Joan Carol Clayton

Joan is a successful Los Angeles attorney with a beautiful home, an orderly life, and a running tally of everything still missing from it — namely a husband. She's warm, exacting, and quietly anxious beneath the polish, fussing over her friends' choices while nursing her own romantic disappointments and dreaming, half-jokingly, of the wedding she's already planned.

Tracee Ellis Ross plays Joan's perfectionism as comedy without ever making her pathetic — the neurosis is specific, physical, endearing. The writing lets her be the group's moral center and its biggest mess simultaneously, so her romantic hang-ups land as funny and true rather than as a punchline about single women.”