Matt Le Blanc has admitted Friends spin-off Joey was doomed to fail (Picture: Getty)

Poor old Matt LeBlanc has admitted Friends spin-off series Joey was always doomed to fail – nine years after it aired.

Joey hit TV screens months after Friends’ finale episode aired in 2004.

And now LeBlanc, who played Joey Tribbiani in Friend, has admitted the pressure was intense to deliver a show worthy of its predecessor and they sadly failed.

‘It was doomed from the start. In Friends I was sharing a 22-minute episode with six other characters. In Joey the script was all me,’ he told Radio Times.


‘It was a lot of responsibility. The pressure was so much, I remember feeling like an elephant had sat on my head.’

Joey aired on Channel 5 (Picture: Channel 5)

Sadly, Matt believes Joey’s character was altered too much by scriptwriters and he was no longer the ‘Joey’ Friends fans knew and loved.



He continued: ‘The writing and the jokes were OK but the conflict and the obstacles in the stories were not valid enough.

Here’s a sneak peak at Joey post-Friends:

‘In Friends Joey was always glass is half full. In Joey he was glass half empty. And that was sad. It was the same showrunner as Friends, and I think we should have taken a year off.’

Joey was panned by critics and was axed after just two series. Now, Matt is a hit in BBC2 comedy Episodes, in which he stars alongside with Tamsin Greig and Stephen Mangan.

Matt now stars in Episodes (Picture: BBC2)

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