Generation Friends

by Saul Austerlitz

  Kevin Bright was the one in the editing bay putting each episode together, and he saw where directors could improve the final product by shooting more or by using different camera setups. Burrows was a superlative director, everyone agreed. But Bright was not only a director; he was also a producer, an editor, and a showrunner, and he wanted to take greater ownership over the shoot itself. It was telling that Bright himself directed the first-season finale, “The One Where Rachel Finds Out.” Bright would direct many more episodes in the future.

  The larger concern was, as large concerns often are, about money. There was only so much money to go around, and for Burrows to get a big enough piece of the Friends pie, Crane, Kauffman, and Bright would have to give up some of what they were to earn. They all liked James Burrows and were appreciative of all he had done to make Friends a success. They also agreed that this was their baby and Burrows, while extremely helpful, had played only a small part in its creation. As long as Burrows was around, Friends ran the risk of being treated as another show in the distinguished lineage of Jimmy Burrows smash hits. Kevin Bright in particular felt confident that the show would thrive in Burrows’s absence just as it had in his presence and was anxious for them to stake a claim for Friends as theirs.

  Nobody wanted Burrows to leave Friends permanently, including Burrows himself, and so room was made for him to come back occasionally after the first season. He would direct the classic “The One with the Prom Video” in the second season, and three more episodes in the years that followed. When Burrows returned, he would insist on bringing back the wooden post and beam that had served as a separation pillar between the kitchen and living room in Monica and Rachel’s apartment, which had been subtly jettisoned after the first season. Burrows preferred having it as visual decoration for his shots, and so the crew would have to lug it out from whatever forgotten storage closet it had been abandoned in since the last time Burrows had been on set.

  NBC was insistent on featuring its hottest series in its most important showcase: the slot immediately following the Super Bowl. NBC was going to be broadcasting the game in 1996 and wanted to display its most impressive wares for the captive audience already tuning in to the game. Crane and Kauffman received a call from NBC informing them that they were to receive the plum post–Super Bowl slot. Crane and Kauffman thought it over and determined that given both the length and the time slot, it would not be enough to simply broadcast a traditional episode of the show. They would have to deliver something bigger.

  The show recruited a host of famous guest stars, including Brooke Shields, Jean-Claude Van Damme, Chris Isaak, and Julia Roberts, to appear on the hour-long “The One After the Superbowl.” Shields would be a delusional stalker who believes that Joey really is his Days of Our Lives character, Dr. Drake Ramoray. Van Damme would play himself, with Rachel and Monica squabbling over him after they encounter him on a movie set. Isaak would be a librarian love interest for Phoebe. And Roberts would play an old friend of Chandler’s who gets payback for a childhood prank.

  Producer Todd Stevens had managed to assemble a mock action-film set on the outdoor back lot, complete with burning cars and vehicles flipped on their sides. The whole effort felt very much like a Van Damme production—unusual for a show generally not particularly committed to veracity or realism.

  Director Michael Lembeck was taken aback to spot Brooke Shields’s then-boyfriend Andre Agassi arriving on the set with a hulking bodyguard. Agassi and his bodyguard were sitting disconcertingly close to the set as Shields ran through the scene in which she licked Matt LeBlanc’s hand. As soon as Lembeck called cut, Agassi rushed the set and tore into Shields, humiliating her and reducing her to tears before storming out. It was left to Lembeck, along with the cast, to lift Shields’s spirits and encourage her to carry on.

  Even Julia Roberts—at that point close to the biggest star in the world—lost some of her self-confidence when it came time to face the audience on the Friday evening they were to shoot the episode. Roberts had not been in front of a live audience since she was a teenager, and she was now squeezing Lembeck’s hand fiercely. While the director could feel his bones being crushed, he understood his responsibility in the moment was to guide her through it as best he could.

