Generation Friends

by Saul Austerlitz

  Joey, increasingly slow on the uptake as Friends progresses, finally catches Rachel’s meaning and returns to find her still standing, biting her thumb, her eyebrow slightly raised, as if to say, “Whaddaya think?” It is a striking moment for Aniston, full of the delicacy and sensitivity and faint erotic charge with which she invests Rachel. In her combative, frustrating encounters with Ross, Rachel is often driven to fury and alpha-girl swagger, but we see here a gentler, more emotionally open Rachel.

  Once more, Joey and Rachel’s relationship is somehow all about their missing partner, with Joey’s telling her, “I couldn’t do it to Ross,” and their awkwardly shaking hands like strangers at a mediocre dinner party. Joey retreats to the hotel lobby, where he spots Ross and Charlie clandestinely making out behind an array of potted plants, and his chivalry instantly melts away. Not only is Ross not pining for Rachel, he is making out with Joey’s own girlfriend to boot. Joey watches them, marinating in his sadness, and takes to his heels. He walks away from the sight of his abandoned relationship and knocks on Rachel’s door. She looks at him, he kisses her, and the door closes on them and the season.

  There is a good deal of soap opera in this transformation, with elements of infidelity and betrayal that would not be out of place on Joey’s own show, Days of Our Lives. We sense that all this is deemed necessary to justify so total an inversion of the accepted order of Friends as to allow the concept of Joey and Rachel together to seem acceptable. In truth, it is not, and the opening of the tenth season emphasizes the fundamental juvenility of the entire endeavor, including their friends’ histrionic responses.

  Everyone in “The One After Joey and Rachel Kiss” is engaged in surveillance. Chandler and Monica lead the charge, proposing to press glasses to the walls to spy on Joey and Rachel. Even this is ultimately not enough for them, and they burst through the door to talk to Rachel about this violation of the sextet’s unspoken rules.

  “We kissed for ten minutes and now we’re talking to our friends about it,” Rachel grouses, “so I guess this is sixth grade!” There is something distinctly middle school about all this, with romantic and sexual behavior being policed by others insistent on knowing every detail even before anything has happened. And Ross is like a particularly distracting ghost, present in every room no matter how fervently they wish him away.

  Everyone pleads with Rachel and Joey to talk to Ross first before proceeding, even though, as Rachel tells Joey, she and Ross have not dated for six years. Both Rachel and Joey picture themselves kissing Ross as they embrace. When the flesh-and-blood Ross finds Joey on the plane ride home, desperate to talk to him about the long-since-forgotten Charlie, the air is thick once more with unspoken secrets. Joey is magnanimous about Charlie, channeling the very words he hopes to hear Ross say about him and Rachel: “You guys make way more sense than her and I ever did.”

  Ross inevitably feels pressured to manifest a calm he does not feel upon learning their secret. Walking in on them kissing, Schwimmer puts on a strangled high-pitched voice, as if he were trying out for a traveling production of Cats, and insists on the two freshly minted couples having dinner together the next night: “I’m making fajitas!”

  Rachel and Joey are doomed by the gods of narrative contrivance, and as soon as Friends prepares its audience for the prospect of Joey and Rachel in earnest, it wipes their relationship away. Joey tells Rachel his ideal first date, which ends with his feeling her up on the carriage ride home. (“Feel me up?” “In a carriage!”) The ghost of Ross still refuses to be dismissed, with their incredibly awkward couples’ get-together (in which Ross insists on pretending to be introduced to Joey’s new girlfriend) ending with Joey’s looking after a drunken and disheveled Ross.

  Rachel and Joey are in agreement at long last about wanting to try having a relationship, but while their minds are in accord, their bodies, tellingly, betray their distinct uncertainty. Rachel finds herself continually slapping Joey’s hand away as they kiss, and Joey, the master of the one-handed bra removal, fumbles with Rachel’s bra strap. Sex, on Friends, is the ultimate arbiter of truth, and Joey’s and Rachel’s bodies betray a truth that they are unable or unwilling to admit: They do not belong together.

