And lo, it came to pass in the eleventh month of the twenty-fifth year, ere the tolling of the millennial bell, that the unseen would walk the invisible nets, and fester in the Tubes of You. The LeBlanc would be blank no more, the spin-off would be unleashed to rotate unfettered, and a great cry of “How you doin’?!” would echo across the land. Finally, it would be as the prophets had foretold: The unaired Joeys would finally be free for all to see.
So, uh, yeah: 20 years after the Friends spin-off got canceled so hard, during its second season, that NBC gave up on even putting out episodes with eight still left to go, every episode of Matt LeBlanc‘s Joey is now available in the United States. (For what is, essentially, the first time ever.) Per Variety, the Friends official YouTube account has apparently been posting installments of its sister show all year, and has finally gotten to the Joey episodes that extended past March 7, 2006, the point where NBC threw up its hands and said “Fuck it, we might as well switch to episodes of Most Outrageous Moments for all the good this is doing for our Tuesday night anchor slot.”
We should note that these episodes are not exactly lost media: The show’s second season got a DVD release in Canada that included the unaired eight, and broadcasts in places like Ireland, Brazil, and Norway mean that many audiences around the globe were able to enjoy the episodes of “Vida De Artista” where Joey Tribbiani goes on Inside The Actor’s Studio or gets in a fight with an 11-year-old movie critic who doesn’t like his movie. They also, presumably, got to see the show resolve more of the character’s relationship problems with Andrea Anders’ Alex, and, we’re betting, encounter at least one decent joke delivered by the usually very funny Jennifer Coolidge, who co-starred on the series. (Our own quick perusal of the episodes didn’t discover any, admittedly, but we refuse to believe you could point a camera at Coolidge for that long without getting something.)
If nothing else, the decision to release the episodes fascinates as a bit of historical curation. These episodes never aired, not because they were actively bad, or contained anything offensive, but because literally nobody could be bothered to do the work to actually put them anywhere that people could see. Given what a huge crest of popularity that Joey was riding as it came off the Friends wave, seeing evidence of that level of indifference is kind of noteworthy all on its own.
