Generation Friends

by Saul Austerlitz

  The first season of Friends encourages us to follow along behind Ross as his feelings for Rachel grow, and as his seeming incompetence at acting on those feelings also balloons. Rachel keeps taunting Ross with descriptions of her dream man. Rachel is looking for a man who could be “your best friend, but can also make your toes curl.” Ross hopes to be just that, even as his sense of his own desirability has been badly wounded by Carol’s leaving him for a woman.

  Kauffman had entered the inaugural season working on the assumption that Friends would wrap up for the year with the birth of Ross and Carol’s baby. It was left to Burrows to approach her and gently share the widely held opinion that no one cared about Ross’s baby. The show pivoted on Ross and Rachel, and the conclusion of the season had to revolve around their relationship. The birth of Ben was bumped to the penultimate episode of the first season, “The One with the Birth,” and the final episode was devoted to Ross and Rachel’s fitful romance.

  There was a fear among the writers that they were in danger of painting themselves into a corner, with Ross endlessly pining and Rachel forever oblivious, unless they began to advance the plot. There had been talk in the writers’ room of having Ross impulsively kiss Rachel when their car hits a bump on a road trip, and then having an extended discussion of what it meant that they had just kissed. The idea was to evoke memories of Woody Allen and Diane Keaton in Annie Hall, and writer Jeff Greenstein spoke up: “Guys, I don’t know if I want to see that scene.” Greenstein was unsure if Ross and Rachel were like Allen and Keaton, and told his colleagues he was not excited about the proposed conversation.

  Crane asked Greenstein what he might prefer instead, and his thoughts turned to the work of Jane Austen. Greenstein’s wife had written her senior thesis at UC Berkeley on Austen, and when they had gotten together, he had read all of Austen’s novels. “You know,” he told the room, “if Jane Austen were writing this story it would go like this: It would be Ross is being called away on some business thing, a paleontological dig or something, and he’s gonna miss Rachel’s birthday, so he leaves behind some small gift for her, something really specific and personal and beautiful that speaks to the depths of his feelings [for] her. He leaves it behind, he goes on this trip, and Rachel gets the gift, it’s so beautiful that she starts to fall in love with him. By the time Ross is scheduled to get back, Rachel can’t wait to see him because she finally wants to tell him how much she cares for him, and he gets off the plane with another girl.” After a beat, Crane said, “Well, let’s do that!” But there were still days of arguments in the writers’ room over the finale, even after Greenstein’s fix.

  At the start of “The One Where Rachel Finds Out,” Rachel is immensely touched by Ross’s purchasing a beautiful brooch that she admired in a store window some months prior. Chandler unthinkingly takes the bait, offhandedly commenting that Ross has always been partial to bold romantic gestures: “Remember back in college, when he fell in love with Carol and bought her that ridiculously expensive crystal duck?” Director Kevin Bright cuts to Joey looking over at Chandler in near-panic, shifting away from him toward the edge of the couch. “What did you just say?” Rachel demands. Chandler, his chest heaving, clears his throat before responding: “Crystal duck.”

  The season ends with Rachel, having rushed to the airport to confront Ross, smelling the flowers she has brought for him while waiting for Ross to emerge, an expectant smile teasing across her face. Aniston is remarkable here, her emotional openness heartrending. We know already that her heart is to be broken, with Ross shown kissing an unfamiliar new woman as they both exit the plane, but she doesn’t know it yet, and her optimism that love will treat her more gently this time is surprisingly moving.

  The first-season cliffhanger, then, is actually less of a cliffhanger than a deliberate withholding of an emotional resolution. We know that Ross and Rachel are going to suffer from a legendarily terrible case of poor timing, and our hearts ache for Rachel, who has finally caught up to Ross just as he vanishes into another relationship.

  The first season of Friends was that rarest of things in mid-1990s television: a fully formed story with an emotionally satisfying romantic arc and a conclusion that left viewers hungering for more. None of these had been invented by Friends—the 1980s drama-comedy hybrid Moonlighting had also artfully worked the ebbs and flows of its central relationship—but few of its comedy compatriots sought to craft a story that viewers could return to for laughs and emotional sustenance.

