F•R•I•E•N•D•S

The arc: Rachel arrives in the very first scene soaking wet in a wedding dress, having just fled her marriage to Barry and the entire cushioned life her father's credit cards had built for her. The show's longest, quietest triumph is watching her earn every inch of the adulthood she skipped: cutting up the cards, pouring coffee badly at Central Perk, and slowly discovering she has actual taste and actual drive.

The career arc is the spine — from waitress to Bloomingdale's to a genuinely impressive run at Ralph Lauren — but the Ross of it all is the heart. The prom video, the airport list, “we were on a break,” the drunken Vegas wedding, and finally Emma: no couple on television has ever broken up in so many formats. Somewhere along the way she also becomes the group's most reliable emotional translator, the one who says the thing everyone else is swallowing.

By season ten she is a mother, an executive, and a person her season-one self would not recognize — which is exactly why the Paris offer lands so hard. Louis Vuitton wants the woman she built from scratch. Ross wants the woman he has loved since ninth grade. The finale makes her choose, and the show's most famous four words — “I got off the plane” — are her answer.

Key episodes: S1E01, S2E07, S2E14, S3E16, S4E24, S5E24, S8E23, S8E24, S10E17, S10E18

Where they end up: Off the plane. She turns down Paris, reunites with Ross for good, and the two of them — plus Emma — finally stop circling each other after ten years.

The arc: Monica is the host: her rent-controlled apartment is the show's true set, her fridge feeds everyone, and her seven categories of towels are a load-bearing joke. Underneath the competitive streak and the label-maker is the series' most bruised backstory — the overlooked daughter, the formerly heavy teenager from the prom video and the Thanksgiving flashbacks — and the show never lets you forget that her perfectionism is armor.

Professionally she climbs from diner drudgery (roller skates, fake bosom) to head chef at Javu; romantically she takes the scenic route. Richard is the great grown-up love who doesn't want more kids; the rebound is a season-four London hotel room and the single best-kept secret in sitcom history. Monica and Chandler sneaking around — and the gang finding out one by one — turns the show's back half into its warmest stretch.

The proposal (both of them on one knee, both crying), the wedding, and then the hardest storyline the show ever gave her: infertility, handled with surprising gentleness, and the decision to adopt. When Erica picks them, Monica finally gets the family she has been table-setting for since episode one — in a bigger house, with twice the babies she ordered.

Key episodes: S1E01, S2E14, S4E12, S4E24, S5E08, S5E14, S6E25, S10E17, S10E18

Where they end up: A mother of newborn twins, Jack and Erica, moving with Chandler to the house in Westchester — leaving the purple apartment empty except for the keys on the counter.

The arc: Phoebe is the wild card with the darkest résumé delivered in the sunniest voice: mother's suicide, stepfather in prison, a stretch living on the street, a twin sister who despises her. The show's trick is that none of it curdled her — it made her fearless, strange, and immune to embarrassment, which is how you get “Smelly Cat” performed with total conviction to a coffeehouse of strangers.

Her arcs are the show's most generous. She carries her brother Frank's triplets as a surrogate — a storyline that starts as farce (her birth mother is played by her actual uterus doctor's nightmare, and the embryo transfer is preceded by a pep talk to a petri dish) and ends with her sobbing goodbye to babies that were never hers. And through it all runs David, the scientist she let go to Minsk, the sweet what-if that keeps resurfacing at exactly the wrong moments.

Then Joey forgets to arrange a blind date, grabs a stranger named Mike from Central Perk, and accidentally sets up the endgame. Paul Rudd's Mike is the only person on the show as comfortable with weird as she is, and their snowstorm street wedding outside Central Perk — officiated by Joey, dog and all — is the finale the character earned.

Key episodes: S1E01, S2E06, S2E09, S4E11, S5E03, S9E03, S10E12

Where they end up: Married to Mike Hannigan, still gigging at Central Perk, and talking happily about kids. Regina Phalange remains at large.

