Astrof brought the story back to the room, as much to share a funny story as to brag, and Crane topped the joke with an acidulous put-down, delivered with as much stern force as he could muster: “Chandler would never date anyone named Elizabeth.” (Of course, years later, Ross would date someone named Elizabeth, but by then Astrof and his waitress crush were long gone.)
In March, near the end of the first season, the cast of Friends was summoned for the closest thing to an American version of a royal audience. The six actors were to appear on The Oprah Winfrey Show and bathe in the glow of Oprah’s love. The appearance would require them to fly to Chicago, and Courteney Cox initially balked, suggesting she would appear via satellite. David Schwimmer, the defender of cast unity above all, insisted that they all appear in person, and Cox agreed to come.
Before the shoot, some of the actors quickly huddled together to discuss how they might respond to the concerns about Friends’ overwhelming whiteness, which had been a regular subject of media coverage. What would they tell Oprah about why there were no black friends, and moreover, about the lack of diversity on the show in general?
As it turned out, Oprah referenced the racial concerns with delicacy, transforming it into a joke. “I’d like y’all to get a black friend,” Winfrey told them. “Maybe I could stop by. In fact, I’m thinking about buying that apartment building next door.” Winfrey told the cast that fans were gathering together in groups to watch the show, and Kudrow, for one, was flabbergasted. Apparently the show was a hit. She knew the ratings were good, but ensconced in their bubble on the Warner Bros. lot, she did not realize how passionately Americans were responding to Friends.
Crane was taken aback to spot the cast of the show on the cover of Rolling Stone in May 1995. He began calculating how much time had passed between shooting the show’s pilot and his cast’s appearance on the cover of one of the most prominent magazines in the United States. How long ago had it been that Crane had been kept up nights over his worries regarding whether the show would be canceled or not picked up, or whether he would be fired?
It had felt downright greedy to hope for a second season of the show, and now here they were, in the white-hot center of American popular culture, riding in a vintage automobile while kitted out in 1940s retro chic—Schwimmer in a sailor’s uniform, Cox in a plunging strapless floral-print, and Perry, eyes bulging, casting an alarmed glance at her while wearing a jaunty straw hat.
Ratings had steadily crept up over the course of the season, from a low 20s share (the percentage of viewers watching television at that hour who were watching Friends) for the first handful of episodes to a share consistently at or above 30 for the final third of the season, which ranked it among the most successful series on TV. And summer, when NBC broadcast reruns of the show, allowed fans who had missed out on the beginning of Friends to catch up, with ratings ascending even higher.
Adam Chase went home to New Jersey to visit his parents in the interval between seasons, and on his return to Los Angeles, he passed by an airport newsstand filled with Friends-themed covers. His first thought was that editors at these magazines were likely going to be in trouble for running such similar covers simultaneously. His second thought was that his show must suddenly have become a huge hit.
The media’s enthusiasm was indicative of a shift in cultural attitudes toward television stars. Prior to Friends, there had been a certain ingrained belief in the second-tier status of television stardom. The gathering frenzy around the six stars of Friends began the process of resetting what TV stardom might look like. Schwimmer, Aniston, Cox, Perry, LeBlanc, and Kudrow might only have been television stars, but the depth and passion of fans’ interest in their new favorites exceeded that directed at any other stars of the mid-1990s.
Old habits were hard to kill off, and an inordinate amount of the media’s coverage of Friends revolved around a single question: Which of the show’s stars were likely to become movie stars? The actors were treated like minor-league baseball phenoms who had won themselves an invitation to the Big Show. The coverage inevitably diminished the scope of Friends’ accomplishment, treating it like an interim success whose significance would be wiped out if none of its stars could make the leap to movie acting. But all six actors were indeed intent on using Friends as a springboard to movie stardom. The summer of 1995, when the show was on hiatus, rapidly filled up with scheduled movie shoots intended to launch the show’s performers into the stratosphere.