  If you watched the first season in the light of what was to come, it was easier to notice that Rachel, who had begun as a runaway bride with only the dimmest sense of the world beyond Bloomingdale’s, was enrolled in a crash course in ordinary life. She was quietly finding her own way in the world, with no husband, no boyfriend, and no heavy-handed parental involvement. Friends was a show about six buddies aimlessly sitting around and drinking coffee, but it was also one in which life quietly passed by between refills. Its characters, it hinted, were going to be growing up as they made us laugh.

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  Rachel and Ross were not the only romance in the show’s first season. The very first thing we were shown in Chandler and Joey’s apartment was the oversize poster of Laurel and Hardy gracing the back wall. Greg Grande had discovered the poster in the Warner Bros. basement, with little sense that it would become one of the most iconic items of décor on the show. In it, Laurel and Hardy were curled up together in a too-small bed. They were each under the covers, with the diminutive Laurel, his swollen chin held in place by a white cloth that gave the appearance of rabbit ears atop his head, swiveling his eyes to take in his bedmate. The hulking Hardy was leaning on one arm, glowering at his friend with barely disguised hostility over some presumed infraction.

  There was a hint of menace in this image—would Hardy really do Laurel some damage with that meaty fist posed in front of the bedcovers?—but it was drowned out by the ludicrousness of their pose. What were they doing in bed together? What had happened to the perpetually unlucky Stan? The poster was an encoded version of the relationship between Chandler and Joey, there to be unlocked by anyone familiar with Way Out West or The Music Box. Chandler and Joey are not only roommates, but in a kind of platonic gay relationship. David Crane saw Chandler and Joey’s friendship as mocking some of the emotional deficiencies of heterosexual male friendship, while also smuggling in gay tropes that might otherwise have found no place in a mainstream sitcom.

  Friends was quietly tipping its cap to the mismatched slacker heroes of the early sound era, another celibate same-sex couple prone to all manner of confusions, mishaps, accidents, and small-fry disasters. Chandler and Joey had their other friends, to be sure, but Friends was pledging itself—at least at this early stage—to the unity of their partnership. In “The One with the Dozen Lasagnas,” Joey and Chandler realize they need a new dining table. Joey and Chandler are a couple in disguise here, their discussion about table shopping an only partially camouflaged conversation about the state of their relationship.

  In the next scene, the two men are in a furniture store, where Joey pleads with Chandler to simply pick out a table. Joey rejects a bird pattern after mistakenly selecting a patio-furniture set, and then Chandler turns down some ladybug-themed chairs. “Fine,” Joey grouses, “you want to get the birds? Get the birds!” Chandler half turns away, leaning on a wooden chair, and responds like a wife frustrated by her husband’s mulishness: “Not like that I won’t.”

  The tenor of the conversation, and the body language, would be instantly familiar to anyone who has ever eavesdropped on a couple fighting in the bedroom section at IKEA. Cut back to their apartment, where the two men, joined by Ross and Monica, crowd around the unseen table. “So, whaddaya think?” asks Chandler. “I think it’s the most beautiful table I’ve ever seen,” says Ross as the camera cuts to a shot of their new foosball table. Monica may proceed to wipe the floor with them in their ina
ugural game, but the foosball table comes to serve as a symbolic stand-in for Chandler and Joey’s happily slobbish domestic partnership.

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  The show spawned its own cult favorites, recurring performers who came in and won the hearts of a dedicated cohort of fans. They were placeholders or temporary solutions to narrative problems that wound up proving more intriguing, or long lasting, than the writers might have initially anticipated, ranging from June Gable as Joey’s gravel-voiced agent, Estelle, to Giovanni Ribisi as Phoebe’s knucklehead brother, to Paget Brewster as Kathy, a girlfriend of Joey’s that Chandler falls for.

  During the first season of the show, Friends’ most popular supporting character was also the one who caused the most dissatisfaction behind the scenes. He was mercurial, prone to unpredictable rages, and untrustworthy as an actor. There was a movement afoot to have him fired from the show, but he was so beloved by audiences that it was hard for Friends to let him go. His name was Marcel, and he was a monkey.

