Phoebe Buffay is a main character on the television show Friends. The show ran from 1994 to 2004, totaling in 236 episodes lasting 22 minutes each. Friends is a sitcom created by David Crane and Marta Kauffman. They show follows a set of six main characters from their twenty’s and into their thirty’s. They main characters aside form Phoebe are Monica Geller (later Bing), Ross Geller, Chandler Bing, Rachel Green and Joey Tribbiani. The show portrays their everyday lives in New York City, as well as major life event that happen to them. Through the eleven years of television this zany group experiences relationship pitfalls, career changes, pregnancy, and all other things that go along with life.
In season seven episode nine; The One with All the Candy, Phoebe’s character is further developed. The Episode starts out by Ross teaching his son Ben to ride a ‘big kid’. Phoebe tells him how huge of a deal that is, and then tells the story of her first ‘big kid’ bike was actually a box her dream bike came in that her neighbor gave her. Her parents were poor and couldn’t afford to buy her a bike so she pretend to ride the box as a bike. Later in the episode Ross surprised Phoebe with her exact dream bike as a gift. She is extremely grateful for the thoughtful gift. The group later is all talking about how cute she is with it but then soon realize that none of them have seen her actually ride it.
Ross confronts Phoebe and asks if she knows how to ride a bike. She says yes and tries to show him but shortly after falls proving that indeed she does not know how to ride a bike. Ross attempts to teach her in the same way many parents would teach their children. He promises not to let go and of course does when she seems to be stable. Once Phoebe realizes Ross is no longer holding on she gets angry and yells at him for lying. She leaves the park angrily. Ross attempts to apologize and convince her to try again by appealing to her kind heart. He tells her that the bike will lose its ‘soul’ if it just sits. She agrees not wanting anything bad to happen to her precious bike, and eventually Phoebe learns to ride the bike; with training wheels.
Through this episode we learn more about Phoebe’s mysterious past which is often left hidden throughout most of the show. We learn in more detail about how poor her family was, and some of the common childhood memories she was deprived at a young age. The connections from her childhood to her adult life are made clearer as we see it wasn’t just that she had to learn things later than others but she just didn’t learn somethings at all. With all this information being provided though this small story within the episode Phoebe keeps her youthful, eccentric, and passionate personality viewers have come to love.
Small stories can reveal important information about a character and help develop them further into a more relatable character. Having Phoebe portrayed in this episode as an underprivileged child can appeal to a wider audience. This episode helped show Phoebe in a more realistic light making her a more relatable character as well as more believable. Even small stories within an episode can add a lot to a shows plot without being a huge event, it can be something as small as learning how to ride a bike.
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