Ross and Rachel squabble like preteens with anger-management issues, not parents raising a child together. They soon reconcile, and Rachel, her eyes glittering with emotion, tells Ross, “Just so you know, with us, it’s never off the table.” This moment is perhaps the most explicit statement yet of what Friends has made clear all along—that however far apart they might be, Ross and Rachel always remain within sight of happiness.
Their bouts of childishness notwithstanding, Ross and Rachel have matured, and the final few episodes of Friends find them searching for a path to happiness, as cluttered and tangled as the way has become. Rachel is willing to consider Ross anew but decides to take a once-in-a-lifetime career opportunity in Paris. “I can’t believe she’s actually leaving,” groans Ross. “How am I gonna say good-bye to Rachel?” (Chandler agrees with the sentiment, comparing it to when Melrose Place was canceled.)
There is still time for one last classic Friends blowout, with Ross deeply miffed at Rachel when she appears to skip over him at her going-away party while offering lavish good-byes to her other friends. “After all we’ve been through,” he blusters, “I can’t believe this is how you want to leave things between us. Have a good time in Paris.”
Ross storms off, and in a later scene in “The One with Rachel’s Going Away Party,” Rachel visits his apartment to chide him for his lack of faith: “I cannot believe that after ten years, you do not know one thing about me!” She goes on: “It is too damn hard, Ross. I can’t even begin to explain to you how much I am going to miss you. When I think about not seeing you every day, it makes me not want to go, OK? So if you think that I didn’t say good-bye to you because you don’t mean as much to me as everybody else, you’re wrong. It’s because you mean more to me. So there! All right. There’s your good-bye.”
So much of the missed-connections aspect of Friends had stemmed from Ross and Rachel’s cosmically bad timing. Here, at last, was the prospect of their each being willing to acknowledge that they were anxious and lovelorn and cared deeply about how the other thought of them. They had spilled oceans of words in a fruitless attempt to convince each other of their love, or of its impossibility, and Ross’s first instinct is to retreat to words once more: “You can’t . . .”
But there are no words left, and anyway, words are not the right response at this moment. He kisses her. Rachel notably pauses, gauging her internal response, then kisses him back. But there are still twists to be revealed.
CHAPTER 21
BILLION-DOLLAR SITCOM
Further Contract Negotiations, Debating the Issue of Whether Anyone Could Afford More Seasons of Friends
Friends was a fixture of the NBC schedule for so long that the contract showdown of 1996 was only the first of four face-offs between the show’s stars and Warner Bros. Once again, the astronomical sums of money at play encouraged Friends’ stars to be aggressive in their demands. And the discussions that began midway through Friends’ run would play a major part in determining the ultimate length of the series.
In July 1999, after Friends wrapped its fifth season, the show’s stars summoned their managers, lawyers, and agents for a secretive meeting. The goal was to hammer out a strategy for approaching Warner Bros. with a set of collective contract demands—$125,000 per episode was nice money, but the previous year, Mad About You stars Helen Hunt and Paul Reiser had received an astounding salary bump, being paid $1 million per episode for their final season. Mad About You was a quality show and had only two stars to Friends’ six, but in what conceivable universe should the stars of the sixtieth-ranked show in the Nielsen ratings have been paid eight times what the stars of the second-ranked show received?
There were still ten months until the contract extension they had negotiated in 1996 would expire, which should have provided more than enough time for their representatives to hammer out a new contract. Lisa Kudrow came in with a different suggestion: Do nothing.
Kudrow believed that their position would be best served by letting the clock nearly run out before beginning talks. Warner Bros. and NBC would be so hungry for more Friends that they would likely accede to all the stars’ demands. The other performers’ representatives hated Kudrow’s plan. What was the point, they wondered, of unnecessarily agitating the very people they would have to negotiate with? Why drag out the process when it could be streamlined? But Kudrow’s more combative proposal carried the day, and the start of negotiations was intentionally delayed until the next spring.
In the fall of 1999, as the show’s sixth season was under way, word circulated in the press that the six stars would once again be negotiating their new contracts in unison. Friends’ closest competitor in the Nielsen ratings, and its Thursday-night compatriot for more than half a decade, ER, had extended star Eriq La Salle’s contract for three additional seasons at a reported price of $27 million. Moreover, Warner Bros. had negotiated with NBC to provide another two seasons of Friends, in an agreement that would bring in $220 million. If Warner Bros. was making more than $5 million for each new episode of Friends, shouldn’t its most famous faces receive a good chunk of those earnings? There was a reasonable argument to be made that rather than being overpaid, the Friends stars were still underpaid.
By February 2000, the two sides’ positions had been clarified. In remarks to the press, Kudrow made clear that Friends would only return if all six actors agreed on a new contract. This was both admirable loyalty and savvy judgment, eliminating one potential line of counterattack: summarily firing one of the show’s actors and hoping to see the remainder come crawling back to the negotiating table. Kudrow was turning up the heat on Warner Bros. by opting for a position of studious neutrality regarding the future of Friends: “If we all decide we don’t want to come back it’ll be fine with me and I’ll just get on with my life. . . . If we sign up for another season, I’m fine with that, too, because it is such fun going to work every day.”
