entertainment

The 'Friends' prop you never noticed explains the biggest plot hole in the show.

It turns out there is a very simple answer.

The biggest question for any dedicated Friends viewer wasn’t how Joey could afford a great New York City apartment with sperm donations as his main source income, no, it was much more bizarre than that…

HOW THE HELL DID THE GANG ALWAYS GET THE SAME LOUNGE AT CENTRAL PERK?

If you know anything about Friends (which you should), you’re familiar with a little thing called Central Perk. It’s the cafe that acted as one of the main settings for Rachel, Monica, Phoebe, Ross, Joey and Chandler to hang out.

See? Friends. Hanging out at Central Perk.

But we could never quite work out how the friends always seemed to get the best lounge in the cafe, at every time of day.

Lisa Kudrow goes on US chat show, says things we never knew about Friends.

While re-watching the series, the good people over at Bustle asked a very hard-hitting, incredibly important question: Why was the couch at Central Perk always free?

With eight million people living in New York, there’s no way the couch in Central Perk was always free for the group.

With over eight million people live in New York City, it’s very, very unlikely (completely impossible) for that particular couch to always be free.

But, turns out, there’s a very clear prop on the table that no one ever picked up on.

It was in front of our eyes the entire time…

Notice it yet?

Nope?

Let’s zoom in…

RESERVED.

The area was always RESERVED.

We hear you, Phoebe. We hear you.

Tanya Ghahremani, the writer who first noticed the life-changing fact, realised it actually makes a lot of sense: “Most of the gang lived right upstairs, and Rachel worked there for a lengthy period of time, so they were clearly all tight with the owner and various employees.

“Though there were certain episodes that joked about the couch being occupied by other patrons (one gag included the gang walking in to see the couch occupied by a set of friends who looked just like them, and another gag involved a pair of bullies stealing the couch from Ross and Chandler), for the most part, it was always reserved.”

So there you have it. The one answer you never realised you needed to know, but has now changed your life, right?

You’re welcome.