The arc: Joey is a struggling actor from a big Italian family in Queens, armed with one catchphrase (“How you doin'?”), one rule (Joey doesn't share food), and a heart roughly the size of the tri-state area. His career is a decade-long rollercoaster the show mines relentlessly: butt double for Al Pacino, Dr. Drake Ramoray on Days of Our Lives, an elevator-shaft death for mouthing off in a magazine, the robot fiasco of Mac & C.H.E.E.S.E., and a triumphant brain-transplant resurrection.

The deeper story is that the show's shallowest character keeps revealing hidden depths at load-bearing moments. He gives Chandler his savings when he's broke, wears all of Chandler's clothes as revenge (going commando), kneels to pick up a ring and gets accidentally engaged to a postpartum Rachel — and then genuinely falls for her, in a late-series arc that is far more tender than anyone expected it to be.

He is also the keeper of the group's institutions: the recliners, the foosball table, the chick and the duck, Hugsy the bedtime penguin pal. When the others pair off, Joey is the one who feels the ground shifting — his panic at everyone leaving is the finale's secret melancholy.

Key episodes: S1E06, S2E10, S2E18, S6E20, S7E15, S8E16, S10E18

Where they end up: The only one of the six still single at the end — by design, since his story continues in the spin-off Joey. He gets Monica and Chandler a housewarming gift of a new chick and duck, and keeps the recliner faith.

The arc: Chandler weaponized sarcasm somewhere around the moment his parents announced their divorce over Thanksgiving turkey, and spent the next twenty-five years hiding behind it. He has the job nobody can name (“transponster!” — it's statistical analysis and data reconfiguration), the on-again catastrophe that is Janice, and a commitment phobia so advanced it once sent him to Yemen.

The Kathy affair with Joey's girlfriend nearly breaks the group — and lands him in a box, thinking about what he did — but it's also the moment Chandler discovers he can take love seriously. Which is why London works: what starts as a comfort-fling with Monica becomes the show's most functional relationship, played out in secret, discovered by Joey through a door and by Phoebe through a window (“My eyes! My eyes!”).

The last act belongs to the grown-up: the double-kneel proposal, making peace with his drag-performer father in Vegas before the wedding, quitting the unnameable job after a Tulsa exile to start over at the bottom of advertising, and the adoption interviews where his terror of fatherhood dissolves the moment Erica picks them. The boy who joked his way out of every feeling ends the series holding two babies.

Key episodes: S1E01, S4E08, S4E24, S6E25, S7E22, S10E17, S10E18

Where they end up: A husband, an ad man, and a father of twins, headed for the suburbs — could he be any more settled?

The arc: Ross starts the pilot freshly abandoned by a wife who realized she was gay, and things somehow get more complicated from there. He is the show's romantic lead and its most reliable disaster: a paleontologist with a PhD and zero chill, capable of both genuine sweetness (the prom video, the planetarium) and legendary meltdowns (the sandwich, the couch, “PIVOT”).

His love life is a running national statistic: three divorces — Carol, then Emily (whose name he famously fails to say at the altar, saying “Rachel” instead), then a drunken Vegas marriage to Rachel he secretly refuses to annul. But the Rachel thread is the real story, from ninth-grade pining through the break heard round the world to co-parenting Emma with the maturity neither of them had in season three.

Around the edges he quietly builds a good life: son Ben with Carol and Susan, tenure-track professorship at NYU (with an accidental British accent on day one), a paleontology grant, and a keyboard nobody asked to hear. When Rachel heads for Paris, it's Ross who races to the airport — and for once in ten years, his timing is perfect.

Key episodes: S1E01, S1E02, S1E23, S2E07, S3E15, S3E16, S4E24, S5E24, S8E23, S10E18

Where they end up: With Rachel, at last, and this time nobody is on a break.

The arc: Ross and Monica's parents, and the show's foundational running joke about favoritism: Ross is the miracle child, Monica is “our little Harmonica.” Jack is bluntly, obliviously affectionate; Judy is a precision instrument of backhanded compliments. Over ten seasons the show slowly lets them make amends — Jack gives Monica his Porsche, and both come through with real warmth at the weddings.

