If you are home (and awake) at nine a.m. on a weekday by some weird turn of events, watch the 1990s sitcom The Nanny currently airing on Hallmark and you would see.. Janice (recall that one possibly just woke up at five to nine.)The similarity between the lead character, played by the inimitable Fran Drescher, and Janice from Friends is way too obvious to miss. Granted , Fran Fine’s character is sweet, funny and endearing while Chandler's on again off again girlfriend Janice Litman Goralnik (née Hosenstein) is mostly plain insufferable,
but as far as appearances go the likeness is undeniable, be it the very.. individual dressing sense, the hair hitched up in a late fifties-ish bouffant or the trademark nasal voice. (and that they're both jewish.)
I wouldn’t call it a cut&paste job, but it is very much possible for Janice’s character to have been inspired from ‘the nanny named Fran’. The Nanny was originally broadcast from 1993 to 1999 on CBS while Maggie Wheeler first appeared as Janice on the fifth episode of season one of Friends (The One with the East German Laundry Detergent) which aired in 1994 on CBS. And one of the first few names that shows up in the credits to The Nanny is that of associate producer Janice Minsberg.
Coincidence? Just another one of those conspiracy theories?
Oh who knows.
I’ve been watching way too much television.
