At first glance, The Nanny’s Fran Fine and Friends’ Janice Litman-Goralnik (née Hosenstein) seem quite similar to the same character. With her tight leopard-print clothes, New York accent, big hair, and Jewish background, one could easily equate Fran with Janice and Janice with Fran. But there is an important contrast between these two characters, and it’s not as simple as one character being annoying and the other not. Nanny and Friends each takes the stereotype of the New York Jewish woman and goes in two different directions – one, Fran, that audiences will sympathize with, and one, Janice, that audiences will hate. These characters are prime examples of the polarizing representation of Jewish women in the media.
The Nanny, a classic sitcom and my favorite, first aired in 1993. Co-created by Fran Drescher and her then-husband Peter Marc Jacobson, it starred Drescher as Fran Fine, a Jewish woman from Flushing, Queens, who works as a nanny for a wealthy upper-class family. Drescher drew heavily on her own life and family when creating the characters of Fran, her parents Sylvia and Morty, as well as her grandmother Yetta. The result is an unabashedly Jewish show in which Fran never changes for the benefit of the WASPy people she surrounds herself with.
But compare Fran to Janice, Chandler’s many-time girlfriend on Friends. Friends began airing a year after The Nanny, and also took place in New York City. By the fifth episode, we are introduced to Janice, a Jewish woman who is stereotypically similar to Fran in dress, hair, voice, and laugh. It’s clear that Janice was intended as a kind of parody of Fran Fine—but in the process, Jewish creators David Crane and Marta Kauffman missed Fran Fine’s point.
Fran is Jewish and proud. She embraces her sexuality and is always portrayed as desirable. These qualities were never present despite her outgoing Jewish personality, her nasal accent, or her unique fashion sense. Those things are part of her appeal, because they are part of who she is. Fran is unapologetic, confident and sexy. The family she works for, the refined English Sheffield people, love and depend on her.
Janice was treated like a joke—a cruel joke. She’s a loving girlfriend and devoted mother, but viewers are supposed to hate her for the very things that make Fran Fine so beloved. Friends leads always complain about Janice: she’s annoying, obsessive, whiny. They make fun of the way she talks and the way she smiles. “Every time she started laughing, I just wanted to pull my hand away, so something could be thrown at her,” Joey said. Over the course of her nineteen appearances on Friends, the show’s writers increasingly defined her by the tired stereotypes often attributed to Jewish women: loud, rude, annoying, clingy.
The point is not that Janice’s personality, dress, and demeanor are all stereotypical. After all, Fran Fine fits many of the same boxes. The problem is how we, as audiences, perceive those stereotypes. The intention is not for viewers to root for Janice or feel bad about the way she’s been treated; which makes viewers dislike her just like the six friends.
Because she is rejected and ridiculed by the country’s most popular group of friends, the show suggests that everything that makes Janice who she is is bad and undesirable. To me, Janice is aspirational. She’s happy, she does what she wants, she’s secure with herself and doesn’t let anyone have her. However, Friends seems to be saying that Janice is not someone to imitate or laugh with, but instead someone to criticize and avoid.
The nanny sends a completely different message. Like Janice, Fran shows her emotions and reveals everything, but she is not ashamed of it. She is portrayed as a blessing to the reserved, lonely Sheffields—Maria to their Von Trapps. She brought joy, fun, and a new culture into the family and was loved for it.
It’s no coincidence that Fran Fine is Jewish. It was so important to Drescher that she had to fight for it. “When we got the green light to write the pilot for The Nanny,” Drescher said in 2020, “I guess the network talked to the big sponsors… they said, ‘That sounds good — We will buy the program immediately. But the nanny must be Italian, not Jewish.” But Drescher still stands firm. She was very deliberate in creating a show that portrayed Jewish characters living openly Jewish lives without having to explain themselves and their culture to a largely Jewish audience.
Meanwhile, Janice’s Judaism seems to function solely for the purpose of taking advantage of cheap jokes about a particular kind of Jewish woman. And because Friends is still so massively popular, many more people will be introduced to Janice Litman-Goralnik than they will be to Fran Fine. These representations have an impact on Jewish and non-Jewish people alike. For some, it can strengthen or create negative stereotypes of Jewish women, and for others it might strengthen their own internalized antisemitism. The Nanny and Friends were both primetime shows with a broad reach and are now in syndication. Millions of people were and continue to be influenced by these portrayals.