Key episodes: S1E02, S1E08, S2E14, S5E08, S6E09

Where they end up: The Long Island house is sold (Monica's childhood boxes long since ruined in the garage flood, naturally), and they end the series as doting grandparents to Ben, Emma, and Monica's twins.

The arc: Rachel's mother, who takes one look at her daughter's new life and delivers the show's most quietly devastating line: “You didn't marry your Barry, honey — but I married mine.” Inspired by Rachel's independence, she leaves Dr. Green, setting off the divorce that makes every Green-family gathering a minefield. She resurfaces at Emma's baby shower, offering to move in for eight weeks (Rachel declines, then panics, then begs).

Key episodes: S2E11, S2E22, S8E20

Where they end up: Divorced, liberated, and last seen doting on Emma — the grandmother who found her second act by watching her daughter's first.

The arc: Rachel's father, a vascular surgeon with the bedside manner of a thunderstorm. Every man Rachel brings near him visibly ages — Ross spends one entire dinner smoking out of terror. He crashes her birthday party while the gang frantically runs two simultaneous parties to keep him from meeting Sandra, and greets the news of Rachel's pregnancy with the calm of a man who owns a shotgun. A season-ten heart attack finally softens him, slightly.

Key episodes: S2E22, S3E07, S10E13

Where they end up: Divorced from Sandra, recovering from the heart attack, and still the most frightening man on the Eastern Seaboard — but a grandfather now, which helps.

The arc: Chandler's mother, a bestselling erotic-novelist who discusses her son's conception on national television and kisses Ross in a restaurant hallway, forcing the show's first great Ross-Chandler confrontation. She is everything a mortified teenage Chandler grew up around: glamorous, oversharing, and never not promoting a book called something like Mistress Bitch.

Key episodes: S1E11, S7E23, S7E24

Where they end up: At Chandler and Monica's wedding, exchanging perfectly calibrated barbs with her ex-husband and stealing focus in a slit dress — proud of her boy, in her way.

The arc: Chandler's long-estranged father, star of the Las Vegas drag revue Viva Las Gaygas, performing as Helena Handbasket. Decades of Thanksgiving trauma and pool-boy jokes finally resolve when Monica drags Chandler to Vegas to deliver a wedding invitation in person — and Chandler, watching the show from the audience, realizes his father never actually left him.

Key episodes: S7E22, S7E23, S7E24

Where they end up: In the front row at the wedding — civil with Nora, reconciled with Chandler, and better dressed than most of the guests.

The arc: Phoebe's half-brother Frank Jr. — a sweetly unnerving kid whose hobby is melting things — falls for his home-economics teacher Alice, twenty-six years his senior. The engagement horrifies Phoebe until she sees they are, impossibly, perfect for each other. Unable to conceive, they ask Phoebe to carry their babies; she says yes to the show's biggest-hearted storyline and delivers triplets Frank Jr. Jr., Leslie, and Chandler (a girl).

Key episodes: S2E21, S3E05, S3E18, S4E11, S5E03, S10E02

Where they end up: Married and gloriously outnumbered — last seen so exhausted by three five-year-olds that Frank briefly floats giving Phoebe one. He doesn't mean it. Mostly.

The arc: Phoebe's identical twin (carried over from Kudrow's role on Mad About You) and living proof that nature beats nurture to a pulp. A waitress at Riff's with a moral compass that spins freely, she dates Joey out of spite, skips Phoebe's birthday, sells Phoebe's birth certificate, and stars in adult films under the name Phoebe Buffay — a scam Phoebe discovers, and monetizes, personally.

Key episodes: S1E16, S1E17, S6E14

Where they end up: Still out there, still terrible. Her engagement to the lovely Eric collapses once he meets the actual Phoebe and realizes which twin he should have picked — and even that doesn't work out. Ursula endures, unrepentant.