Schwimmer starred in the Graduate-esque romantic comedy The Pallbearer, LeBlanc appeared opposite a chimpanzee in the baseball film Ed, and Aniston won a plum role in She’s the One, director Edward Burns’s follow-up to the acclaimed The Brothers McMullen. None were hits, nor was Matthew Perry’s attempt to vault to leading-man status with the romantic comedy Fools Rush In, opposite Salma Hayek, one year later.
The only Friends star to meet with immediate cinematic success was the one who had already experienced it. Courteney Cox turned in a solid performance as a reporter in Wes Craven’s self-referential horror film Scream, which wound up grossing over $100 million at the domestic box office in 1996. Journalists pored over the results with the nuance of elderly Talmudists, intent on parsing the meaning of the message being sent by the American moviegoing populace. Did fans not want to pay to see the Friends stars play roles too similar to the ones available for free on network television? Did they not want to see them at all after twenty-four episodes?
The obsessive coverage of the movie transition mostly overlooked two primary facts. First, the Friends stars’ movies had mostly flopped because they had been inept. They had not been sunk by the lesser wattage of a television actor’s stardom. The one that had succeeded, Scream, had featured a clever concept, an appealing cast, and a talented director, and had not been sold as “Friends, but at the multiplex.” And Cox had been a supporting performer, not a stand-alone star. Second, the stars of Friends, even after their movie careers’ collective failures to launch, were still enormous stars. It was only the stubborn insistence that movie stardom was genuine currency and television stardom counterfeit that made this a subject for consideration.
Warner Bros. and NBC scheduled an avalanche of tie-ins and promotions to cash in on the Friends frenzy. There were plans for everything from Friends-themed calendars to a Friends coffee line. Turn on the TV, and there they were—in character—hawking Diet Coke. Turn on the radio, and that familiar theme song was now omnipresent, dominating the charts.
Coca-Cola approached the showrunners with an amount of money that was hard to turn away from. Crane and Kauffman put the writers to work for an entire week drafting ideas for the Diet Coke commercials, in which the six friends would tout the wonders of the low-calorie soda. The showrunners were still in the first blush of success and inclined to snatch at every business opportunity that came their way, but as Crane and Kauffman both later acknowledged, the commercials were a notable misstep. Kevin Bright, too, believed that the unneeded complexity of the commercials—why did the performers have to appear as their Friends characters, rather than as themselves?—fed into the burgeoning Friends backlash.
In one commercial, the six friends appeared in a police lineup, swearing their innocence regarding the theft of a missing Diet Coke. In another thirty-second spot, each was interrogated, with Phoebe suggesting candles to lighten the hard-boiled atmosphere and Monica ranting about how she had no alibi because she did not have a boyfriend.
The commercials were perfectly adequate, in and of themselves, but their crass hucksterism felt at odds with Friends’ warmth. Crane later argued that not only had he put the show at risk by taking the Diet Coke commercials, he had put the actors in a difficult spot by encouraging them to take the gig. Of all the choices he had made over the course of a decade running Friends, it was the one he wanted back most.
Kevin Bright had become impressed with the work of the Hasidic Jewish sect Chabad and offered to freshen up t
heir annual telethon to raise money for their drug-and-alcohol-rehabilitation centers, which usually leaned to guest appearances by the likes of Shelley Berman, by cajoling the cast to appear. (The video is worth tracking down, if only to listen to Matt LeBlanc attempt to pronounce Chabad.) Matthew Perry and Jennifer Aniston shot a commercial for Windows 95, in which a prototypical tech geek told them “communicating online is the hot thing right now.” And Kudrow, Cox, and Aniston filmed a promotional video for the NBA from Monica and Rachel’s living room, in which they betrayed a vaguely erotic enthusiasm for old-school NBA short-shorts and swooned over—of all unlikely people—Utah Jazz point guard John Stockton. Friends’ sudden ubiquity meant that its characters were inescapable, which was not necessarily desirable for a hit show intent on staying popular for years to come.