Producer Todd Stevens would come into the show’s office during this period and steer his way around Kevin Bright, whom he knew to be consumed with the contract negotiations. He figured that the less he knew, the better off he would be. That way, when news of the stars’ contract status broke in the press—and it inevitably would—Bright would not be giving him the stink-eye.
The actors selected Aniston and Cox’s manager Sandy Wernick to represent them in the negotiations. He came in with a steep, and painfully brief, bid: $1 million per episode for just one more season, the seventh. Not only did the six actors want an enormous pay raise, they also wanted their pay retroactively increased for the season they were wrapping. This would mean that Warner Bros. and NBC would be back in the same position one year from now, needing to meet their stars’ demands to ensure another season of Friends. They countered with an offer of $600,000 per episode for two more seasons of the show.
The negotiations dragged on for long enough that the show’s writers had to begin preparing for the possibility that the upcoming sixth-season finale would also serve as the series finale. There was still no deal by the time the sixth season finished shooting, and by early May, NBC began to grow genuinely fearful that Friends would wrap permanently. NBC pulled all discussion of Friends from the upcoming upfronts in New York, removing images of the show’s stars from a mural that would feature the network’s biggest names.
NBC and Warner Bros. were publicly declaring themselves resigned to the loss of Friends from their broadcast schedules while privately scrambling to meet the stars’ demands. Warner Bros. told the network that they would have to chip in almost $6 million per episode from the seventh season on. They also approached Bright/Kauffman/Crane and insisted that the show’s creators share some of the back-end profits with their cast.
By this point, the deal, while not quite at the $1-million-per-episode mark carved out by Hunt and Reiser, had reached approximately $20 million per season per actor. Over the course of the two-year contract, they would each stand to make $40 mil
lion. On Friday, NBC had informed all the parties involved in the negotiation that Sunday at noon was the drop-dead time. If no deal had been reached by then, NBC would regretfully have to move on without Friends.
Early that Sunday, at around one thirty in the morning, the six actors and their representatives got on a conference call to make their final decision. Given the negotiating tactic they had employed, this decision would be more convoluted than usual. If everyone did not agree, there would be no deal. In the end, it was Schwimmer and Kudrow who were most unsure about carrying on with Friends.
Even though her recent film Hanging Up had done negligible business, Kudrow saw herself as a budding movie star after prominent roles in The Opposite of Sex and Analyze This, ready to leave television behind. And Schwimmer had always considered himself more of a misplaced theater geek, adrift in Hollywood. But the money so dramatically eclipsed what any of them could earn in the movies—let alone the theater—that it was hard to justify not spending two more years on Friends and earning enough money for a lifetime.
The other four stars rallied to convince Kudrow and Schwimmer to stay on. Not only was there an inordinate amount of money to be made, the six actors actually still enjoyed each other’s company and enjoyed the work they did. And it would be hard to imagine a schedule more tailored to their comfort. They only worked four days a week now, with less rehearsal time built into the schedule and the producers’ making sure to leave plenty of leeway for their stars to shoot films, even during the season.
After a long night of negotiation, Wernick called Warner Bros. at three A.M., only hours before the deadline, to tell them the deal was done. Some of the negotiators were stunned that the decision had been made so near the deadline, given that so much time had elapsed in which the six actors could have made up their minds about whether to come back. One unnamed source told Entertainment Weekly: “It’s an asinine time to decide whether to do something. . . . They’ve known about it for a year, and the night before they’re deciding whether they want to stay?”
The cast wound up with a new two-year contract that would pay them $750,000 per episode, ensuring that Friends would run at least eight seasons. NBC was relieved, and also inclined to poke some fun at their erstwhile adversaries. The next day, when the fall schedule for the 2000–01 season was unveiled, West Coast president Scott Sassa called for the six people most responsible for closing the Friends deal. Six actors with briefcases took to the stage, with the last one, executing a series of backflips, introduced as “Schwimmer’s lawyer.”
The shorter contract meant that only about eighteen months would pass before the same figures were negotiating again, seeking to bring the show back for a ninth season. In the intervening time, a split had begun to form between the corporate partners involved with Friends. Warner Bros. had already lavishly recouped their investment through their syndication deal. Friends would bring in more than $1 billion for Warner Bros. even without future seasons, so the prospect of another twenty-four episodes of the show was less attractive to them than it was to NBC, which desperately wanted another season of elite ratings. The stars asked for $1 million per episode—Reiser and Hunt levels, but for all six stars.
NBC had had years to develop new hits to eventually take over Thursday nights, but with the exception of Will & Grace, the cupboard was mostly bare. There were concerns once more that Kudrow and Schwimmer were likely to be the holdouts, with Kudrow said to be most likely to bail given the paucity of worthy story lines for Phoebe as Friends was consumed with the Rachel/Joey plotline. Once again, Warner Bros. wanted to recoup some of their future investment with greater buy-in from their partners. This time, given the differing financial interests of the studio and the network, Warner Bros. wanted to break even on the deal immediately, rather than losing money in the moment even if future profits would more than cancel out the debt.
