In the end, the only friend whose future was not made clear by the series finale was Joey, and, since he wound up being the center of the show's only spin-off Joey, that open end might have seemed intentional. However, the showrunners insist they didn't design the series finale to give rise to more storytelling.
"We never, ever from the beginning ever wanted to do a spin-off [...] we never wanted to be part of that, because it so rarely works," Kauffman told EW. The fact that Joey ended up happening also had no influence on the script, as David Crane insisted, "That was its own thing. It had no bearing on what we were doing for the finale."
That said, former NBC president Warren Littlefield always had spin-off potential in mind, albeit a very different one. "My fantasy was that the two Matts would be the spin-off," he conceded. "But by then I was gone from the network, and of course, storywise that couldn't happen." The only question we're left to wonder is: would something like Joey and Chandler have worked better as a spin-off? Would more Friends fans have tuned in? Unfortunately, we'll never know.
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