Friends is a television sitcom you may have heard of. Airing on NBC from 1994-2004, the show about six friends who hang out in annoyingly expensive New York apartments and sometimes a coffee shop became a cultural phenomenon. It is, to this day, a television comfort food mainstay, so much so that streaming services fight over it and an eagerly anticipated reunion special is being planned.

One question, though: What's the cast been up to since the show ended? How have Jennifer AnistonCourteney CoxLisa KudrowMatt LeBlancMatthew Perry, and David Schwimmer been cultivating their creativity, playing against and with their established TV types, and proving they're more than the six friends who'll be there for you?

Here now, for all you die-hard Friends fans, are the six best performances post-Friends from each main member of the cast, performances that all breathe new life into the careers of actors we've fallen in love with for some time. And for more goodies you can watch on HBO Max, check out the best shows on the service.

Jennifer Aniston - The Morning Show

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Image via Apple

In some ways, The Morning Show can never quite escape its shadow as a ripped-from-the-headlines prestige soap with higher-than-average production values and cast pedigree. Famous actors like Reese Witherspoon, Steve Carell, Billy Crudup, and Gugu Mbatha-Raw chew into stylized, showy speeches with a sense of "gunning for that Emmy" gravitas that can overshadow or even trivialize the important societal issues being explored. Whether you like the show or not depends on your patience for this kind of storytelling (for me? Surprisingly high!). But one nearly objectively high point is Jennifer Aniston. She manages to anchor (pun mildly intended) the show's sometimes scattered focus with a complex, richly interior, multi-layered performance. Even when she's being asked to communicate wild ideas (i.e. meeting a recently fired sexual predator in his home in the middle of the night to express her insecurities and doubts), Aniston sells it with believability, never being tempted by the siren song of "performative, awards-baiting acting." On Friends, Rachel often felt vulnerable, her emotions on her sleeve, her status trending towards low. It's such a revelation to watch her play a higher status character trying desperately to keep her ever-burgeoning vulnerability at bay, until it can't help but explode in invigorating, truth-telling ways.

Courteney Cox - Cougar Town

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Image via Walt Disney Television

Don't judge Cougar Town by its title — because the show itself will beat you to the punchBill Lawrence's follow-up to Scrubs may sound like a sex-crazed sitcom about older women going after young men — and I guess it is? kind of? technically but not really? — but it's so much more than a knee-jerk, on-paper reaction. It's sublimely silly, surreal, and self-aware, packed with jokes that come from a place of love and invention, eager to make big, puppy dog swings like crossing over with Community just for the thrill of it. Its ensemble cast is stacked -- special shout-out to Busy Philipps' exceptionally high-strung work — and the centralized performance of Courteney Cox works as a perfect guiding force. Cox is a phenomenal physical, slapstick comedian (think Monica with a turkey on her head shimmying), one who knows that the sillier the bit you're performing, the more committed you have to be to grounding it in reality. Cougar Town gives her ample room to show off these skills, while also giving her like 900 perfect one-liners per episode, all of which she knocks out of the park. Cox's Cougar Town, title and all, is a delightful glass of rosé of a show, and Cox is the perfect sommelier.

Lisa Kudrow - The Comeback

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Image via HBO

Wow, wow, wow, what a performance. The Comeback is a transformative show for Lisa Kudrow, one that allows her the space to play notes of cringe-inducing cluelessness, bitter realization, and heartbreaking pathos — sometimes within the same scene. Shot in a sparse, warts-and-all, mockumentary style (less Modern Family, more This Is Spinal Tap), the show follows Kudrow's Valerie Cherish, an actor who had huge success on a sitcom in the past and has since fallen on hard-ish times. She's now filming a reality show on her ostensible "comeback," which in one season involves a horrid, sex-crazed multicam sitcom, and in the second season involves... well, I don't necessarily want to spoil the meta-trickeries involved in the complex second season, but it is worth your time and thensome. When we talk about the most influential TV comedy series of the 2000s, it is a downright shame we don't put The Comeback on the same level as an Arrested Development or The Office. Kudrow's performance is essential work, rendered with an unflinching empathy, whether Valerie's behavior deserves it or not. Don't call it a comeback; Kudrow's been here for years.