  She went out for her first scene with Perry, and while Lembeck massaged his gangrenous hand, he watched her perform. Lembeck felt that if a word bubble could have been appended to her first take, it would have read, “Wait a minute, I can do this!” The second take was superb, but it required her getting through that first take and regaining the confidence needed to face an audience. Stealing Chandler’s clothes and then taunting him in a restaurant bathroom, Roberts contributed some of the funniest moments of a deeply uneven episode.

  Van Damme showed up for the shoot twelve hours late. What had been scheduled to be a morning shoot with Van Damme on the mock film set was now taking place in the evening, with a very un-Friends-like nighttime look to accommodate the new circumstances. Lembeck had his hands full simply coaching Van Damme through his few lines of dialogue and keeping him from disturbing his female costars.

  “The One After the Superbowl” wound up as the most-watched episode in the show’s history, with 52.9 million viewers, but was hardly the ideal introduction to the show. It was a reminder that the second season of Friends was not the first, and could never be. The first season had been an unexpected triumph; the second time around, critics were gunning for the show, and Friends was opening the door to criticism with lesser efforts like “Superbowl.” With bloated enterprises like this episode, Friends was playing into the hands of critics carping about the show’s lowest-common-denominator impulses. Some of this was the blowback that any popular TV show would engender, but some was also prompted by Friends’ desire to please everyone all the time.

  In retrospect, Crane thought the Super Bowl episode was a tremendous opportunity, but one whose final shape did not entirely resemble the show. Friends occupied its own rarefied space in American popular culture, one that not only did not need any infusions of star power but could be hindered by stars not up to the caliber, or popularity, of its own performers.

  Part of Friends’ lesser critical status stemmed from its reputation as a photocopy of Seinfeld, a pale WASP knockoff. While Friends was less groundbreaking a comedy than Seinfeld, the particulars of its reputation were misguided. Seinfeld was known as an echt-Jewish show, with its fixation on babkas and Upper West Side schlemiels, but the series masked its obviously Jewish characters as other ethnic types. (George is Italian? Costanza, please.)

  Friends, by contrast, was more forthright about the ethnic backgrounds of its characters, with Rachel, Ross, and Monica all pegged as Jews of varying types. (Ross and Monica were supposed to be half-Jewish.) Their Jewishness came out most strongly in the flashback episodes, with Ross in his Jewfro and Rachel with her pre-rhinoplasty nose; to be Jewish was, in Friends’ eyes, to be geeky and unpolished.

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  The show was required to regularly contort itself in response to the question of what it could and could not say on network television. One of David Crane’s most important weekly tasks was his conversation with NBC’s standards division. He customarily took the calls in the writers’ room, happy to let his staff hear just some of what was required to get their vision to air.

  Crane would negotiate over whether he was allotted one breast or two in a given episode’s dialogue. Asshole was verboten, but ass was allowed. For a time, NBC banned Friends from using the word penis, before changing their minds and allowing it again. At other times, the concern was about tonnage. Two mentions of penis would be OK, but three was unacceptable. Kauffman and Crane had gotten their television education with HBO, and this sudden outburst of middle-school morality was frustrating.

  Could Monica and Rachel be shown squabbling over the last condom in the bathroom drawer? Could a condom wrapper be shown on a bedside table? Kauff
man and Crane were perpetually frustrated with the degree of pushback Friends received from NBC, especially when compared with Seinfeld, which could devote an entire episode to a masturbation contest. Initially, Kauffman and Crane were told that the distinction between the two shows stemmed from when they aired. Friends, airing before nine o’clock, attracted a younger audience that NBC had to be mindful of.

  Even when Friends shifted to nine thirty late in the first season, NBC’s attitude hardly budged. When Crane pushed back, NBC executives told him that, having attracted a younger audience, the network was fearful of alienating youthful Friends fans by having its characters say and do things that would provoke discomfort.

