Christina Pickles

Friends has aged like milk, inasmuch as some bits of it are like cheese or yogurt or similar and are still delightful and other bits of it are a horrific disgusting mess. One of the things that was consistently the former is the Thanksgiving episodes. Friends had a knack for capturing the uncomfortable nature of a holiday where the entire purpose is getting together with your family—the holidays where you couldn’t or didn’t want to be with your family, the holidays where you legitimately loved being with your found family, and relevant to today, the holiday where you awkwardly combined the two and then remembered why you tried to avoid doing that.

I bring this up because, long and distinguished as the career of Christina Pickles has been, where I will always think of her first is “The One Where Ross Gets High.” The episode is a chaos of lies, with Jack (Elliott Gould) and Judy (Pickles) Geller arriving at Monica’s apartment for the holiday, unaware that she is now living with Chandler, whom they dislike because Ross once convinced them he had been smoking pot in Ross’s room and had just jumped out the window, and this is the least insane aspects of the episode. All the truth is dumped all at once, and Pickles gets to react to it. It’s magnificent.

Yes, all right, I know she was on St. Elsewhere and critically acclaimed for it. She’s done a ton of stage, including Shakespeare in the Park. She’s one of those actresses where I’m surprised not to see a Wikipedia page including what awards she’s won; she’s only ever been nominated for Emmys, having won one for a web series quite recently. (Her Friends nomination was for “The One Where Nana Dies Twice” and she lost to Cyndi Lauper for an episode of Mad About You. She also lost to Doris Roberts twice, once for a St. Elsewhere episode, and twice to the same St. Elsewhere costar.) She feels criminally underawarded.

I’m also, I suppose, a bad Gen-Xer for never actually having seen the first thing wherein she appeared with Courtney Cox, so I don’t even know if they shared any scenes. At least I’ve seen some St. Elsewhere, even if it was when it originally aired, but I’ve never seen Masters of the Universe. I remember when it was in the theatre and I remember thinking even then that it was likely a terrible movie. I’m pretty sure Siskel and Ebert hated it, and I cared back in those days. I doubt Pickles thinks of it as the high point of her career.

I moved Pickles way, way up the schedule when I thought about adding her; she was not the original person at this spot in the Month of Chris. But I very much wanted to get to her while she still qualified, because she is a talented actress who deserves to be discussed. Even just the role of Judy Geller. Judy is, let’s be clear, a fairly terrible person. She mistreats Monica, showing blatant favouritism to Ross, and she cares way too much about her college-age son maybe having tried pot once. (We’ll not discuss if Ross smoked pot after that one time.) But you do love to hate her, and Pickles is obviously having fun in the role.