The arc: Ross and Carol's son, born in the season-one finale and raised by Carol and Susan with Ross orbiting anxiously. Played by a succession of babies, then twins Charles and John Allen, and finally a young Cole Sprouse, Ben is the audience for two all-time Ross set pieces: the Holiday Armadillo (Hanukkah's part-time representative) and a prank-war education courtesy of Rachel. Famously, he vanishes from the show after season eight and is never seen in the same room as his half-sister's toddlerhood — a mystery fans have theorized about ever since.

Key episodes: S1E23, S7E10, S8E12

Where they end up: Growing up between two households, presumably somewhere just off camera. The show simply stops mentioning him — the finale's most quietly debated absence.

The arc: Ross and Rachel's daughter, conceived the night of the bonus copies of the infamous tape and born after a 21-hour labor in which seemingly all of New York delivers first — including Janice. Her name is a gift: Monica had “Emma” saved for her own future daughter and hands it over in the delivery room. Emma spends the final two seasons as the show's highest-stakes plot device — the reason Ross and Rachel keep almost, almost, almost.

Key episodes: S8E23, S8E24, S9E08, S10E17, S10E18

Where they end up: A toddler with, at last, two parents in the same city, the same apartment, and the same relationship. Paris's loss.

The arc: The young birth mother who chooses Monica and Chandler — initially because a file mix-up convinces her they're a reverend and a doctor. Once the truth surfaces, she picks them anyway, and her sweet, guileless visits to New York give the final season its countdown clock. The kicker arrives in the delivery room: surprise, it's twins, a fact everyone somehow missed until the second baby.

Key episodes: S10E09, S10E17, S10E18

Where they end up: She delivers Jack and Erica Bing in the finale and returns home, having handed the show its final family. The girl twin is named in her honor.

The arc: Rachel's sisters, each a portrait of the person Rachel would be if she'd never cut up the cards. Jill (Witherspoon) arrives freshly cut off by Daddy and weaponizes a flirtation with Ross until Rachel shuts it down. Amy (Applegate, who won an Emmy for it) crashes Thanksgiving, calls the baby “Emmet,” and asks to be Emma's guardian “if you all die” — then comes back a season later to babysit and pierce the baby's ears.

Key episodes: S6E13, S6E14, S9E08

Where they end up: Jill storms back to Daddy's good graces; Amy remains gloriously unimproved, last seen contemplating marrying an old man for his money. The Greens are a work in progress.

The arc: Monica's great pre-Chandler love: her parents' friend, an ophthalmologist twenty-one years her senior, and the owner of television's most persuasive moustache. Their relationship is the real thing — which is exactly the problem, because he's done raising kids and she hasn't started. They break at Barry and Mindy's wedding, mid-slow-dance. He returns twice: once for an ill-advised “just friends” experiment, and once, catastrophically, on the eve of Chandler's proposal, to declare he'd do it all — kids included.

Key episodes: S2E15, S2E24, S3E13, S6E24, S6E25

Where they end up: He bows out with dignity when he learns Chandler is about to propose — the rare sitcom ex allowed to be a genuinely good man who was simply the wrong timing.

The arc: The Englishwoman Ross falls for at whirlwind speed — engaged within weeks, married in London within months. Then, at the altar, Ross says “Rachel,” and Emily's storyline becomes a study in a reasonable person driven to unreasonable lengths: she'll stay married, but only if Ross never sees Rachel again. He almost agrees. That's the marriage.

Key episodes: S4E14, S4E23, S4E24, S5E01, S5E20

Where they end up: Divorce number two for Ross. Her final appearance is a voice on his answering machine, having wedding-eve doubts about her next husband — a message Ross, for once, is wise enough to erase.

The arc: The colleague Ross brings home from his China dig — stepping off the plane at the exact moment Rachel arrives at the airport, flowers in hand, to confess her feelings. Julie's crime is being genuinely lovely, which makes Rachel's sabotage (and the infamous pro/con list that ends her) all the more painful to rewatch.

Key episodes: S1E24, S2E01, S2E07, S2E08

Where they end up: Dumped by list. In a perfect grace note, she later pairs off with Russ — Ross's uncanny lookalike — proving the universe has a sense of humor about these two.

