Jerry Seinfeld has been taking shots at Friends for more than two decades at this point. In 2003, Bob Costas asked the comedian if he thought NBC would’ve given Seinfeld time to succeed if it’d premiered then instead of in 1989.
“Has Friends been on too?” Seinfeld asked, to which Costas replied, “Yeah, Friends has been on.” “Really?” Seinfeld sarcastically responded, “So they managed to steal it without seeing it!”
Seinfeld’s opinion doesn’t appear to have changed one bit over the years. This past May, at the Netflix Is a Joke Fest, he repeated a belief that he’s shared on a number of other occasions, which is that Friends was just his show with good-looking people. Seinfeld reportedly kept that same energy with Lisa Kudrow when he ran into her at a party years ago. After Kudrow said hello to Seinfeld that night, he simply told her, “You’re welcome.”
But does Seinfeld have good reason for feeling the way that he does? At the end of the day, Seinfeld came before Friends, and more than a few things that were done on Seinfeld were done on Friends as well. And we’re talking oddly specific things that seem a little too close to chalk up to parallel thinking. Ross having trouble with an overly tight pair of pants in 1999’s “The One With All the Resolutions,” for example…
Suspiciously similar to Kramer’s battle with tight jeans in the 1996 Seinfeld episode “The Wait Out”:
Or how about Ross having a disastrous tanning accident in 2003’s “The One With Ross’s Tan”:
Compare that to Kramer dealing with the same issue in “The Wife” nearly a decade earlier:
That brings us to the concept of someone getting one of their toes severed and having to have it transported to the hospital on ice. This happens to Elaine’s co-worker, Toby, in the Seinfeld episode “The Fire,” from 1994:
Chandler goes through this experience himself on Friends, just, you know, later on. Four years later on, to be precise, in “The One With All the Thanksgivings”:
Is it possible that this is all just a coincidence? I suppose, but the examples don’t end there, unfortunately. If you feel like exploring things further, allow me to direct your attention to this 14-minute video compilation on YouTube that includes plenty of other side-by-side comparisons for you to shake your head at:
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