  Joey, the much-lauded icon of masculine vigor, cannot find it in himself to have sex with Rachel, and as they forlornly discuss the idea of being “one of those couples that never has sex,” the end of their relationship appears as unexpectedly as its beginning. “I love you,” Joey tells Rachel, but when Rachel says it back, it is leached of any and all erotic heat. There is nothing left to see here. Rachel and Joey retreat into their earlier pattern, this interlude erased from the historical record.

  And when Friends headed for its conclusion in season 10, it was understood that only Joey would be left without a romantic happy ending. To be sure, some of this was to keep a door ajar for a spin-off series, in which Joey would be at liberty to start a new life in Los Angeles, but it was also reflective of what had happened to LeBlanc’s character over the second half of the show. There were concerns among the producers that Joey had been rendered progressively more foolish as the show unfolded, with the writers leaving him to wander in the wilderness before belatedly understanding a reference or a joke. This was what happened to you on Friends when you were unlucky enough not to find love.

  Joey’s temporary alteration was too abrupt, demanding that we accept a serial pickup artist’s blossoming seemingly overnight into an unrequited lover. It is telling that, soon after wrapping the Rachel-and-Joey plotline, Joey’s starry-eyed romantic side retreats, never to be seen again.

  To tell a story over the course of a decade, and to continually seek to surprise the audience, is to almost inevitably stumble into narrative cul-de-sacs. The gap between surprise and misstep is far narrower than it might appear from the exterior. Friends was good at subtly shifting the ground underneath its characters’ feet, so that Chandler could slowly, steadily transition from lonely and desperate to dedicated family man without ever pushing the audience to rebel against this change in tone. But the story of Rachel and Joey never really works, because the audience struggled to accept the late-blooming transformation of a character it believed it already knew in full. Accepting it, too, would have meant acknowledging that Ross and Rachel were not meant to be—something that Friends fans were not willing to do. Joey’s alteration was a misstep, if an occasionally compelling one, but does it not speak to Friends’ strengths that there were ultimately so few of these lapses over the course of a decade?

  CHAPTER 19

  NEVER OFF THE TABLE

  How Friends Was Belatedly Invited to the Emmy Party

  In September 2001, the writers of Friends were planning to send Monica and Chandler on a honeymoon. The writers scripted what seemed to be a funny B plotline. Chandler and Monica would bicker over the necessary lead time needed for arriving at the airport, and obsessive Monica would hold up the security line in order to maintain her streak of never setting off the metal detector. Chandler would spot a sign prohibiting joking about bombing and lean in to an airport worker: “You don’t have to worry about me, ma’am. I take my bombs very seriously.”

  Chandler is instantly taken away and vainly strives to convince a pair of skeptical federal agents he means no harm: “I mean, I know the sign says no jokes about bombs, but shouldn’t the sign really say, ‘No bombs’?” The entire plotline was harmless airport humor, casting Chandler in the familiar role of hapless joker facing a distinctly unamused pair of foils, but on the morning of September 11, 2001, reports filtered onto the Friends set about an airplane that had crashed into one of the towers of the World Trade Center.

  That September morning, David Crane had been at the gym. He had seen the television reports and had called his partner, Jeffrey Klarik, to register his difficulty processing what he was seeing taking place in the city he once called home. As he was saying good-bye, Crane told Klarik that it was time to head into the
office. Klarik firmly told him that not only would he not be going into the office, no one would be going into the office that day.

  Crane, Kauffman, and Bright were all former New Yorkers and felt a deep affinity for the city. Moreover, their show was set in New York, which raised the question of how, if at all, Friends would acknowledge the deaths of three thousand people in the same city where Ross, Rachel, Monica, Chandler, Joey, and Phoebe bantered and drank coffee.