The arc: The assistant Rachel hires at Ralph Lauren for reasons that are 0% résumé and 100% face. Their office romance is sweet, secret, and doomed by arithmetic: on her thirtieth birthday, Rachel does the timeline math on marriage and kids, looks at her twenty-five-year-old boyfriend, and lets him go. He returns once more, post-breakup, upon hearing she's pregnant — gallant, confused, and gently dismissed.

Key episodes: S7E04, S7E14, S8E02

Where they end up: Out of the picture after season eight, presumably still handsome somewhere. The show's tidiest object lesson in “adorable” versus “plan.”

The arc: OH. MY. GOD. Chandler's thrice-recurring girlfriend and the show's most beloved human boomerang, armed with a laugh that could strip paint. Every season finds a new way for Janice to reappear — dating Chandler, kissing her ex-husband the Mattress King, dating Ross (briefly, horrifyingly), and giving birth down the hall while Rachel is in labor. The genius of Janice is that she's never the villain: she is warm, self-assured, and completely unbothered — it's everyone else who panics.

Key episodes: S1E05, S1E14, S3E08, S5E12, S8E23, S10E15

Where they end up: Happily remarried (to Sid, who never hears any of this), and very nearly Monica and Chandler's next-door neighbor in Westchester — until Chandler fakes undying lust to scare her off. It works. It barely works.

The arc: Joey's girlfriend — and the first woman Chandler ever loved enough to betray his best friend over. The slow burn (a shared love of books, a birthday gift chosen too carefully) detonates when Chandler kisses her, Joey finds out, and Chandler serves his sentence in a shipping box on Thanksgiving. She and Chandler get their chance; it ends when he lets jealousy over an on-stage romance push her into the arms of her co-star.

Key episodes: S4E05, S4E07, S4E08, S4E13

Where they end up: Gone by mid-season four — but the box episode she caused remains one of the show's great friendship monuments.

The arc: The soft-spoken physicist who falls for Phoebe mid-heckle at Central Perk, then chooses a once-in-a-lifetime research post in Minsk — the show's longest-running what-if. He resurfaces years later for one perfect evening, and again in the final seasons, back for good and ready to propose. His Barbados proposal is interrupted by the only man alive with worse timing than his: Mike, proposing first.

Key episodes: S1E10, S7E11, S9E23

Where they end up: Nobly out of the running. David is the road not taken who shows up at the fork twice, and both times the light is red.

The arc: The stranger Joey grabs at Central Perk after forgetting to arrange Phoebe's blind date — and, against every law of sitcom probability, her soulmate. A lawyer-turned-pianist with a failed marriage and a deadpan as dry as Phoebe's is weird, he legally becomes “Crap Bag” when she becomes Princess Consuela Banana-Hammock, which tells you everything about why they work. Their courtship survives a breakup over remarriage, a rivalry with a returning David, and a hall full of wedding-planning Monica.

Key episodes: S9E03, S9E23, S9E24, S10E12

Where they end up: Married to Phoebe in the snow outside Central Perk, and talking about kids in the finale. Crap Bag got the girl.

The arc: A brilliant paleontology professor who dates Joey first — a matchup the show plays as an affectionate mismatch of IQ points — before finding her intellectual equal in Ross at the Barbados conference, in the same episode Rachel and Joey pair off. Tyler was the show's first Black recurring love interest, and Charlie is written with real stature: she's the one character who can out-credential Ross.

Key episodes: S9E20, S9E23, S9E24, S10E06

Where they end up: She leaves Ross for her Nobel-adjacent ex, Benjamin Hobart — the man controlling Ross's grant money — exiting the show with the grant drama resolved and Ross's path back to Rachel cleared.

The arc: The impossibly handsome Italian neighbor who materializes during the blackout (via cat) and becomes Ross's first great romantic obstacle. Paolo speaks little English, needs none, and is precisely as trustworthy as he looks: he makes a pass at Phoebe on her massage table, earning the immortal epitaph “crapweasel” and an immediate ejection from Rachel's life.

