One of my favorite TV shows is Friends: a 90's sitcom about six friends who live in New York. One of the reasons I love to watch this show is the interesting characters. I now realize the characters are so engaging because of the writers' excellent use of Big 5 Personality profiles for the characters. Here I will analyze three of the characters from friends: Monica, Joey and Pheobe.
Monica (pictured third from the right) is very high in conscientiousness. She is very dependable and reliable, she has to win, and her apartment is always perfectly organized and clean. In one episode she can't sleep because she knows that her shoes aren't put away. She is also high in neuroticism, prone to worry and stress. Monica provides some stability to the show and always offers a clean apartment for everyone to hang out at and being on top of plans for holidays.
Joey (pictured second from the right) is very low in conscientiousness, his apartment is always a mess and he is known to forget to do things, like show up to the Macy's day parade he is to appear on as a star of Days of our Lives. He is also very high in extraversion, and hits on basically every girl he meets. Joey's character provides an interesting comedic element to the show, especially when his low conscientiousness clashes with Monica's plans.
Pheobe (pictured on the far right) is very high in openness to experience. One of the most unusual characters on the show, she is very creative and unconventional. She always has crazy ideas, and thinks in very different ways from the other characters on the show. In one episode, she tries to teach Joey to play the guitar, and her unconventional character is portrayed very well. She doesn't actually know the names of the chords, however, but has just made up names based on what her hand looks like playing them. She uses names like: "Turkey Leg," "Old Lady," and "Bear Claw." Her very diverse way of looking at the world leads to many funny moments on the show.
This is a good character analysis and probably why the show was so relatable. I was thinking about these with my own friends as well as the attachment styles we learned about, it's fun to understand why we fit so well with certain people.
Interesting analysis! I never considered the kind of thought that goes into creating a character, especially such iconic ones like the cast of Friends or the Simpsons family as we saw in lecture. It's interesting how we all have some aspects of the Big Five Traits, but have different amounts. My friend and I both scored high conscientiousness, but she also scored higher on neuroticism than I did. I tend to be calmer before midterms, while she gets really anxious.
"Friends" is probably the best show you could use to find all of the Big 5 personality traits. I never would have thought to apply the concept, nor have I ever noticed the contrast that they all offer on the show. Good choice!
This is a great character analysis, plus I just love 'Friends'. I did notice that all of their personalities are so incredibly different. I think that is part of what makes the show so hilarious and so easy to relate to - watching the complete opposite personality types fighting, getting along, and dating. Great post!
Oh!!! It was such a nice explanation of characteristics of main charaters in Friends!
I rreally liked that show and I liked phoebe and joey! My personality is like monica and I wanna have a personality like phoebe. For joey, he was so different from my personality, so I liked him alot!
It was such an interesting blog posting!
You really explain well about three characters with the concept of Big 5. I think every character has different personality and no one is similar. This makes this sitcom much funnier. Also, you are right that because we learned Big 5 so that we can now describe many distictive people's personalities.