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Oprah Winfrey may have delicately tiptoed around it, but the question of Friends’ lack of diversity remained a recurrent critique of the show. How could a show set in Manhattan be so lily-white? A drumbeat of articles in the mainstream media after the show’s first season castigated Friends not only for featuring six white protagonists, but for depicting “a fictional Manhattan where black people are strangely absent from restaurants, museums, health clubs and the streets.”
While network dramas like ER and Homicide: Life on the Street included integrated casts and racially incisive plotlines, comedies like Friends rarely featured nonwhite characters, even in supporting or one-off roles. Jonathan Storm of The Philadelphia Inquirer totted up the numbers in a 1996 article, determining that of the sixty-four comedies that had appeared on any of the six networks during that season, only twelve had featured racially mixed casts, with forty all-white and twelve all-black shows comprising the remainder.
Friends, third in the Nielsen ratings, ranked ninety-ninth in African-American households. It was telling that Friends was programmed in the same time slot as Living Single, the Fox sitcom about single African-American women frequently mentioned as a precursor to Friends. The Inquirer spoke to Brown University professor Sasha Torres, who described Friends and its network counterparts as “figuratively and narratively trying to make urban spaces safe for white people.” This phenomenon was not exclusive to Friends but was predicated on the domestic intimacy of comedy.
“The comedies for some reason just have not been courageous,” ER executive producer John Wells told the Los Angeles Times. “I certainly was determined to do our show with a multiracial and multicultural focus. It’s irresponsible not to. It does not mirror the society we live in.”
Friends would later address its racial deficiencies by casting Gabrielle Union in a one-off role as a woman Chandler and Joey simultaneously date in the seventh season, and Aisha Tyler as a paleontologist attracted to Joey in the ninth and tenth seasons. (There had also been the Asian-American Lauren Tom as Ross’s love interest Julie in the second season.) Much of the media’s attention, when it came to matters of diversity in the 1990s and early 2000s, was concentrated on the proportion of African-American actors cast in key roles, and the criticism of Friends often took the shape of wondering when the show would feature an African-American performer in a major role. The effort was notable, if demonstrably tardy, but USC professor Todd Boyd described it in a 2003 Boston Globe article as “a slap in the face. . . . They’re saying, ‘We’ll do this when we know we’re going off the air. We’ve addressed the critics, now leave us alone.’” Friends never really had much of an answer for its whiteness, and its reflexive defensiveness when the subject was broached only increased the sense of discomfort. The show had countless opportunities to improve its track record on diverse casting and mostly failed to respond to the very legitimate critique being proffered.
Friends could not be solely blamed for what had been a preexisting condition on television. But Friends’ enormous success prompted a rash of imitators intent on similar all-white ensembles, according to Mike Duffy of the Chicago Tribune: “The trend has become only more pronounced this season, with the ‘Friends’ phenomenon sparking a white-bread wave of sitcom clones about young Caucasian chuckleheads.”
NBC offered two more urban-living comedies, Caroline in the City and The Single Guy, in 1995, and ABC and Fox had their own attempts at replicating Central Perk. The Washington Post’s Tom Shales saw Friends as the harbinger of a newly crude era on television and was disturbed by its replicating itself across the network lineup. Shales was resigned to endless Friends imitators, but no one was going to get him to chuckle over it: “This year’s new hit is certain to inspire the networks to send in the clones. It’s the eternal cycle of TV Land—or rather the eternal recycle.”
Perhaps the most powerful indicator of Friends’ remarkable success was what it inspired Charlie Quinn to do. Quinn, the program director at a Nashville radio station, pulled the forty-five-second version of the Friends theme song off the telecast and looped it until he had a three-minute song he could play on the air. “I’ll Be There for You” rapidly became a runaway hit, and the impromptu song spread from Tennessee around the country.