In its last seasons, Friends existed in a simultaneous state of unprecedented success and unsettling limbo. Friends was one of the most popular comedy series to ever appear on American television, and its appeal was growing as it approached double digits. The costs of keeping all interested parties happy had risen so dramatically that no one could be sure that the current contract would not be the last one to be signed. The $1 million figure was astounding, but was met by NBC and Warner Bros. for one more season.
During the ninth season, the default assumption was that this would be Friends’ last hurrah. There likely was neither the money nor the interest from either Warner Bros. or NBC in any more beyond this season, and writers were planning how to end the show suitably. Marta Kauffman and David Crane had quietly been informed that this would likely be the last season, as NBC was not comfortable spending the money it would cost for a tenth season. Crane was philosophical about the news. It had been a good run, and all he had ever asked was to have advance notice of when the show was to end, so he and the writers could craft a suitable conclusion. Negotiations continued apace regardless, and as the discussions unfolded, it became clear that NBC very much wanted one final season of the show.
There was one last negotiation deadline, this time on a shoot night. Kevin Bright was frustrated at the lack of progress and the lack of clarity about his show’s future, and he yanked the six stars into a room next to the stage for an impromptu meeting. This was it, he reminded them. All the decision-makers were here, and it was time to settle on whether there would be a tenth and final season of Friends. That entire evening, between takes, Bright and the cast would quickly convene and pick up the conversation where they had left off. The two sides ultimately settled on $1 million per episode for a foreshortened final season of only seventeen episodes. It would be ten seasons and, finally, done.
CHAPTER 22
LIGHTNING IN A BOTTLE
Saying Good-bye to the Show
From the moment the actors signed on to return for a tenth and final season, David Crane knew that the time had at last arrived to consider how Friends would end. The ninth season had hardly begun before the tenth was negotiated, so this was Crane’s first extended opportunity to ponder the show’s conclusion. It would require not only bringing Ross and Rachel back together but also striking the right final note for the show’s six characters. How could the show say farewell to its six-headed friendship while also confidently sending its characters forward into the future?
“Do you realize a quarter of our lives have been spent on this show?” Crane asked prop master Marjorie Coster-Praytor during the final season. Coster-Praytor was struck by Friends’ having thrived for so long that it occupied a significant portion not only of its cast and crew’s careers, but of their lives as well.
Crane knew immediately that there were two emotional beats the final episode would have to strike, with Ross and Rachel’s reunion followed by a farewell to all the characters. A plot thread from earlier in the tenth season laid the groundwork: Chandler and Monica were, at long last, moving out of the apartment and to a home in the suburbs. We knew that the apartment had belonged to Monica or one of the friends for more than ten years, and so it made emotional sense for everyone to gather there one final time before it passed into the hands of strangers.
There had been a sadness in the writers’ room that entire final season. The tenth season had come as a gift, an unexpected bonus, but with it came a profound sense of finality. This experience, this impromptu family that had been formed during late nights and early mornings on the Warner Bros. lot, was coming to an end. Everyone knew that this intense enmeshing in a collective goal would never return. There would be other shows, and other challenges, but how many of them would be overseen by the likes of David Crane and Marta Kauffman?
As a tribute, the writing staff decided to hire a skywriter to convey their gratitude to Crane and Kauffman for the opportunity they had been given. The writers trooped outside on a cloudy spring day, Crane and Kauffman in tow, waiting impatiently for their final message to appear in the sky: “Than
k you from the writers to Marta and David.”
The somber mood, the understanding that meaningful things were coming to an end, weighed down the writers’ room. Ted Cohen found himself leaving the room to avoid bursting into tears in front of his colleagues. One writer began pitching a story about Ross’s saying good-bye to the apartment and broke down in tears. Writer Sherry Bilsing broke into laughter, sure that this was just another bit. It took her a minute to realize the emotions were real, but by then Crane had already gotten out of his seat and gone over to console the writer.
Real and imaginary endings, real and imaginary farewells, were getting twisted together. The writers were constructing an imaginary send-off to their characters while thinking of the very real good-byes they would be saying to the people they had worked with for years. “This is lightning in a bottle,” Bilsing remembered Ted Cohen telling her, leaning on the same image that so many others involved with Friends had turned to. “We had the perfect cast, the perfect writing team, everything. Crew. This whole thing was a family-type experience that is so rare.”
The space crunch for available studios on the Warner Bros. lot meant that a new show would be moving into Studio 24 immediately. Central Perk, whose couch and easy chairs had been occupied for ten years, would be disappearing forever as soon as the last scene taking place in the coffee shop was completed, which happened early in the first part of the two-part finale.
In the scene, Ross was moping over Rachel’s imminent departure, and Phoebe and Joey were trying to convince him to speak up before she left. Just as Ross summons the courage, he is preempted by Gunther, who chooses that moment to tell Rachel that he is in love with her. Ross, understandably flummoxed, lets Rachel leave.
Generation Friends Page 28