notably her character's seventh season kiss with actress Winona Ryder and pregnancy arc. Aniston had been telling the press that the show's ninth season would be her last, and was initially hesitant to return to Friends to film its tenth and final season. She explained to NBC's Matt Lauer, "I wanted it to end when people still loved us and we were on a high. And then I was also feeling like, ‘How much more of Rachel do I have in me?’” However, the actress ultimately agreed to complete the tenth season of Friends, which was reduced from 24 to 18 episodes to accommodate Aniston's busy film schedule. Characterization and themes Rachel is the youngest of Friends six main characters. She was brought up in Long Island, New York. The term "spoiled" is often used to describe the character's personality during her early appearances. Encyclopædia Britannica describes Rachel as a spoiled and funny character. According to Rachel's original character description, written by Crane and Kauffman themselves for the show's pilot, the character is a spoiled yet courageous young woman who "has worked for none of what she has", unlike best friend Monica, and is initially "equipped to do nothing". James Endrst of the Hartford Courant identified her as "a spoiled rich kid", while the Daily News dubbed Rachel an "endearingly spoiled Daddy's girl". Author Kim Etingoff wrote about Rachel in her book Jennifer Aniston: From Friends to Films that the character is "spunky and sometimes spoiled", while TV Land called her "naive." Citing the differences between Rachel and her two female friends, The Guardians Ryan Gilbey observed that the character "wasn't insulated by self-regard, like Monica, or swaddled in gormlessness, like Phoebe". Frequently identified as fitting the "girl next door" archetype, Anne Bilson of The Telegraph described Rachel as "funny but not too funny, pretty but not too pretty, sexy but not too sexy, scatterbrained but not too scatterbrained". TalkTalk's Dominic Wills described the character as "smart but ditzy, determined but undisciplined." Meanwhile, Liat Kornowski, writing for The Huffington Post, wrote that Rachel is a "beautiful, coveted, slightly neurotic, borderline egocentric" character. Observing that the show's main characters are each based on a stereotype, Jonathan Bernstein of The Daily Telegraph identified Rachel as "the self-absorbed one who goes from riches to rags". According to Reign Magazine, Rachel is "a human being full of vulnerability, humor and strength while aesthetically donning