Friends had made the Rembrandts suddenly famous, but at first, the duo was uninterested in recording a full-length version of the theme song. The money in music was in songwriting, and the band did not want to record someone else’s work. The band’s record label, East West Records, insisted, threatening that without “I’ll Be There for You,” they wouldn’t release the band’s new album. A compromise was ultimately worked out, and the Rembrandts—Danny Wilde and Phil Solem—were cut in as cowriters of the fuller song, which added new lyrics to the original version, along with Kauffman, Crane, Skloff, and veteran songwriter Allee Willis.
The full-length version of “I’ll Be There for You” became a breakout hit in 1995, cracking the top twenty on the Billboard charts. The song became the centerpiece of the Rembrandts’ album L.P., as well as a Friends tie-in soundtrack album, which spliced juicy bits of the show’s dialogue with songs by Hootie & the Blowfish, R.E.M., and Paul Westerberg.
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David Crane had felt little additional pressure heading into the second season. There was a show to be written, and no one’s opinion mattered to him other than those of the people in the room and the people on the set. Whether Friends was an enormous hit or an underachiever, the problems remained the same: What was our story? How would we get the audience to care? Friends might have been one of the top-rated shows on television, it might have occupied far more than its fair share of space on newsstands across America, but work was work, and there would be little to no discussion of Friends the phenomenon on the set or in the writers’ room. Others noticed changes, though. The stars now had security guards. There were luxury cars in the employee parking lot and discussions of the new homes the cast and crew were buying.
For Crane, Friends was merely a television program that employed a group of serious, efficient, and talented people, one of whose many responsibilities was to entirely tune out any and all discussion of the show that took place outside of work. It was remarkable to Crane simply that the show continued to air and that NBC was placing its confidence in their work.
Crane and Kauffman may have been of one mind in their insistence on keeping success at bay, but the executives charged with fostering the show’s development did not always heed their message. After the second-season premiere, in which Ross introduced his new girlfriend Julie (Lauren Tom) to the group, Les Moonves, then president of Warner Bros. Television (and soon to become head of a rival network, CBS), came to the Friends soundstage and read the show’s Nielsen ratings to the cast and crew. Moonves was celebrating Friends’ remarkable numbers, the strongest indication yet that NBC had another huge hit on its hands. Adam Chase turned to a colleague and said, “I don’t know what those numbers mean, but I’ve never seen this guy before. I think this is a big deal.”
Everyone wanted to benefit from the extraordinary popularit
y of the show, not least among them James Burrows. Burrows had directed the pilot, his imprimatur an enormous help in convincing others to take its chances more seriously. He had found his way to the emotional and comedic heart of the show, and had swiftly and wisely directed it toward the Ross-and-Rachel plot arc that would serve the show for a decade to come. Burrows was already a sitcom veteran where most everyone else associated with the show was a relative newcomer, and when Friends became an enormous hit, he expected to be cut in for his fair share of the show’s profits.
There were two complaints about Burrows, one large and one relatively small, that prevented this from happening and resulted in his mostly ceasing to direct new episodes of Friends after the first season. The small complaint was significant enough. It came courtesy of Kevin Bright and others on the Friends team who felt that while Burrows was undeniably a sitcom wizard and had a remarkable gift for understanding comedy, he was always in a hurry. The first take was always perfect in his eyes, and the entire episode, complete with pauses for the writers to adjust lines, would be wrapped by ten P.M. each week—still late by sitcom standards, but downright early in comparison to what would come on Friends. Burrows enjoyed maintaining a limber, quick-paced set where the show’s creators would often have preferred to slow down and take notice of how best to improve the final product, even if it took substantially longer.
The proof was in the pudding, and the final results were undeniably good, but Burrows seemed to be in a hurry to get to his vacation home in Mexico each Tuesday night, and this caused resentment among some of the people putting in punishing hours to make Friends. It was not that the show suffered under Burrows’s watch; it palpably did not. But there was a growing sense that there were opportunities Burrows was leaving behind in his haste to finish each week.
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