"Friends" (TV Series - "Best of") from Johnny Web (Uncle Scoopy; Greg Wroblewski)

Normally, we don't do articles on TV shows, but we have the inside track on this one. A friend of mine is on the creative team, and has leaked me the actual script from the final episode. Here is a summary.

Rachel joins the U.S. Special Forces, because she thinks it will offer the most rigorous post-natal conditioning program to get her figure back. "It's like getting paid to go to a fitness farm!". She's thrilled with the conditioning, but imagine her disappointment when they send her to Afghanistan, a country without a single Bloomie's!

Joey makes it big in, of all things, a sitcom, playing the part of Matt Le Blanc, a relatively untalented guy who somehow hits the big time in show business, and therefore abandons all of his old friends to pal around with people like Hugh Grant and Madonna. The naive Joey Tribbiani, thinking that this is the way life should work, follows suit in his personal life, dumping the other five "friends" so he can hang with George Clooney and Marky Mark. All four of those people guest star on the final episode, in an attempt at the all-time ratings coup.

Ross, heading for new levels of whining, now blames all of his personal problems on America, and joins the regrouping Taliban guerrillas in the hills.

In the second-last scene, just before the final commercial, we see Hugh Grant soliciting a prostitute on the streets - and it turns out to be wacky Phoebe. Quick cut to Ross and Rachel in the mountains of Afghanistan, pointing their automatic weapons at each other, each unaware that the other is in the crosshairs, because Ross has an untrimmed beard, and Rachel's trademark hair is covered by her military headgear.

Cut to commercial.

In the final scene, which takes place 20 years in the future, Chandler and Monica head back to Greenwich Village to buy some art. Monica is now even fatter than she was in high school, but she looks like Twiggy compared to Chandler. Walking with them is whiny Rosselyn (played by David Schwimmer in a dress and a bad wig), whom they have raised after both her parents were lost in action.

They walk past a movie theater that is playing Ocean's 39, and stop to look at the poster of Clooney and Tribbiani with their arms around each other, both smiling broadly and looking younger and handsomer than ever. Rosselyn tells them that they should try to call Joey for old times' sake, and they reply that they would, except that he slapped that restraining order on them. Swept away by nostalgia, they head for Central Perk, only to find that it has been converted to a low-rent bar, and is filled with crack ho's. Chandler pushes away a particularly skanky old ho who is trying to hand him something, and they call for their driver to take them back to Westchester County. As they drive off, the skanky ho sticks her hand in their window, apparently asking for change, but they roll up the window, disgusted, and make some cavalier jokes about her being too lazy to get a squeegee. The camera follows the crack ho's POV over her own outstretched hand, watching the limo drive off. Then it switches to the limo's POV, looking back at the hooker with the outstretched hand. The camera zooms in on her, tighter and tighter, we see a tear in her eye. We don't really recognize her, but we have our suspicions. The camera goes down to see what was in her hand - she wasn't asking for a handout. She was trying to hand them something - an autographed picture of smiling, handsome, perennially young Joey Tribbiani, signed "To Phoebe, for the old times".

No music, no credits. Silent, abrupt end.