fight), but as the series progressed, it became obsessed with either the show’s own mythology (season five does it decently well, but season six, eight, and nine are terrible) or simply being moments of fan service (season 10).
What’s funny about how influential these episodes are is how little they stray from the typical ‘holiday’ episode – especially ‘Where The Underdog Gets Away’. Little problems are always escalated into major issues, with a ruined meal and a lot of bitterness that’s quickly resolved in the final moments. This episode has all of them, but gives them some meaningful context: each one of these characters had other plans for the holidays, not realizing that they didn’t need anybody but each other to enjoy it.
Cheesy as fuck, I know, but the magic of Friends was when they could surround those predictable moments with heartwarming story beats and a lot of great jokes, both of which this episode has in spades. There are so many funny little running gags in here: Rachel’s inability to be a good waitress, Joey being on a poster for VD, Monica being subjected to everyone’s potato demands (with Joey saying “… and a TOT!”), Chandler’s rejection of ‘pilgrim holidays’… of the nine episodes to this point, ‘Underdog Gets Away’ is definitely the funniest of them.
The amount of humor provides a great balance to the typcial arc of the episode: everyone has separate plans but ends up together, resentful at first, but embracing each other by the end of the episode. You know the type: through dysfunction we find meaning and all that lovely stuff we’ve seen a million times. But ‘Underdog Gets Away’ is infused with so much believable character – Monica trying to please everyone (especially in the light of what we just saw in the previous episode with her mother), Ross finding a small place in his new family, and of course, why Chandler rejects anything sentimental and/or emotional.
To a crappy New Year, indeed.
Other thoughts/obseverations:
- “You sure have a lot of books about being a lesbian.”
- My favorite moment in the episode is during Monica’s meltdown when she mentions how she had to make sure “Mario gets his tots.” I wish that would’ve become a recurring joke – “What Mario Isn’t Telling You” is a stroke of comedic genius.
- the opening feels like the writers had to define Rachel again for some reason, all to a character we’d never see again: Terry, the cafe owner. There is the first Gunther sighting however, during the montage set to The Police song “Don’t Stand So Close To Me” (a reference that makes no fucking sense: the song is about a teacher trying to avoid a hot schoolgirl, as seen in the music video where Sting wears angel wings and a graduation cap).
- Ross suggests there is one way that provides an ‘acoustical advantage’ when talking to his unborn child. Who said this guy doesn’t have charm?
- Ross walking around…. it annoys the fucking shit out of me in these early episodes.
- we get just the tip of the iceberg hearing about Chandler’s Thanksgiving where he found his parents were getting divorced. Of course, the show would show us that very night, in its later, more masturbatory days.
- Up next: Friends introduces David in “The One with the Monkey”.