after walking around with a pregnancy bump roughly the size of a golfball for the preceding nine "show months". Said baby seems to have been conceived mainly to revive the then-flagging interest in Friends. Curiously, the baby conveniently disappears in the following episodes whenever Rachel or Ross are required to do something which a baby would get in the way of. This marked the point at which I finally gave up on Friends. The following all contributed, too:

- Chandler and Monica getting it on in London. Show begins creaking under the weight of implausibility.
- Everyone starts fucking everyone else. Show becomes a soap opera with a laugh track.
- Chandler maturing because of his relationship with Monica. Show effectively castrates it's main source of penisary humor.
- Joey learns the value of responsibility and common sense when tasked with helping Rachel through her pregnancy. Show loses it's second most reliable source of laughs.
- The writers take every opportunity they can to remind us Rachel is pregnant and this is funny because Rachel isn't really a mother figure.
- Occasional gems remind one of how far show had fallen from grace during the last four seasons.
- Emotions played too big a role in the final few seasons. Friends was always a sort of soggy crumpet to Seinfeld's razor sharp toast, but Chandler and Monica trying to conceive, the pointless Joey/Rachel will they/won't they romance, Phoebe getting married...this was just too much saccharine bullshit to deal with.

At what point did YOU give up on Friends?