  In response, Friends perfected a side glance at raunchy material, avoiding the kind of explicit dialogue that might run into difficulties with Standards and Practices. Friends managed the feat of making sex feel wholesome and all-American, a necessary stage in the evolution of the American adult. Sex was the ocean in which Friends’ characters swam, with actual depictions of sex eschewed in favor of torrents of sexual talk. Conversation was the thing Friends enjoyed most, and what could be better to talk about than sex?

  Intriguingly, sex talk was never treated as exclusively the province of the men on the show. Friends’ female characters were allowed to be casually sexual. Don Ohlmeyer had worried that audiences would judge Monica for her perceived sluttishness, but he had read the crowd wrong. Friends’ fans were comfortable with equal-opportunity sexual banter.

  In a memorable sequence in “The One with Phoebe’s Uterus,” Monica walks the clueless Chandler through women’s seven erogenous zones, laying out one potential sequence by chanting numbers with increasing fervor. “Seven! Seven! Seven!” she shouts before lying back, spent by the encounter with her imagination. After Monica accidentally knocks her nephew Ben’s head against a post and encourages Rachel to similarly clobber her head in an effort to soothe him, Rachel coyly notes, “If it’s not a headboard, it’s just not worth it.”

  As with Chandler and Joey, much of the sexual banter was actually character banter in disguise, merely another facet of their intimate (at times almost intrusive) knowledge of each other’s preferences, peccadilloes, and pet peeves. There would later be easy jokes to be mined about naked prostitutes at Chandler’s bachelor party, but there was also a character joke about Joey’s presuming that the horror of spending day after day with the same woman would soon have him longing for “the sweet release of death.” And it would be sexual banter transformed into character study that would grant Friends one of its most enduring episodes, and a notable moment in the depiction of sexuality on American television.

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  In the fall of 1995, Candace Gingrich was traveling the country as part of the Coming Out Project, which educated young people about gay rights, reminded them of the progress yet to be made, and offered those still in the closet a safe space in which to acknowledge their sexuality.

  She was just back from one Coming Out Project trip when a colleague came up to her with a message: “You got a phone call from Friends. They want you to be on the show.” “Shut the fuck up,” Gingrich replied. “That’s not funny. Don’t mess with me like that.” Once Gingrich was finally convinced Friends had actually called, she got in touch with a producer on the show, who explained that they were shooting a lesbian wedding and wanted to cast Gingrich as the officiant. Could she fly out to Los Angeles tomorrow?

  Friends was returning to Ross’s ex-wife Carol and her partner Susan (Jessica Hecht) with a charming episode devoted to their wedding. For those aware of who she was, the presence of Candace Gingrich on Friends was a reminder that there were people in the real world who were only too happy to paint this loving union between two women as the source of all societal dysfunction. Candace was Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich’s half sister and had been taken aback, but not surprised, by some comments her brother had recently made about homosexuality, in which he had argued that “it is madness to pretend that families are anything other than heterosexual couples.”

  David Crane was pleased to have someone known in her own right for her advocacy on behalf of gay rights but also enjoyed the gentle political commentary of employing the sister of the homophobic Speaker of the House to officiate at the most famous (imaginary) lesbian wedding in the history of the United States. Only the preceding month, Roseanne had featured a wedding between two of its gay characters, giving the two shows an opportunity to introduce American television to a kind of love that had never before graced prime time. It was telling that in both instances, the gay characters would be in supporting roles; it would not be until 1997 that Ellen DeGeneres would come out on Ellen.

  There would be no full week of rehearsal for Gingrich, as many of the professional performers asked to appear on the show had gotten. She showed up on the day of the shoot and almost immediately filmed her scenes. During the filming of the reception sequence, Gingrich was standing near Matt LeBlanc, who leaned over and thanked her for appearing and for speaking out about gay and lesbian issues. He had been raised by a single mother, he told her, who had instilled in him a belief in respecting differences.

