Friends Season 4, Episode 20 “The One with All the Wedding Dresses”
Written by Adam Chase (story), Gregory S. Malins & Michael Curtis (teleplay)
Directed by Gail Mancuso
Aired April 16, 1998 on NBC
When Joey starts snoring in his sleep… all the women of Friends briefly lose their minds? “The One with All the Wedding Dresses” feels like an episode of Friends where there’s an undisclosed gas leak in Monica’s apartment or something; while everybody looks and sounds like the people we know, every choice made in the confines of this half-hour feel just feel a little bit off. And it has a snowballing effect; what begins with a silly choice by Chandler and an impulsive bit by Monica snowballs into a raucous, thoroughly unhinged third act, in what amounts to what is both the strangest and most counterproductive half hour of season four.
What’s interesting about “The One with All the Wedding Dresses” is at least Rachel’s part of the episode makes sense – unfortunately, the episode attaches her to the rather perfunctory anxieties of Monica and Phoebe, each feeling their own mortality (and lack of husband) with Ross’s latest engagement. While Rachel’s pursuit of Joshua hasn’t exactly made for engrossing character material, it has established a template in which her romantic decisions have become reactionary behavior to Ross’s relationship with Emily. In that regard, Rachel attempting to fast track her fragile new relationship with Joshua makes perfect sense; what’s frustrating is how little this episode actually invests in Rachel, instead lazily tagging her onto the end of two stories that aren’t really about her.
The most prominent of those, of course, are the titular wedding dresses; when Emily finds her perfect wedding dress at a New York bridal shop, Ross employs Monica to go pick it up for him. Naturally, this leads to Monica… putting on the dress and refusing to take it off for the rest of the episode? Given how Monica’s comported herself since the events of “The One Where Monica and Richard Are Just Friends”, it was general assumption that Monica was fairly content with where she was in her life, now that she was more clearheaded about what she wanted in a partner (feelings solidified after the events of “The One with the Ultimate Fighting Champion”, of course). Though her regression would make perfect sense, given her brother’s getting married for the second time, Monica realizing how sad she’s really become is treated as nothing but a punchline, a brief moment where her and Phoebe (in her own rented wedding dress, having not wanted to miss out on the fun) stop tossing fake bouquets and contend that maybe their evening of fun might have some depressing connotations.
Friends waves the moment away, however, and the scene immediately shifts away from their perspective, to become an accelerant for Rachel’s manic reaction to finding out Ross is getting married in a month. It’s a real missed opportunity; rather than this moment be used to reflect on Rachel and how far she’s come by putting her back in her wedding gown from “The Pilot”, it becomes a punchline to the farce that her and Joshua’s ‘relationship’ is revealed to be. It’s obvious Friends would try to express Rachel’s anxiety in a way that’s both funny and a little reductive; however, surrounded by a Monica and Phoebe completely tied up in their own neuroses, Rachel just kind of flails around “The One with All the Wedding Dresses” until the very last minute, when the episode pulls back to explore just how dumbfounded she is by everything that’s happening.
The final scene, where Monica and Phoebe both express their surprise that Ross and Rachel were never “on again, again”, is one of those scenes that works until you consider anything outside of the immediate context of the scene. What about the last year of Ross and Rachel suggests they were ever “destined” to be with each other? With Emily and Ross’s engagement, Friends is clearly giving itself the opportunity to reintroduce the Ross/Rachel dynamic with a bit of reflection; but instead of contend with all the toxicity and fundamental dissonance it introduced in season three, Friends throws its leads in wedding dresses and goes for a few cheap laughs, which really undercuts the show’s ability to show growth in its characters, which it’s done numerous times in the past two seasons.
To ignore something so important at such a critical juncture is a profound disappointment; after such a strong season exploring the fault lines in each character and how they react and grow from them, season four’s final act seems to be trying to regress back to where it was before “The One At the Beach” – and its all the lesser for it.
It also doesn’t help in catalyzing the dramatic crescendo that is Emily and Ross’s impending – and now overseas – nuptials; to some degree, their impending marriage feels like a concept the show hasn’t committed itself to yet, especially with Emily’s inconsistent presence within her own arc. We don’t even hear her voice in this episode, and Ross’s casual approach to agreeing to a wedding in four weeks feels like a footnote to the real plot of the story: laughing at the reactions of the women in the group as they fall under the allure of the wedding dress (a phenomenon seen in numerous sitcoms of the late 1990s and early 2000s TV, including How I Met Your Mother and 30 Rock). That’s just not as interesting; and when the other plot of the episode is about Joey’s snoring, this underwhelming plot is left carrying a lot more emotional and narrative weight than it was designed to handle.
At least we have the Joey/Chandler runner, a story that does absolutely nothing but provide a comedic salve from the other, more underwhelming parts of the episode – but it’s pretty good at that, especially when Joey falls asleep in a waiting room while he’s trying to hit on a woman. I even enjoy the irony of Chandler, frustrated that he can’t sleep with Joey’s snoring, thinks its a smart idea to pick up a woman he meets at Joey’s sleep study – but the idea that this fits alongside the other, much heavier and existential story of the episode is a laughable one, something “The One with All the Wedding Dresses” really ever resolves, making the episode an incredibly inconsistent mix of unfunny awkwardness and slapstick, oscillating between the two with no sense of pace or purpose.
“The One with All the Wedding Dresses” may be good for a few iconic images – particularly the three women sitting on the couch, drinking beer in fancy gowns – but its script feels like a collection of scraps assembled from the writer’s room floor (tied together with the kind of cringe humor this series very rarely does well). It’s probably where these stories should’ve stayed, given how much it undercuts season four’s strong, consistent character arcs with some incredibly underwhelming, counterproductive storytelling – it might not be the season’s worst episode, but certainly one of its most disappointing.
Grade: C-
Other thoughts/observations:
- There’s an undercurrent of Monica growing increasingly annoyed with Rachel’s living habits – she spends a lot of time complaining about dishes, which we briefly see Rachel pretending to do at one point. It’s a good touch that adds a bit of conflict to their dynamic, without it having to be a big dramatic piece of the episode.
- Chandler’s ‘wah-pah’ whip is still one of the show’s funniest bits; what is surprising is how little a part of this episode it really is. It feels like one of the show’s most iconic bits, and it’s barely 30 seconds of this episode – that just speaks to how good it is, of course, but its outsized reputation is always surprising when I rewatch the actual scene.
- I really like how Ross’s “and I know someday this will happen for you too” feels both genuine and condescending in the moment, a rare example of “The One with All the Wedding Dresses” exploring nuance with its characters.
- Phoebe, looking at wedding dresses: “about half of these are going to end up getting divorced.”
- Chandler discovers Joey sleeps commando: “you’re going to a sleep clinic… and a pajama store!”
- I’m very glad this episode doesn’t have a Joshua/Rachel and Ross/Emily dinner scene.
- Also – how is Emily surviving and affording these constant eight-hour intercontinental flights?
- Phoebe rented her wedding dress from a store called “It’s Not Too Late”.
- When Gunther overhears Joshua turning down Rachel’s ‘proposal’, he explodes: “YOU IDIOT!”
- Extended thoughts: There’s not much here, except for Joshua joking to Rachel “You’re not going to put on the cheerleader outfit again, are you?”
- Up next: Friends takes a look back at 94 episodes of Ross and Rachel in “The One with the Invitation”.