Graph Theory in Friends
Friends has become the quintessential TV sitcom of the 90s and has given us six lovable characters to quote in common scenarios. All six of the characters were good friends, but Ben Blatt of Slate attempts to take a look to see which of the six friends were the closest. Can the amount of screen time shared between characters dictate the actual physical and personal relationships that these characters had?
If we dictate a close relationship as if two characters are related, date, or ever room together, then we have several relationships.We can use the basics of graph theory to analyze these relationships. The numbers next to the pairings indicate the number of scenes that just had the two characters in them. Throughout the show, we see that Ross and Monica (25) are siblings, Ross and Chandler (38) were college roommates, Monica and Phoebe (63) were roommates at one point (before the show began), Monica and Rachel (52) are roommates throughout most of the show, Ross and Rachel (163) date throughout the show, Joey and Chandler (130) are roommates for most of the show’s ten seasons, Ross lives with Joey (54) for a couple of episodes, Monica and Chandler (151) begin dating and eventually get married and live together, Phoebe and Rachel (63) live together for a bit, Joey and Rachel (73) live together for a period of time and date for a short amount of time as well. The only friends that don’t have a direct relationship are Ross and Phoebe (33), Chandler and Rachel (20), Joey and Monica (28), Phoebe and Joey (60), and Phoebe and Chandler (20).
We can see that there definitely is a correlation with the number of scenes and the strength of their relationship. The romantic relationships overwhelmingly dictate the strength of the relationship along with individual pairing screen time, with the exception of Joey and Chandler, who live together for at least 6 seasons of the show.
Based on the statistics, the actors all had roughly equal screen time with Joey appearing in the most scenes at 47.7% and Phoebe appearing in the fewest scenes at 41.9%. This makes sense as Phoebe only has two strong ties with Monica and Rachel, leaving her as the least connected of the friends.
In terms of strong triadic closure, there are some predictions and violations. For example, Ross’ strong relationship with Monica (as a sibling) and Chandler (as a college roommate) predicted the eventual relationship of Monica and Chandler. Monica lived with both Phoebe and Rachel on separate occasions, and Phoebe and Rachel become roommates at one point in the show. A violation of the strong triadic closure is the friendship between Chandler and Rachel. As both Ross and Monica are close with Chandler and Rachel, it might be expected that Chandler and Rachel would have more screen time than just 20 scenes together (the more rare grouping of any two friends).