  Ultimately, Friends decided that an extremely minimal response was wisest. The producers excised all glimpses of the World Trade Center from its interstitial sequences but otherwise made no explicit reference to the calamity. Crane felt strongly that Friends was not the show to address the destruction of the World Trade Center. Even if they had wanted to, it was unclear how the scope of a comedy series like theirs could be expanded to incorporate a tragedy like this. (Years later, a spec script for Seinfeld, written by Billy Domineau, in which the characters muddle their way through 9/11 was a brief Internet sensation. George asks a firefighter whether all the hoopla is exciting for him, and Kramer realizes that his old pal Mohamed Atta borrowed his box cutter to hijack an airplane and fly it into the World Trade Center.) This was someone else’s job. Crane was aware of the hunger for comfort food in the face of horror, and he was proud to have the responsibility of creating the thing that would take Americans’ minds off death and terrorism and war for thirty minutes each week.

  Friends also had a story emergency of a most unusual kind. Normally, stories went bust when the writing staff realized they weren’t getting the laughs they were looking for or something else went wrong onstage. Here, the story was still fine, but the world had changed.

  The original bomb-centered plotline had to be completely excised from the episode scheduled to run October 11, 2001, “The One Where Rachel Tells . . .” The writers were put to work on crafting a replacement story line, preferably using the same sets, and came up with a plot about Chandler and Monica competing with another set of honeymooners for all the trip perks (first-class seats and hotel upgrades) on offer. It was not Friends’ most inspired moment, but at least it avoided reminding audiences of the horrors they had so recently experienced.

  After September 11, Kevin Bright had the idea of inviting one hundred first responders and their families to Los Angeles to attend a taping of the show. Firefighters traveled across the country, from the real New York, still horrifically scarred from the attacks on lower Manhattan, to the New York of the mind located on the Warner Bros. lot in Los Angeles to receive some comfort, and to offer some comfort to everyone still in mourning for their city.

  They came bearing sweatshirts and T-shirts for the cast and crew, and in the resulting episode, “The One Where Chandler Takes a Bath,” Joey eats his morning bowl of Frosted Flakes while wearing an FDNY T-shirt honoring the memory of Captain Billy Burke. Friends said nothing explicitly about Burke or about the thousands of others murdered in the collapse of the World Trade Center, but intrepid viewers would be able to find his New York Times obituary and read of the forty-six-year-old firefighter who would regularly ride his bike to his firehouse, who had spent a quarter of a century as a lifeguard, and who had “ordered [his men] out of the north tower” on September 11 “while he continued searching for people to rescue.” Friends’ New York would carry on as it had, but it quietly acknowledged the thousands like Burke who never came home.

  In the wake of horror, Friends went on much as it had been, albeit with metal detectors on the lot and, for a short time, show-night audiences made up of extras and Warner Bros. employees. Its characters proceeded with their lives with no hint of genuine New Yorkers’ feelings of terror, determination, fear, or grief. And truthfully, Friends’ emotional landscape would have been overwhelmed by immersion in too much reality. Friends had always been a hothouse environment, its characters protected from certain forms of blight.

  There simply could not be three thousand dead people in the streets of Friends’ New York. Whether this was a failing of the show or an expression of its stubborn strengths remained an open question, but it marked a decided positive shift in the show’s reception. The 2001–02 season found Friends receiving its highest ratings since the second season. Where most series plateaued and then never returned to peak levels of viewership, Friends had found new life in its eighth season. Having ascended to fourth place for its third and fourth seasons, and second in its fifth season, it dropped to fifth place in the Nielsen ratings for its sixth and seventh seasons, but it was the highest-rated show on television for the first time in the 2001–02 season.

  The show still generated remarkable revenue for both NBC and Warner Bros., with NBC taking in $250 million in ad sales for the 2001–02 season alone. Syndication, moreover, had generated around $400 million for Warners, with a further $1 billion in ads sold to run alongside those syndicated broadcasts. Friends was on the air in 175 countries, dubbed or subtitled into 40 other languages.

  Friends was also the beneficiary of a belated sense that it had long been deserving of awards recognition it had yet to receive. The show had never won the Emmy for Outstanding Comedy Series. Over its first seven seasons, the only Friends cast member to receive an Emmy had been Lisa Kudrow in 1998. (Besides Kudrow, only Schwimmer and Aniston had even been nominated; Matthew Perry, Matt LeBlanc, and Courteney Cox had been snubbed for seven years running.)