  Early on, writers Adam Chase and Ira Ungerleider suggested a story line where Ross would adopt a pet to appear more saucy and Mediterranean. Ideas for what kind of animal Ross might take in were batted around, and the writers settled on two options: a monkey and an iguana. Jeff Strauss had been a biology major in college and had considered becoming a veterinarian. He felt strongly that Ross’s getting a monkey would be a major mistake. Strauss launched into a tirade in the writers’ room about a monkey making for a ludicrous pet. Monkeys were not cute little people that could be deployed at will to inject some charm into a story line. They spent most of their time masturbating and enjoyed throwing their feces in order to express their dissatisfaction, and what appeared to be a smile was actually a hostile glare.

  Strauss lost the battle, and Marcel the monkey was duly introduced as Ross’s companion in the tenth episode, “The One with the Monkey.” While he didn’t love the ways in which Marcel served as Ross’s wingman and junior partner, Strauss was relieved that Ross’s relationship with the monkey was mostly depicted as an expression of a wounded spirit. Strauss took his children to the zoo and was pleased to hear some of the zookeepers talking to each other about the relative accuracy of the depiction of monkey behavior on the show. It was, Strauss thought, a tiny victory for primate realism.

  Almost as soon as Marcel was introduced, the writers of Friends were scheming to undo their triumphant mistake. Marcel was wildly popular, and they absolutely hated writing for him. By the time of “The One with Two Parts,” Ross was recast as a frustrated father of a reckless son, with Marcel erasing his phone messages and peeing on his newspaper.

  Rachel lost Marcel in “The One Where the Monkey Gets Away,” and ironically, the monkey got away for real during the episode’s preshoot, escaping his handlers and disappearing into the wilds of the stage. With a set that ran four stories high before ascending to the rafters, there was a great deal of ground to cover to coax him back, only further demonstrating the necessity of calling a halt to Marcel’s run on the show. Even after he is recovered from the grip of eccentric neighbor Mr. Heckles, who has dressed him in a frilly pink tutu, Ross decides he must send his monkey away to the San Diego Zoo.

  Friends rarely went for a self-referential note, but having Marcel come back as a star in the second season’s “The One After the Superbowl,” advertising Monkeyshine beer and appearing in a movie with Jean-Claude Van Damme, was a clever gesture in the direction of America’s strange love affair with the monkey. Friends grew out of its monkey phase, to the point where Ross could offhandedly comment, some seasons later, “Remember when I had a monkey? What was I thinking?”

  For “The One with the East German Laundry Detergent,” from early in the first season, Phoebe and Chandler were both supposed to break up with the people they were dating. Phoebe would briskly, efficiently, and painlessly end things with her boyfriend, while Chandler, paragon of romantic disaster, would have to endure the worst breakup in human history.

  Strauss began to think about what torments Chandler might have to go through and remembered an ex-girlfriend. She had rapidly sought to escalate the relationship far beyond where Strauss was ready to take it. One day, she called up Strauss and told him that she had already purchased his Christmas present. She knew that he collected Fiestaware pottery and had found the ideal piece to add to his collection. She even described to him what it looked like. That it was currently September, or that they had not been out more than two or three times, was no impediment for her. What if Chandler’s girlfriend were to bring him a gift just as he was preparing to end things with her? And so Janice (Maggie Wheeler), soon to be Chandler’s foil and his relationship Kryptonite, would enter bearing a pair of Bullwinkle socks for him.

  Janice was loud and abrasive, her voice less like fingernails on a chalkboard than like a thousand nails scraping on a thousand different chalkboards. Best—or worst—of all was Wheeler’s laugh, a braying, wheezing work of art. Janice was not merely a bad date; she was the encapsulation of every bad date anyone had ever had, amplified and exaggerated until the horror became humor. We felt for Chandler that he had been trapped with such an appalling dud, but Janice’s presence also telegraphed something essential about Chandler. Chandler was romantically inept, and Janice was here as his comeuppance.

