Generation Friends

by Saul Austerlitz

  After a scene, the actors would usually step off the stage briskly and move on to the next scene, but this time, they could not get up from the couch. How many times had they sat in these very places, trading banter? How many millions of minutes had television viewers collectively spent watching them sitting here? The amount was unfathomably large, and the idea that there would never be another opportunity like this one was ineluctably bittersweet. Instead of being shooed off the set, Schwimmer and Aniston were soon joined there by Crane, Kauffman, and Bright, and by the rest of the Friends team.

  The actors and crew and producers and writers gathered on the stage and exchanged hugs and shared anecdotes about all the moments they had spent together on this very set, telling the stories of these imaginary characters who had taken a very real hold on the affections of millions of television viewers.

  The audience waited patiently, no doubt shedding some tears of their own, as they stared at this rip in the façade of emotionless television professionalism. After a lengthy interlude, the actors felt ready to resume the shoot, but their faces had to be redone first. The tears had smudged their makeup.

  After the shoot was over, everyone came back on the stage and drank tequila while they watched the crew dismantle Central Perk. At the very end, when the walls were about to come down, someone pulled out a pen and everyone passed it around, signing their names to the back of the set.

  David Crane had told himself all along that the finale was merely another episode, merely one more opportunity to solve a story problem. Crane and the writers wanted the finale to be perfect and to deliver the satisfying conclusion the fans hungered for, and the pressure got to him. He developed a nasty case of shingles, presumably from the stress of Friends’ coming to an end. Finales mattered. When a show failed its audience, or was understood to do so, as with the Seinfeld finale, it colored fans’ recollections of the entire series. Crane wanted Friends to go out on top.

  The final shoot was chaotic and emotional all at once. The Friends finale was the hottest ticket in Los Angeles in the spring of 2004. Everyone at NBC and Warner Bros. wanted to be present for the last episode of a television legend. The finale was also an impromptu reunion for staffers who had long since departed the show but still felt an emotional connection to Crane and Kauffman and to Friends. The floor in front of the audience was so crowded with returning visitors that the camera crew had to ask people to move out of their way so the cameras could get through. The cast would regularly pause to let a wave of emotion wash over them, and the audience, caught up in the moment, would whoop and holler and express their love.

  The episode neatly wrapped up the story lines that viewers had been following for a decade, with Ross and Rachel reaching a resolution at long last (about which more momentarily) and Chandler and Monica preparing to leave their apartment with their newborn son and daughter. In a symbolic gesture, Joey and Chandler’s foosball table is destroyed, the emblem of an era’s coming to an end.

  The final scenes also contained a handful of comic nuggets for the die-hard fans. The movers arrive, and Monica pulls them aside to direct their attention to the ugly white ceramic dog. It was part of Joey’s hideous new-apartment décor since all the way back in the second season’s “The One Where Eddie Moves In,” was ridden like a conquering steed by Chandler after he and Joey won the apartment in “The One with the Embryos,” and then became Chandler’s. “If that falls off the truck,” Monica tells them, surreptitiously passing along a generous tip, “it wouldn’t be the worst thing.”

  Phoebe notes that, at one point, every one of them lived in this apartment. When Ross says he never did, his sister reminds him of the summer he lived with their grandmother and tried to make it as a dancer (a callback to Ross’s energetic but lackluster dance moves in “The One with the Routine”). “Do you realize,” Ross tells her, “we almost made it ten years without that coming up?” The audience is presented with the gift of one last reminiscence, one last funny anecdote to chuckle over when the show faded to black.

  At last, each of them takes out their keys to the apartment and leaves them on the countertop for the building superintendent, Mr. Treeger. (Mike Hagerty, who played Mr. Treeger, did not appear in the finale but was touched to hear his character’s name invoked at the very end of the show.) Everyone takes their leave, silently and feelingly, and Rachel asks the crew, “Should we get some coffee?” Chandler is given one final joke (pitched by Andrew Reich), momentarily dispersing the nostalgic fog: “Sure—where?”

  Joey helps to carry the stroller down the stairs, and the camera pans around the now-empty, strangely silent apartment, past the six keys laid out in the kitchen, coming to rest on the famous picture frame on the back of the door. Everyone is gone, and we are given one last moment to take in the familiar details of the apartment and be struck by the unnatural quiet. Life will go on, we know, both ours and those of the characters we have grown so attached to—but it will not go on here, not anymore.

  When it was all over and the last moments of Friends had been filmed, everyone gathered once more, crying and hugging and feeling strangely somber about this triumphant moment in their lives. Warner Bros. wanted back their own props, and the Smithsonian had come calling, looking for memorabilia from the show to display in Washington. The museum wound up taking away Chandler’s and Monica’s wedding rings, invitations to the characters’ weddings, and Phoebe’s dollhouse from the episode “The One with the Dollhouse.” Coster-Praytor, who had designed the dollhouse, wondered how long it could possibly last in a museum, given that the Tootsie Roll-away bed was made out of a genuine Tootsie Roll. What condition would the candy be in twenty years from now?