Key episodes: S1E07, S1E12

Where they end up: Deported from the narrative by his own hands. Rachel's first post-Barry lesson in the difference between gorgeous and good.

The arc: Ross's first wife and the woman she left him for — introduced at the sonogram of the son all three would raise. (Carol was played by Anita Barone for exactly one episode before Jane Sibbett took over.) Susan and Ross's needling rivalry mellows across the seasons into something like family, peaking when Ross — of all people — walks Carol down the aisle at their wedding when her parents refuse to come.

Key episodes: S1E02, S1E23, S2E11

Where they end up: Married, co-parenting Ben, and long since promoted from “Ross's painful backstory” to two of the extended family's most stable adults.

The arc: Rachel's personal-shopping client at Bloomingdale's: freshly divorced, in need of an entire wardrobe, and the object of a crush that turns Rachel into a one-woman screwball comedy — the “spontaneous” fake party, the cheerleader uniform, the works. They finally connect just in time for Ross to get engaged to Emily, at which point Rachel greets Joshua at the door in a wedding dress as a joke. He does not take it as a joke.

Key episodes: S4E13, S4E16, S4E20

Where they end up: Scared off, understandably, by matrimonial cosplay four dates in. A casualty of the Ross-and-Emily season more than anything he did.

The arc: The student Ross dates in open defiance of university policy, common sense, and her terrifying father Paul (a scene-stealing Bruce Willis, who promptly starts dating Rachel). The relationship is sweet and doomed in equal measure: she's twenty, he's a tenured-track adult, and the gap announces itself everywhere from spring break plans to her preferred conflict-resolution method — water balloons.

Key episodes: S6E18, S6E21, S6E23

Where they end up: Dumped, and avenged via water balloon. Ross keeps the job; the university, mercifully, never finds out.

The arc: The woman Ross meets at Monica's wedding reception — hours before learning Rachel is pregnant with his child. Mona is the show's most patient romantic bystander: she weathers the pregnancy reveal, the joint holiday card, and Ross's escalating half-truths, right up until she discovers Rachel is moving in with him. She made him a key. He changed the lock. It was that kind of relationship.

Key episodes: S8E01, S8E11

Where they end up: Out by mid-season eight with her dignity intact, having correctly concluded that there were three people in the relationship and she was the third.

The arc: The bleach-blond soul of Central Perk, silently refilling cups behind the six for a full season and a half before earning his first line (“Yeah,” midway through season two — Tyler got the job partly because he was a real barista who could work the machine). What began as background became the show's longest unrequited-love story: Gunther adores Rachel from the first pour to the last, buys her cat for a thousand dollars, and suffers every boyfriend in silence.

Key episodes: S1E02, S2E09, S10E17

Where they end up: In the finale he finally says it. Rachel, kindly: she loves him too — “probably not in the same way.” Somehow, it's enough. The coffeehouse, and its keeper, endure.

The arc: Joey's chain-smoking, gravel-voiced agent, whose client roster consists of Joey and “the guy who eats paper.” Her career advice is reliably catastrophic and her loyalty weirdly total. (Trivia for the rewatch: June Gable also played the delivery nurse when Ben was born, one season before Estelle debuted.) When she dies in the final season, Phoebe impersonates her on the phone so Joey — freshly furious at her — never has to know his last words were angry ones.

Key episodes: S1E06, S2E10, S10E15

Where they end up: Gone in S10E15, title role. Somewhere, the guy who eats paper is unrepresented.

The arc: The building superintendent — gruff, mop-wielding, and secretly a marshmallow. Introduced clearing out Mr. Heckles' apartment, he gets his showcase when he makes Rachel cry over a clogged trash chute and Joey, negotiating peace, ends up as his ballroom-dance practice partner. The sight of Joey and Treeger waltzing is one of the series' purest deliveries of joy.

