Can We Have A Minute For Charlie From Friends Please?

I never thought that I'd be sat here in my twenties, re-watching one of my favourite tv shows, and feeling disconnected from it. That's the trouble with nostalgia. The memory of beloved sitcoms like Friends often can't quite withstand the standards and expectations of a more culturally aware 2018.

Don’t get me wrong, much like other the rest of Friends’ sprawling and diverse fan base, I can accurately quotePhoebe's song lyrics, recall Joey’s favourite food and know at precisely which point in the theme song those four quick claps come. But if I'm entirely honest with myself, looking back I suppose that yeah, there was always an element of estrangement that came with watching six white characters, who I so desperately wanted to be like when I grew up, and not actually looking like any of them.

Now, it's quite easy to see that Friends is seriously lacking in the diversity department. It’s not something that was glaringly obvious to me back in the late nineties when I was young, political correctness was still in progress and there was little high-profile pressure to represent the lives of people of colour on screen. But re-watching the show after it landed on Netflix earlier this year, it became clear just how important the current drive for diversity and the fair, accurate and equal representation of black communities (one would hope) on television really is.

That said, re-watching Friends in 2018 also offered the opportunity to rediscover Charlie Wheeler. Charlie was Joey's girlfriend for a time, before becoming Ross's girlfriend and eventually ending up with Benjamin Hobart. She's also one of the show's most under-appreciated yet retrospectively crucial characters in *Friends *saga.

READ MORE: All The Celebrity Cameos In Friends That You Forgot The First Time Around

We’re all too familiar with the token roles given to black actors in predominantly white films and TV shows. It’s the sidekick, the maid, the background character with little more than ten seconds of dialogue, zero character development and the one that's subject to such heavily stereotyped caricature, their identity is often undistinguishable beyond ‘the black character who was around for a minute or two’. It was default in the nineties and remains frequent in more recent years. See Donald Glover’s character in Girls and Kendra in Buffy The Vampire Slayer, for example.

But Charlie was slightly different. For one, she outlasted the two-three episode curse that plagued the liked of black female actresses like Tisha Campbell-Martin who played Toni in *Blossom, *and Gabrielle Union who played two different characters in _Saved By The Bell: The New Class. A_ctress Aisha Taylor appeared as Charlie for nine episodes. No, it's not that many when we consider that there are more than 250 episodes of friends and very few included people of colour in the story line; but it's depressingly more than many of *Friends' *contemporary programmes.

Most refreshingly, Charlie's character was what we too infrequently find in the depiction of black women on screen: intelligent and desirable.

Let me tell you a little bit about Charlie. She's a paleontology professor for whom dating Nobel Prize winners was the norm. She's smart without being obnoxious. She's neither loud, nor lairy as black women are often positioned to be. Charlie is also presented as a valid love interest. Not a fleeting object for Ross and Joey to fleetingly attempt to chat up (see Gabrielle Union as Kristen Lang in *The One With The Cheap Wedding Dress) *but someone who enters what starts off as promising relationships with two of the white male leads. Someone who's so desirable that Benji awkwardly sabotages her relationship with Ross through his work. Not cool in the slightest, but young black women rarely get to be fought over in this calibre of television show. Least of all when they're the only female of colour around.

Much like all characters, Charlie is flawed of course. But she'd neither be relatable, nor an admirable addition to the 'normal mates doing normal things and living normal lives' narratives that Friends so actively championed. And we're here for the flaws just as much as we are her excellence.

Charlie Wheeler is the brilliant black character who for an albeit short lived time, managed to give Friends a brief moment of commendable representation without the fanfare of using awkward dialogue and contrived costume, accents or demeanor that shouted 'LOOK! We've got a black woman on the show!'. Sitting here more than twenty years after *Friends, *still waiting for Hollywood to get over it's race problemand for black actors to be given the same pay and opportunities as their white counterparts, Charlie Wheeler holds a different significance and in turn, makes it a little easier to watch an old show that in other areas, hasn't stood the test of time.

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Follow Jazmin on Instagram @JazKopotsha

This article originally appeared on The Debrief.