  Friends had won a smattering of other Emmys, including director Michael Lembeck’s for “The One After the Superbowl” and guest-acting prizes for Bruce Willis and Christina Applegate, but was mostly shut out from the major awards by the likes of Frasier and Everybody Loves Raymond.

  In 2002 the streak was finally reversed, with Friends at last taking home the Emmy for best comedy and Jennifer Aniston winning for best actress in a comedy. Friends was benefiting from the simultaneous confluence of two burgeoning trends. First, in the aftermath of September 11, audiences were unexpectedly hungering for comfort. Much of the media coverage in the days and weeks after the destruction of the World Trade Center had raised the possibility of the death of irony and satire, and the return of a new seriousness that American culture had been said to have abandoned. None of this came to fruition, and Friends embodied the lingering pleasures of the antebellum era: its interest in matters of the heart, its occasionally syrupy wholesomeness, and its purposeful lightness.

  Additionally, the continuing success of Friends, at a point when most other shows had either gone to their eternal slumber or entered a period of terminal obsolescence, was a necessary reminder of its remarkable achievements. Whether you loved it, hated it, or found it merely a tolerable way to pass thirty minutes on a Thursday evening, Friends proved itself to have a lasting appeal that few could have anticipated when it premiered in the fall of 1994. The Emmy win was understood less as a celebration of its most recent season, which included the divisive Joey-and-Rachel plotline, than a lifetime-achievement award honoring the show’s superlative run. Friends was in its twilight, and a realization was creeping in that the show had never been properly feted for all its accomplishments.

  CHAPTER 20

  THE DOOR TO THE PAST

  The Ballad of Ross and Rachel, Part 5

  Friends found inventive ways to keep Ross and Rachel tangled up in each other’s romantic lives, even as their actual relationship receded ever further into the past. Rachel briefly dated the father (Bruce Willis) of Ross’s college-student girlfriend (Alexandra Holden). In “The One with Monica’s Thunder,” Monica stumbles on Ross and Rachel contemplating a “bonus night” of pleasure, making out in the hallway outside her apartment moments after she and Chandler have gotten engaged: “I’m sorry. Apparently I’ve opened the door to the past.”

  The eighth season begins with the question of the paternity of Rachel’s forthcoming baby resolved and Ross established as the father. With the show flirting with Rachel and Joey’s finding love, Ross and Rachel are now less a couple in the mak
ing than bickering spouses, fighting over everything from their daughter’s name to the role of Braxton Hicks contractions in the birthing process (“No uterus, no opinion,” she memorably tells him).

  There are still moments of tenderness, of pained recollection of what was and optimism about what might be. We see it in Rachel’s elaborate descriptions of her imaginary engagement and wedding to Ross in “The One in Massapequa,” with its appearances by Stevie Wonder and Annie Leibovitz, and its planetarium proposal with “Will Marry You Me?” written in the stars.

  Ross and Rachel are tipping their hands here; like us, they, too, imagine that a happy ending is written in the stars for them, as much as life appears to be yanking them apart. Ross wants to do better this time than he did with his oldest, Ben: “Every time I have to drop him off at Carol and Susan’s, it breaks my heart a little.” For this as-yet-unborn child, he imagines a life in which everyone is in bed together on a Sunday morning, fighting over the science section of the newspaper. Left unstated, but strongly implied, is that Rachel is next to him in the bed.

  Ross appears to be resigning himself to a life without Rachel, but as always, we like Ross best in his wistful, nostalgic mode. In “The One Where Joey Speaks French,” Ross comforts Rachel after her father has a heart attack and takes pleasure in visiting her childhood bedroom.

  “Rachel Green is very happy you’re in her room,” Rachel purrs in response, and while this particular interlude ends in recriminations, with Ross turning down no-strings-attached sex for noble reasons and Rachel frustrated with his inability to comfort her in the manner she requests, this reminder of the sheer length and scope of their relationship jump-starts the final round of their romantic face-off.