  There was no way of knowing it at the time, but Wheeler was to become one of the show’s most memorable recurring characters. She turned up again and again when Chandler was weak or bruised, hopeful once more that their wildly mismatched relationship was about to become a romance for the ages. And one of the most charming aspects of Janice’s character, and perhaps one that salvaged her from being a stereotype, was just how highly she thought of herself. Janice did not just think she was a catch; she was downright sure of it. And Chandler, for her, was simultaneously the guy who kept breaking her heart and the man who would, one day, make all her dreams come true.

  Janice kept showing up long after Chandler had settled down into marriage, there to flirt with Chandler as he attempts to deposit a sperm sample at the doctor’s office or planning to buy the home next door when he and Monica move to suburbia. She was, in her own way, a reminder of all the show’s many changes, a comedic aide-mémoire regarding the distance from bad romance to real love.

  Where Janice was a perpetually braying foghorn, her spiritual counterpart Gunther (James Michael Tyler) was a silent, lurking presence—so much so that he did not have a single line of dialogue until his thirty-third appearance on the show. Tyler was a barista at a Los Angeles coffee shop called the Bourgeois Pig when he was asked to stand in the background and knowledgeably work the levers of the (nonfunctioning) espresso machine at Central Perk. It took two seasons for Tyler to get his first speaking lines, or even a name for his character.

  Gunther served as an ongoing running joke for the show, the outsider whose perpetually foiled attempts at penetrating the inner circle emphasized the charmed status of the sextet. Gunther was background color for Friends, present at the characters’ parties and gatherings, lurking over their shoulders as they sipped coffee at Central Perk. He was there to be ignored and overlooked, forgotten and taken for granted. Gunther was carrying a torch for Rachel while she was only dimly aware of his existence. (At one point, she tells him that one day, he’ll make some man very happy.) He was in a perpetual froth of unrequited love and hurt feelings. Gunther was like an upside-down Ross, stymied by his love for a woman, and as a comic doppelgänger, he was obscurely threatened by Ross’s very existence. (“What does Rachel see in this guy?” he wonders in voice-over as he serves Ross his coffee.)

  Kauffman and Crane had rejected the network’s suggestion of a “Pat the Cop,” who would dispense mature wisdom to the show’s characters, but Gunther was their deliberately askew version of the idea. Gunther offered no insight and no comfort, but he served as a helpful reminder for audiences that, unlike him, we were always welcome to hang out.
/>   CHAPTER 6

  THE BIGGEST NEW SHOW ON TV

  Creating a Sensation in Season 1

  David Crane was out to dinner with his parents and his partner, Jeffrey Klarik, over Thanksgiving weekend in 1994 when Klarik suddenly shushed the conversation. “Listen,” he told Crane, directing his attention to a nearby table.

  “Did you see the one in the Laundromat?” asked one patron.

  “And Ross and Rachel?” responded another.

  Klarik told Crane, “Remember this moment. Because the rest will be a blur. But people over there are talking about the show.” Friends was a show whose fans’ enthusiasm could be eavesdropped on.

  For many of the people involved with the show, there were discrete moments when their work’s impact could be experienced in encounters with strangers. These would be cherished, wrapped in paper to be carried back to the Warner Bros. lot, their good feeling the energy that would drive the grueling work to be done.

  Marta Kauffman was out shopping with her child on Larchmont Boulevard, near her home in Hancock Park. A fan spotted her Friends hat and approached, asking Kauffman if she might tell her what would happen with Ross and Rachel. She promised she wouldn’t tell anyone. On another occasion, Matt LeBlanc was out to lunch with David Schwimmer when a woman spotted Schwimmer. She ran up to their table, practically tossed her baby into Schwimmer’s lap, and began frantically digging into her purse in search of a camera so she could take a photograph with him.

  Writer and notorious jester Jeff Astrof had a particular coffee shop that he liked getting his coffee from, in no small part because of a pretty waitress named Elizabeth who worked there. Seeking a competitive advantage, Astrof took to chewing meditatively on his pen, staring at his blank notebook page, and musing aloud, “I wonder what Chandler would do?” Elizabeth took the bait and asked Astrof if he was truly a writer for Friends. He shyly confirmed that he was, and at the end of a flirtatious conversation, Astrof told her, “I think Chandler will date a girl named Elizabeth.”