The Main Character of Friends Has Finally Been Revealed

Thirteen years since it finished and we're all still obsessed with Friends. We just can't help it can we? Sure, some of the jokes are pretty sexist and homophobic in the sober light of day/2019, but we're still quoting it like no one's business (sorry but there is an appropriate Friends quote for every situation).

We'll without a doubt all have our own favourite characters (did someone say Mike?!), and others we care about less (cough PHOEBE), but have you ever thought about who the main character is?

As Metro reports, Yashu Seth, a data scientist, started thinking just that after watching an episode of Friends ('The One With Ross' Tan', ofc), and decided to use their data skills to work out exactly who the main character is.

Annnnnd it was Ross.

Writing in their blog, Yashu explained how they worked it out, "To determine an answer to this question, I downloaded transcripts of the ten seasons... I have used different parameters to find out who stood out among our six friends."

Looking at who spoke the most lines, Yashu said, "I could not get the actual screen time of the characters but I think the number of lines spoken would give us a reasonable estimate." Ross and Rachel both had the highest number of lines (over 9,000 in total), and Phoebe had the least with 7,000.

Ross and Rachel both spoke the most words, too. Yashu looked into who appeared on screen the most, with Rachel topping that category shortly followed by Ross. And, as per, Phoebe had the least screen appearances throughout the ten series.

But that didn't quite go deep enough, Yashu explained. "The number of individual scenes can also be a good parameter to answer our question. For this part, I consider scenes in which only one character among the six was present. This also counts scenes where other supporting characters were present but with only one of these six." And yeah, Ross won by miles on this one, with Joey coming in second.

They also analysed how many times each character's name was mentioned in an episode title - with Rachel winning at 27, followed by Ross (24) and poor, sweet Monica bringing up the rear with four lowly mentions (AN INJUSTICE).

In conclusion

As Yashu put it, "It is really close between Ross and Rachel. But, Ross beats Rachel by a significant margin in the individual scene appearances. Besides, there was very little difference between them in the other parameters. Hence, I will have to give it to Ross."

Other cool things they found

Now we know whose the most important character, let's look at Yashu's other interesting findings seeing as we're all such Friends nerds, eh.

- Chandler and Joey were the main duo, as they had the highest number of scenes together as a pair

- Phoebe was spotted in two thirds of ALL the Central Perk scenes

- In the entire ten series, there was just one scene featuring Ross, Monica, Joey, and Phoebe without Chandler, Rachel or any other character ('The One With The Blackout').

Cool, huh?