Matt LeBlanc

I remember the Heinz commercial—his IMDb trivia claims it was a UK commercial, but it definitely aired in the US—but even more shockingly, I remember TV 101. I haven’t seen it since it aired, but I do remember it. It was an interesting concept; a high school journalism class in the ‘90s that was more focused on TV than newspapers, and the kids got camcorders and recorded journals. I remember, vaguely, the episode where a character got pregnant and got an abortion. Do I remember Matt LeBlanc on that show? No, not particularly, but I don’t remember the show well enough to remember much of anyone on it.

He was something of a staple of my childhood, actually, because he did a lot of commercials. I was inflicting one of those “commercials every Gen-Xer will know” compilations from YouTube on my kids not long ago, and there was not just the Heinz one but a Cherry 7-Up one, from when Cherry 7-Up was new, that I suddenly remembered having seen before but would not have been able to mention if you’d paid me five minutes earlier. Doritos, apparently, and Levis and Coke. It paid the bills, and good for him—but it only paid the bills so well. It seems that, by the time he was cast as Joey, he was down to his last eleven bucks.

I would not be able to stand being around Joey in real life. He’d get on my last nerve. However, he does mostly seem to be good-natured, at least. He’s willing to stay at the group’s Thanksgiving dinner even though his dancer roommate is across the hall getting drunk with his friends. He’s not happy about it, but he’s going to do right by his friends. It’s just, you know, he’s also dumb as a brick and I wouldn’t be able to cope with that. I do kind of wonder if the first Thanksgiving episode, where his image is used for a medical poster, ties in to the fact that LeBlanc himself was once a cover model for a gay travel guide. It’s the sort of thing Friends would do.

I didn’t watch Joey. To be fair, by then, I’d stopped watching Friends, too, because I just couldn’t take the Ross and Rachel thing anymore. If they’d showed half as much respect for one another as my partner and I do to one another, they wouldn’t have been as off-again-on-again as they were, and I think the writers were just afraid of the alleged Moonlighting curse where your show tanks when your dueling romantic leads get together. But since I wasn’t watching for the romantic tension, who cared?

Matt LeBlanc seems, from what I can tell, content with his career. I mean, again, Friends money; he doesn’t need to work anymore. But he’s able to be grey now; he started greying in about season two, but while some people do go grey early, Joey never would’ve let it happen. He works some, and if he doesn’t feel like working, he doesn’t. What else is Friends money for?