(Editor’s note: Seasons 1 and 2 were reviewed under an earlier editorial standard and format. They’ll be revisited in the Second Look Remastered series, running January – June 2027. Subscribe to Processed Media (it’s free!) so you don’t miss the updates.)
After a few stellar episodes, Friends was due to come back to earth at some point – and that point is “The One Where Eddie Moves In”, an episode that’s not particularly unfunny or unpleasant, but takes some great story ideas and doesn’t really go anywhere with them. There are some good jokes along the way to keep things entertaining, but it loses the grounded moments of the previous two or three episodes, and replaces them with the less satisfying but more mass appeal-y humor of this episode.
The biggest problem is with Joey and Chandler: it’s been but a week from Joey moving out, and he already wants to move in. As a character, Joey’s never a person who really gets to grow a lot – we see some last season when his father visits in “The One with the Boobies”, but aside from those two examples and a short arc next season, Joey’s character is mostly running on a treadmill throughout the series. The Joey/Chandler friendship is one of the most meaningful on the show in the early seasons (until they move away from that for constant relationship dramatics in the future), and they do it a disservice by pushing them back together after only a brief moment apart – Joey literally spends one episode in his apartment before he’s lonely, and wishing he could live with Chandler again.
As for Chandler, the show diminishes his feelings about Joey moving out by reducing his character to parallel a gay man who just lost his live-in boyfriend, with loaded metaphors and allusions about their relationship about how his new roommate Eddie is just “a rebound guy” (more on him in a minute). Instead of taking the time to really draw out the things Joey and Chandler have to face without each other, Chandler becomes ignorant and slightly gay, while Joey gets jealous and bitter about Chandler’s new roommate, who Chandler met in the ethnic food aisle (a meet-cute that exists as another gay joke for them to play on).
It’s like four episodes worth of plot and character thrown into twenty minutes: and because of that, it skips all the emotional beats that would really make the arc effective (instead of returning to the status quo in a couple episodes). We don’t even get enough time with Chandler as he struggles to live in an apartment with an empty room, and finally coming to the tough choice to find a new roommate. It’s a weird curve on the Joey/Chandler dynamic from the previous episode: where as Joey wanted to move on and grow up, Chandler was hanging onto Joey. Halfway through this episode, it becomes reversed: Chandler’s got a new roommate and is happy, and Joey just wants things they way they used to be. The arc isn’t quite over – but the inconsistent characterizations rob a lot of the fun out of them (the broad homosexuality jokes don’t help either), and it’s ultimately revealed to be a short lived gimmick, rather than a moment of character growth for either of them.
I feel the same way about Phoebe and the “Smelly Cat” video: it takes the route of least resistance, offering up a Phoebe who has no idea what she sounds like, and thus is surprised to find herself dubbed out of her own music video by another singer’s voice. Instead of showing us how the music industry takes advantage of the little person (in finding comedy in the many ways they find to screw with and change “Smelly Cat” and Phoebe’s image), it revels in Phoebe the ditz who has no idea what’s going on until it’s too late.
If there’s one thing the episode does well (and I’d argue they do this really well), it’s Monica dealing with Ross being in her life on a daily basis again. Now that he’s dating Rachel, he’s always in her hair again – or spending too much time on his own hair when Monica’s trying to take a shower. For awhile, it feels as if the writers are indulging themselves like they do with the other two story lines, with lots of juvenile behavior between Ross and Monica, with Rachel obviously being turned off by it. But at the end, Ross’s teasing leads to a real powerful moment for Monica, as she reveals to him how much she hated the older brother who picked on her and took her things, all while parading around as the family’s prodigal son.
It adds a really nice touch to an otherwise disappointing episode, a very solemn moment that sticks out against the blander, less character-focused plots of the episode around them (despite positing themselves as being such, the events of the episode are mere story-by-number affairs), reminding us that Monica and Rachel once were not great friends – something I think would’ve worked even better had it been done with Chandler and Joey, showing us how they’ve become better people through their friendship. But these are only hypotheticals; the episode we’re given in “The One Where Eddie Moves In” is ultimately, a very pedestrian one.
Other thoughts/observations:
- the extended credits sequence to this episode is pretty charming: while singing “Smelly Cat” Monica, Chandler and Joey belt out the refrain boisterously and alone. It’s just a fun moment that I’m sure was cut to fit time restrictions.
- Rachel dropping the pie in the random guy’s hat is the kind of great gag I wish they’d done more with Rachel, instead of just screaming “she’s a shitty waitress!” all the time.
- Joey filling his house with animals so he doesn’t feel alone is adorable, no matter how cold your heart may be.
- Joey: “I don’t have as many thoughts as you might think.”
- Eddie doesn’t like Baywatch: stormy seas ahead.
- Joey again (he’s really quotable in this episode): “I need the juice!!!”
- Joey and Chandler both have big animal slippers on, though I believe the broadcast version cuts the bit where Joey’s are visible on his feet.
- Up next: Daytime television changes forever in “The One Where Dr. Ramoray Dies”.
The Phoebe plot in TOW Eddie Moves In really bugs me, because as you said, it actually had a lot of comedic potential. The idea of a music video based on Smelly Cat notwithstanding, it could’ve also given us a humorous look at record companies (even “teeny tiny” companies like the one that signs Phoebe) and how they tend to screw their bands over. But, instead, that whole plot was played in a disappointingly straightforward manner with no real payoff at the end other than Phoebe drawing a parallel between the woman chosen to sing in the video and the titular Smelly Cat himself. Very disappointing plot.