  “The One with the Lesbian Wedding” devotes the bulk of its running time to other plotlines, but the segment devoted to the nuptials is bittersweet and delicate. Carol suffers from a last-minute case of cold feet and thinks of calling off the wedding. It is left to Ross to talk her out of it: “This is your wedding. Do it.” The implication, an especially generous one coming from her ex-husband, is that this wedding will be hers in a way that their wedding could never have been. Ross winds up walking Carol down the aisle, in one of the most emotionally nourishing beats of the Ross-Carol plotline. Before Ellen’s coming-out episode, before Will & Grace, during the first term of a president soon to sign the punitive Defense of Marriage Act, Friends was staking its claim to the telling of emotionally complex queer stories.

  Friends is not above jokes about the idea of a lesbian wedding, but these are grounded in parodying heterosexual self-absorption. Joey takes in the scene at the wedding and despairs: “It just seems so futile. All these women and—nothing. I feel like Superman without my powers.” Chandler responds with one of the best lines of the series, and a perfect summation of his mind-set: “The world is my lesbian wedding.” The episode even finds room for a sweet moment between David Schwimmer and Jessica Hecht, with Susan approaching Ross to offer a rare bit of praise: “You did a good thing today. You wanna dance?” Susan offers to let him lead, and they take to the floor to the strains of “Strangers in the Night.” Hecht, who sometimes struggled to understand Friends’ sense of humor regarding her character, loved the scene, finding it a charming respite from the perpetual air of hostility between Susan and Ross.

  In retrospect, Crane wished that he had dared to tell “The One with the Lesbian Wedding” from the perspective of the women getting married and not from that of the possessive, jealous ex-husband. A more contemporary sensibility would have demanded it, but the resulting episode was tender and genuine nonetheless.

  And Friends would later sneakily pay homage to same-sex love, with a single throwaway moment from the end of the third season’s “The One Without the Ski Trip” speaking to Friends’ quiet frankness. Ross knocked on his ex Carol’s door late at night, and Carol answered, flustered and in the midst of cinching her robe shut. She was not sleeping, she tells Ross, and as she does so, her tongue flicks past her teeth, and she reaches up to remove a pubic hair from her mouth. The gesture was unscripted and served as a reminder of Carol and Susan as sexual beings in their own right.

  NBC prepared for a deluge of viewer complaints about “Lesbian Wedding” that never arrived. The network hired 104 operators to field calls, and wound up receiving a grand total of 2 complaints that evening. A month later, Reverend Donald Wildmon’s acolytes sent in letters of complaint, but the letters made it clear they had not watched the episode in
question. NBC affiliates in Ohio and Texas, among others, chose not to air the episode out of fear of the tender sensibilities of their viewers, but those who did watch “The One with the Lesbian Wedding” seemed mostly unfazed by the experience.

  It was not until after the episode was aired, and Jane Sibbett was appearing with the likes of Geraldo Rivera to discuss it, that she realized how significant it might be for lesbians who had never seen themselves represented on television before. How much more would it have done for them, Sibbett wondered, if Carol and Susan had also been able to kiss like any other newlyweds?

  Sibbett had been raised in a religious home and attended a Presbyterian church in Hollywood at the time she won the role of Carol. Her father had grown more conservative as he aged, and he began hosting a weekly Bible-study class in his home on Thursday nights to ensure that none of his friends would see his daughter playing a lesbian on TV. After “The One with the Lesbian Wedding” aired, she began hearing from many fellow congregants from her childhood, who were writing to tell her she was going to hell. Sibbett was confounded by the response and sad for the childhood friends who had worked themselves up into such a frenzy over the idea of others’ happiness.

  Some time later, Sibbett would be called, along with Hecht, to accept an award on behalf of Friends from an organization that supported gay families. The group’s president rose to speak and observed that if he had been able to see characters like Carol and Susan on television when he had been a child, he might not have attempted suicide on multiple occasions. “The One with the Lesbian Wedding” was imperfect, but its imperfections were embraced by countless people hungering for something that reminded them of themselves on American television.