Listening to The Darkest Timeline podcast with Paget Brewster and having lots of emotions (paraphrasing):
PAGET: Frankie and Jeff were supposed to be romantically involved.
ME:
PAGET: But Joel, you put the kibosh on that.
ME:
JOEL: True. I asked.
ME:
PAGET: And I wouldn’t want to mess with the Annie thing. I LIKE the Annie thing.
ME:
I think I owe a ton of paranoid people over a Milady/Milord on LJ a biiiiiig apology. There were a lot of people saying that Frankie was basically “an age-appropriate Annie” and that it was obvious that they were setting Frankie up to be the romantic interest replacement.
Me (then): C’mon. There’s NO WAY they would do something like that. Do you know how shitty that would be? A last-minute swoop in from a new character rather than go with the pairing they’ve been teasing for six fuckin’ years?
Me (today): Well, shit. I don’t know what I expected.
I’m just glad that from the sounds of things Joel and Paget were both solidly against it and shut it down (although a little surprised since I haven’t gotten the impression from Joel that he was a big fan of Jeff and Annie). I’m a new fan, but I’m just continually boggling at how… DUMB this show was with some of its behind-the-scenes decisions, particularly re: romance, and wondering how much of an accident it must have been that anything on that front worked at all.
During the run of the show, Joel never really sided one way or the other. It’s after the show ended where Joel said a few minor things that – if you squint – indicated that he wasn’t entirely comfortable with the idea of Jeff/Annie, even if he was entirely comfortable playing romantic scenes with Alison.
I think the issue is that Joel had a kind of character-actress conflict. On the one hand, Annie is 18. On the other, Alison very much is not, and is a shitload more comfortable playing romantic than Gillian (not a slam against Gillian…she has come out and said she is hella uncomfortable doing any kind of kissing/romance and was even more so at the start of Community).
It also doesn’t help that sometimes when things would get tremendously weird on-set (which according to the cast happened all.the.damn.time because of their crazy-ass shooting schedule), Alison and Joel would kick back, pretend they were a married couple, and that they were hosing an out-of-control dinner party. (This was also recently revealed.)
I think Joel has kinda-sorta changed his mind on the whole Jeff/Annie thing, in part because “Annie” would be in her late 20s in-universe. Also, because Joel is very much a “give the people what they want” kind of guy, and he knows Jeff/Annie is easily the second most popular pairing after Troy and Abed.
So I’m very much not surprised that Joel was against a Jeff/Frankie pairing. What I am surprised about was that there were actually plans to go there.
Listening to The Darkest Timeline podcast with Paget Brewster and having lots of emotions (paraphrasing):
PAGET: Frankie and Jeff were supposed to be romantically involved.
ME:
PAGET: But Joel, you put the kibosh on that.
ME:
JOEL: True. I asked.
ME:
PAGET: And I wouldn’t want to mess with the Annie thing. I LIKE the Annie thing.
ME:
I think I owe a ton of paranoid people over a Milady/Milord on LJ a biiiiiig apology. There were a lot of people saying that Frankie was basically “an age-appropriate Annie” and that it was obvious that they were setting Frankie up to be the romantic interest replacement.
Me (then): C’mon. There’s NO WAY they would do something like that. Do you know how shitty that would be? A last-minute swoop in from a new character rather than go with the pairing they’ve been teasing for six fuckin’ years?
Me (today): Well, shit. I don’t know what I expected.
