31 Years Ago, Friends Solved a Major Plothole By Crossing Over With Another Hit Sitcom

Television is filled with some interesting crossover moments, many of which tend to go over the heads of viewers. That’s because, unless a major TV crossover is being sold as a crossover event (The Simpsons/Family Guy, It’s Always Sunny/Abbott Elementary), the casual viewer will just see a TV show scene and think nothing more than what they see on the surface. And that’s exactly what some TV creators are counting on: deep cut gems that only the most dedicated fans will appreciate.

31 years ago, TV viewers got one such moment when Friends, arguably the most popular show on the airwaves, featured a scene that broke the wall of its own universe and crossed over into the world of one of the most acclaimed shows on at that time.

Friends & Mad About You‘s Crossover Moment Explained

When Friends Season 1 premiered in September 1994, Mad About You was starting Season 3, having already grown into an awards darling. The show earned both an Emmy and Golden Globe nomination for its pilot episode (both for actress Helen Hunt), and Season 2 had done even better, earning 4 Emmy nominations as well as a Golden Globe win for Hunt. By the time Season 3 was done, Mad About You was exploding into more Emmy and Golden Globes nominations, while Friends was crushing viewership ratings – all of it (along with shows like Seinfeld) propelling NBC to be the dominant primetime network in the 1990s.

The network clearly saw the potential early, because they made the decision to have Friends crossover with Mad About You when it was in the middle of its first season. On February 23, 1995, Friends aired the two-episode special “The One with Two Parts”, and it blended the worlds of Friends and Mad About You by using the crossover status of actress Lisa Kudrow. Kudrow had booked a recurring role on Mad About You before she landed a lead role in Friends; she played “Ursula Buffay,” a ditzy waitress at the NYC restaurant Riff’s, where lead couple Paul (Paul Reiser) and Jamie (Helen Hunt) Buchman are regulars.

Read Next

Every MCU Show on Disney+ Ranked by Comic Book Accuracy

However, when Friends premiered, the network and producers decided to set the two shows in the same fictional NYC playground, particularly since viewers had noticed that Kudrow was playing two characters both living in modern NYC. Having the shows ackowledge her duel casting plugged a major hole, and gave fans extra reason to tune into both series as Friends was still establishing itself.

It was revealed that Lisa Kudrow’s Friends character, “Phoebe Buffay” was the twin sister of her Mad About You character, Ursula Buffay. The reveal happened in “The One with Two Parts”, where one subplot of the two-part event was dedicated to a storyline where Joey (Matt LeBlanc) runs into Ursula at a restaurant while he’s out dining with Phoebe. Joey sleeps with and starts dating Ursula, which disrupts his friendship with Phoebe. In the end, Ursula gets tired of Joey and ghosts him, leaving Phoebe to impersonate her sister and let Joey down softly. In the end, Joey figures out the ruse, and reaffirms his friendship with Phoebe.

The Crossover Kept Crossing Over

Once Friends tooks off, Ursula became a recurring character in the series. She was developed into essentially being Phoebe’s evil twin, a wild child who did everything from work in adult entertainment (using Phoebe’s name as an alias) to battling Phoebe over a school teacher named Eric (Sean Penn). Mad About You added to the character’s lore in its finale, with the twist reveal that Ursula would eventually go on to become Governor of New York.

“The One with Two Parts” also featured a cameo from two other Mad About You characters: Helen Hunt’s Jamie Buchman and Leila Kenzie’s Fran Devanow. The ladies run across Phoebe in Central Park and mistake her for Ursula – a mistaken indentity gag that Friends would return to multiple times in later seasons.

While other shows have done crossovers, few have been so popular as Friends and Mad About You, or kept the blending of worlds going for so long. You can check out where it all began by streaming Friends, “The One with Two Parts”, on HBO Max. Discuss the film with us over on the ComicBook Forum!