Spinoffs are hard. For every Frasier or The Jeffersons, there are about a dozen forgotten shows that buckled under the pressure of living up to their original series.
But the stakes for a spinoff have arguably never been higher than they were in 2004, when Joey Tribbiani left his friends behind and flew across America to launch his Hollywood career.
After the incredible success of Friends, which ran for 10 seasons and won six Emmy Awards, the only cast member who agreed to stick around for a spinoff was Matt LeBlanc. The result was Joey, a two-season sitcom filmed on the very same soundstage, in which the lovable doofus moves to Los Angeles to finally become a star.
Spoiler alert: He kind of succeeds, but his career was cut short when the show was canceled due to low ratings.
Two decades later, the pilot episode of Joey recently made its streaming debut when it was quietly uploaded to Friends’ official YouTube channel. Overnight, the 26-minute-long episode racked up over a million views.
I’m only slightly ashamed to admit that one of those views was from me. After stumbling across the first episode of Joey thanks to YouTube’s algorithm, I wound up watching more episodes of the series than I’m willing to publicly admit. And while Joey has plenty of flaws – it’s certainly no Friends – it’s way better than I ever imagined. In fact, it might actually be kind of good.
The best thing Joey has going for it is its cast. There’s Matt LeBlanc, of course, who does an impressive job carrying the weight of an entire show on his broad shoulders. The Joey Tribbiani we see here is pretty much the exact same version from Friends’ latter days, and the fact that he’s still entertaining to watch even without Chandler by his side speaks to the resilience of a well-built sitcom character.
In the pilot episode, Joey arrives in Los Angeles, where he’s greeted by his sister Gina (Drea de Matteo, best known as Adriana on The Sopranos). Gina’s character mostly exists to make Joey look smart by comparison, but Drea infuses the part with an angry New Yorker attitude that’s memorable, even if she’s playing a stereotype.
Other standouts from the cast include Jennifer Coolidge as Joey’s new agent, Bobbie (she’s not in every episode, but when she does show up, you know she doesn’t miss) and his landlord Alex (Andrea Anders, who you may remember from another under-appreciated sitcom, Better Off Ted).
While the plot is never particularly memorable – Joey tries to get work as a Hollywood actor, deals with family drama and dates a lot of women – there’s something comforting about its classic sitcom structure.
Despite only running for two seasons, the show produced 46 episodes, each with an A-plot and a B-plot that intersect at some point before resolving by the 20-minute mark. That was pretty common in 2004, but in 2025, it’s become increasingly rare. Watching Joey today can feel like uncovering a forgotten time capsule from a nostalgic time in your life you’d almost forgotten.
As for the show’s problems (because let’s be real, it has plenty), I’ll start with the most obvious. The cast of Joey is extremely white. This wasn’t unusual in 2004, but Friends had already faced some criticism for its lack of diversity, so you’d think a spinoff would offer a chance to course correct. Alas, it wasn’t, at least not until its second season, when Miguel A. Núñez Jr. joined the cast as Joey’s new friend Zach.
Another critique: The story of Joey’s Hollywood career is unbelievable to the point of being distracting. In Friends, Joey’s acting work mostly consisted of nonsensical off-Broadway plays and cheesy soap opera roles. In Joey, he’s cast in a primetime drama set in a ski town. We’re constantly told the show is good and popular, but the scenes we actually see are soap opera dreck. Only his agent, Bobbie, seems aware of how absurd the situation is as she constantly refers to this very serious drama as a hilarious comedy.
Joey also fails to take advantage of its Hollywood setting in any interesting way. Most of the show takes place in Joey’s apartment and the building’s shared outdoor patio, complete with a hot tub (because Los Angeles). Unlike Friends with its iconic Central Perk cafe, there’s no other location that connects Joey to the city where it takes place. Maybe the budget was too small, or maybe LA just doesn’t have third places. Either way, you can feel that absence.
Ultimately, Joey was probably doomed to fail from the start as the spinoff shifted from ensemble to one-man-show. As Matt later told The Hollywood Reporter: “The pressure was huge. I can’t lift the weight that six people were lifting. Those were big shoes to fill.”
But despite all that pressure, Joey is still a half-decent sitcom you won’t regret watching. Sure, it doesn’t live up to Friends, but then again, what could? And in an era of TV where the best shows disappear for several years at a time before offering up meagre eight-episode seasons, there’s something downright satisfying about the unsurprising comfort of a show like Joey.
Joey is available to stream on YouTube.