Who is the Main Character on Friends?

According to IMDB, Friends is ranked #1 in “the Best Sitcom” poll.

Friends aired between 1994–2004, Won 6 Primetime Emmys. However, one question remains unanswered …

Who is the main character?

Is it Joey, Rachel, Ross, Phoebe, Monica, or Chandler?

Using Quantitative Analysis, I tried finding an answer.

• Method #1 — Whoever has the most mentions in the episode title is the main character
• Method #2 — whoever has the most mentions in the episode summary is the main character

You can view the complete analysis here.

Method #1

Each Friends episode is usually titled either “The One Where” or “The One With,” followed by a character name.

Here are some examples:

• Season 2 Episode 16: “The One Where Joey Moves Out”
• Season 3 Episode 15: “The One Where Ross and Rachel Take a Break”

Therefore, the character who appears the most in an Episode’s title is the main character.

Using this dataset from Kaggle, we can utilize the following information:

• Year of prod: Year of production
• Season: Season of the TV Show (1 to 10)
• Episode Title: The title of the episode
• Duration: The duration of the episode
• Summary: A summary of the episode
• Director: The director of each episode
• Stars: Ranking on IMDB
• Votes: How many people voted on IMDB

So I’ve loaded this dataset into MongoDB and used the following aggregation pipeline to count each character mentioned in the episode title. For example, Monica:

[{$match: {
 Episode_Title: {
  $regex: 'Monica'
 }
}}, {$group: {
 _id: 1,
 myCount: {
  $sum: 1
 }
}}, {$addFields: {
 name: 'Monica'
}}]

Which produced the following result:

_id: 1
myCount: 9
name: “Monica”

Monica was mentioned only in 9 episodes. Then I moved on to the rest of the characters creating a union of all results.

Number of Mentions in Episode Title

And so it seems Rachel Greene is the main character!

Followed by Ross, Joey, Chandler, Phoebe, and Monica.

Method #2

Each episode has a plot. The plot can be summarized.

Here are some examples:

• Season 1 Episode 19: “The gang frantically search for Ross’s monkey Marcel after Rachel loses him.”
• Season 8 Episode 14: “Chandler’s very curious about a locked closet, but Monica won’t tell him what is inside.”

Therefore, the character who appears the most in an Episode’s summary is the main character.

So I’ve utilized the same dataset loaded into MongoDB and revised the aggregation pipeline referencing the summary field:

[{$match: {
 Summary: {
  $regex: 'Monica'
 }
}}, {$group: {
 _id: 1,
 myCount: {
  $sum: 1
 }
}}, {$addFields: {
 name: 'Monica'
}}]

Which produced the following result:

_id: 1
myCount: 152
name: “Monica”

Monica was one of the main characters in 152 episodes. Then I moved on to the rest of the characters creating a union of all results.

Number of Mentions in Episode Summary

And so it seems Rachel Greene again is the main character!

Followed by Monica, Chandler, Ross, Joey, and Phoebe.

Method #3

What if a single method is not enough to determine who is the main character?

We can combine Method #1 + #2 to have a new type of score.

As it happens, Rachel is the winner in each Method, so it is safe to determine.

🥇Rachel Greene is the winner and the main character in Freinds!🥇

Top 100 Episodes

Bonus: “The One Where” VS. “The One With”

There were 163 episodes of “The One With” and 54 episodes of “The One Where”.

With VS. Where

Final Thoughts

The full analysis can be viewed here.

Who is the most favorite character in Friends? 🤔

(mine is Ross)