Matt LeBlanc - Episodes

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Image via Showtime

The pilot of Episodes ends on such a vicious Matt LeBlanc dunk, that I am surprised and delighted that LeBlanc even appeared to be in the series. After English sitcom writers Stephen Mangan and Tamsin Greig have their original classically trained British actor dashed for the American version of their show, the clueless American studio pitches them a new one: Matt LeBlanc. And then the episode ends on... silence. Dumbfounded silence, both the characters and us as audience members understanding implicitly how silly, how foolhardy, how simply stupid such a suggestion is. LeBlanc is more than willing to have his reputation skewered and burned for the sake of his art, taking his journey as "Matt LeBlanc" to not just sharply funny places, but to emotion-driven, ruthless places, too. LeBlanc continues to be the king of the killer one-liner delivery, particularly when his raw emotion and knowledge of his true self butts up against the unbending "truth" of the universe around him (case in point: His delivery of "I'd watch Whores"). But beyond his time-tested, ultra-professional understanding of comedy performance, LeBlanc also stretches as an actor capable of much more. A fearless, courageous, shameless in the best way performance.

Matthew Perry - Go On

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Image via NBC

One thing I find admirable about Matthew Perry's post-Friends performances (many of which he produced and/or wrote) is his need to dig beneath the surface of his image and find the prickly, uncomfortably true psychological machinations whirring. Works like NumbBirds of America, and even the treacly made-for-TV The Ron Clark Story find Perry in appealingly low-key, Even as these scripts backslide into formula and screenwriting deus-ex-machinas, Perry's commitment to these roles and their interior authenticities is underrated and inspiring (especially in Numb, which despite some writing issues, yields a comfortably uncomfortable, mental health destigmatizing performance from Perry).

But in one beautiful season of television, which was unjustly cancelled after 22 episodes, the material met Perry's commitment at his level. Go On was an uncommonly bittersweet NBC sitcom made in the spiritual shadow of its bittersweet cousin Community. Perry plays a sports radio host reeling from the death of his wife, who finds himself in a support group full of other grieving folks with idiosyncrasies that feel silly and fleet on the surface, but part ways to reveal a litany of deepening traumas themselves. The show is warm, silly, earnest, and provides wonderfully applicable lessons that step one toe into being sentimental without feeling unearned. And Perry gets so much to play with, his central character feeling like a culmination of all of his interests.

David Schwimmer - Duane Hopwood

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Image via IFC Films

Nuclear Take: If you're going to watch one New England-set character study about an alcoholic father struggling to regain control and cathartically work through his traumas, watch Duane Hopwood, not Manchester by the Sea. The latter is overlong, oppressively morose to an almost absurd degree, and stars a noted sexual predator. But the former runs a tight under-ninety, supplants its authentic pains with an endearingly melancholy sense of humor, and stars national treasure David Schwimmer. It's an easy switch! And Schwimmer plays the title role easily, despite Duane Hopwood's many complicated pains involving his children, his disease, his divorce with Janeane Garofalo, his mounting frustrations managing a middle casino in Atlantic City, and most amusingly, his newfound experiment managing the career of aspiring comedian Judah Friedlander. Playing a more passive, reactive sad sack whose goals are as simple as "just getting by" is always a tough position to put an actor in (see: many of the other indie films people in the Friends cast have made), but Schwimmer walks the line of "sympathetic" and "annoying" with textbook agility and acumen. This is the film that should've made Schwimmer a go to for indie dramedy auteurs like Greta Gerwig, the film that should've earned him awards attention instead of Creepy Magoo. Would ya watch Duane Hopwood already?