extracted... it's a long article and I can't find it online.
"Television has a very different agenda and the couples on it carry a burden that has more in common with Brecht than with Bochco. The end must never come, happy or otherwise. A storybook ending is not in the script. For Ross and Rachel... the job is to keep the plates and plots aloft season after season... mating on prime-time runs the same risk that it does for lower orders of insects: get it on and die.
It is nearly impossible to think of a long-running show that doesn't depend on a grippingly untable, thrillingly disfunctional, non-starting couple as its comic or dramatic kingpin. And the most robust thwarted romance currently perplexing the comedy nation is the one, or rather the one not, between Friends Ross and Rachel. If ever there was a ludicrous spinning of the wheels of sexual tension this is it. Don't get me wrong, the pair were, and in many ways still are, ideal TV soulmates. Their romance pre-dates the start of the show, with a high-school crush; one or both of them spent week after wearying week on the rebound from each other; they deluded themselves into loving tedious outsiders (a prime stalling tactic); they practised denial with a skill that was nothing short of presidential; but the want in their eyes registered with the force of a cyclone. Then it happened. We made it to the summit. They gave in to their desires. Which meant of course that if anyone was going to keep watching they had to be broken up, and soon. The reason for their sundering was even less likely than any of the million ploys to keep them apart. A weak-willed fight. And now we are back at the base camp of bad timing, unreturned affection, lovesick desperation. As one former Friends producer says "They'll never touch that one again". Yeah, and no one was ever going to turn a dime on the internet.
How then to explain the show's healthy, uncomplicated, sweet and downright normal (for TV) merging of Monica and Chandler? By all laws of sitcom science their courtship should not have been so swift, nor their union so easy, so right. Perhaps they are more like the viewer than their haircuts and decorating would suggest. The vicarious kicks of watching others drop in and out of the love parade may actually pale compared to the drama of our own lives. We might prefer narratives that have a prayer of turning up on our own shabbier doorsteps. Let's face it, in the real world we want to fall in love like we're falling down a flight of stairs. No one really likes to work for it."
Jac (I like the line about haircuts and decorating)