Key episodes: S2E03, S4E04

Where they end up: Still running the building, presumably still dancing. Marge, we hope, said yes to a second date.

The arc: Chandler's boss, a man who communicates exclusively through nicknames (“Bing!”) and celebratory butt-slaps. He is the reason Chandler develops the Work Laugh — the dead-eyed bray Monica witnesses with horror at a company party — and a walking argument for everything Chandler eventually quits.

Key episodes: S3E24, S5E12, S8E11

Where they end up: Last seen mid-divorce and more Doug than ever. Chandler escapes to advertising; the WENUS reports on without him.

The arc: A rotating rep company for Joey's career. He lands Dr. Drake Ramoray on Days of Our Lives (S2E10), talks himself into an elevator shaft by claiming he writes his own lines (S2E18), and returns years later via the medical miracle of a brain transplant — receiving the memories of Jessica Lockhart, played by a magnificently haughty Susan Sarandon as Cecilia Monroe (S7E15), who coaches him in slapping and steals a kiss on her way off the canvas. In between: Kate Miller (Dina Meyer), the play co-star who breaks his heart and leaves for Los Angeles, and the unforgettable Mac & C.H.E.E.S.E., in which Joey is upstaged by a robot.

Key episodes: S2E10, S2E18, S3E19, S3E22, S6E20, S7E15

Where they end up: Drake Ramoray outlives them all — Joey is still playing him when the series ends, twice resurrected and never once convincingly board-certified.

The arc: The downstairs neighbor with the broom, first glimpsed during the blackout (credited only as “Weird Man”) and forever complaining about noise the girls aren't making — he could have owned a cat. His death in season two lands a surprise gut-punch: he leaves all his worldly possessions “to the noisy girls upstairs,” and Chandler, reading the dead man's yearbook and old letters, recognizes a lonely, sarcastic, commitment-phobic mirror of himself. It scares him straight(er). A flashback episode later restores him to glorious, broom-thumping life.

Key episodes: S1E07, S1E19, S2E03, S3E06

Where they end up: Gone since S2E03, but permanently part of the building's mythology — the ghost of Chandler's possible future, banging on the ceiling of the past.

The arc: The neighbor across the street whose curtainless existence the gang narrates like nature documentarians: Ugly Naked Guy got a Thighmaster, got gravity boots, laid kitchen tile. He is seen on screen exactly twice — poked with a giant device of chopsticks when the gang fears he's dead, and sharing naked mini-muffins with an equally naked Ross, who is auditioning to sublet his apartment. The actor's identity stayed a genuine mystery until 2016, when Jon Haugen was finally revealed.

Key episodes: S3E08, S5E14

Where they end up: He moves out in season five and Ross wins the apartment — which is how Ross ends up living across the street for the rest of the series, in the flat with the best view of his friends' window.

The arc: The replacement roommate Chandler takes in when Joey moves out, and a three-episode masterclass in escalating menace: Eddie watches Chandler sleep, dehydrates fruit at 3 a.m., keeps a goldfish cracker as a pet, and accuses Chandler of sleeping with his ex and murdering the fish. Evicting him proves impossible until Chandler and a returned Joey simply gaslight him back: “Here's the thing, Eddie — you don't live here anymore.” He accepts this.

Key episodes: S2E17, S2E18, S2E19

Where they end up: Convinced he never lived there, and gone by the end of season two — the cautionary tale that reunited television's best roommates.

The arc: Ross's pet capuchin monkey, acquired in season one to fill the ex-wife-shaped hole in his apartment, and responsible for the “The Lion Sleeps Tonight” needle-drop that lives in every fan's head. When Marcel reaches, let's say, romantic maturity, Ross surrenders him to the San Diego Zoo — only to discover a season later that his monkey has gone Hollywood: a Monkeyshine Beer campaign and a starring role in Outbreak 2: The Virus Takes Manhattan.

Key episodes: S1E10, S1E19, S1E21, S2E12, S2E13

Where they end up: A working actor with better credits than Joey had at the time. Retired from the show after the Super Bowl episodes, forever fabulous.