  After the finale was completed, Warner Bros. hosted a gala wrap party the likes of which no one could remember attending. Kevin Bright had never seen an ice chute that dispensed vodka before. It was like a scene from a big-budget movie about a hit television show, ostentatious in a way that was rarely encountered in real life. Sheryl Crow performed for the crowd of celebrants, only some of whom had any personal or professional connection to Friends. The cast took turns reading the lackluster testing reports from the pilot. Everyone enjoyed themselves thoroughly, but there was a sense, for some of the inner circle, that it might have been nice to have a more ordinary wrap party, for the people who had labored so long together to enjoy each other’s company for a few more hours before parting ways.

  The critics were half-hearted in their enthusiasm for the show, even as the final episode was about to air on May 6, 2004. “NBC’s send-off has been the most overwrought and prolonged farewell since Violetta’s death scene in La Traviata,” complained the New York Times’ Alessandra Stanley. “The network’s bathos has drained much of the fun out of tonight’s two-hour finale.” Stanley poked fun at the breathless ad campaign for the finale, which she described as using “the hushed, lugubrious tones usually associated with a space-shuttle disaster or an assassination.”

  Having established her preference for what she saw as the more sophisticated humor of Frasier, also ending its decade-long run that month, Stanley adroitly tapped into what she saw as the source of Friends’ appeal. It was a show about the economic boom of the mid-1990s and the reclamation of New York from the chaos and disorder of the 1970s and early 1980s. “Friends didn’t just ride the economic recovery. It tapped into the country’s rediscovery of New York at the dawn of the Giuliani shape-up-or-ship-out era. Suddenly, and in large part because of Friends, Manhattan once again looked like a safe, fun and romantic place to be.”

  While Friends had led to imitators like Will & Grace, which Stanley saw as aping its predecessor’s sensibility, the networks had never been able to create replacement hits. “Viewers grieving over the end of Friends and Frasier are not just bidding farewell to their favorite sitcoms, they are mourning the genre itself, and that may well justify some hoopla and hyperbole.”

  Slate’s Chris Suellentrop disagreed wit
h Stanley’s diagnosis, seeing the death-of-the-sitcom mournfulness as misguided. Friends, he argued, was not a sitcom at all: “It’s a soapcom, a soap opera masquerading as a situation comedy. The earworm theme song, the laugh track, and the gooey sentimentalism all conspire to fool viewers and critics into thinking they’re watching a family sitcom like Growing Pains or Family Ties updated for urban tribes (a Golden Girls for the pre-retirement set). But the beautiful people with opulent lifestyles, the explicit sexual content . . . the long multi-episode story arcs, and each season’s cliffhanger ending are the show’s real hallmarks. Days of Our Lives isn’t the only soap opera that Joey has a role in. And this one’s got jokes to boot.”

  Before the finale, Dateline ran a two-hour special about the impending end of Friends that featured the cast and creators discussing their feelings on wrapping up the show and its impact on the television landscape. The barrage of commercials and marketing hoopla was so intense even others under the network umbrella began to poke fun at the hype machine. On Late Night with Conan O’Brien, a faux audience member shouted at the host, “I’ve had it up to here with all you NBC whores talking about Friends!”

  The night the finale aired, the cast and crew gathered back on the lot to watch it on television. It was a smaller, more intimate crowd, but it was challenging for some to get back in the mood to say good-bye. For David Crane, they had already wrapped, had already edited the final episode, had already watched it countless times. It was hard to fully comprehend that everyone else was only getting to say good-bye to the show now.

  Fifty-two point three million viewers tuned in for the Friends finale, the fourth-largest finale audience in television history (behind M*A*S*H, Cheers, and Seinfeld). Television-nostalgia network TV Land chose to go dark during the one-hour broadcast, paying tribute to another show entering the pantheon of beloved television series past.

  That night, Jay Leno feigned surprise for the cameras as he poked around on the shelves of a (now-reconstructed) Central Perk on The Tonight Show. “This is cool!” he enthused, standing in front of the famous orange couch. Leno introduced a bit with purported former guest stars’ reminiscences of their time on the show. “I almost joined the cast of Friends a couple of years ago,” said a smirking, reptilian Donald Trump, “but then NBC realized they couldn’t afford seven billionaires on one show.” “I auditioned for Friends a long time ago,” slyly drawled Snoop Dogg, “and the response I got was they had enough black people on the show.” Quentin Tarantino claimed to have directed the first episode, where he killed off nineteen of the original twenty-five cast members. The sketch ended with another sitcom legend, Homer Simpson, who celebrated the news that he would finally get his wish to appear on the show—next season.

  Tom Shales of The Washington Post, a perpetual Friends detractor, was disgusted by what he saw as the shameless intermingling of journalism and commerce exemplified by the Dateline special. “At NBC they seem to care much less about programming than they do about promotion,” Shales observed. “How NBC News executives can stand up and loudly proclaim their independence after a special two-hour version of Dateline that was nothing but a Friends puff is stupefying.”

  Shales was offended not only by the inappropriate treatment of publicity as news but by this treatment’s being given to Friends, a show he remained baffled by after ten seasons. “The Friends finale was designed to be no worse but certainly no better than the average Friends episode. The parting of the ways at the end of the show seemed trivial and unaffecting compared with, say, the parting of the Bunkers, Archie and Edith, from their daughter and son-in-law, or the parting of the Ricardos and the Mertzes when Ricky and Lucy moved to the country—and that wasn’t even a series finale, just a turning point.”

  Of course, the emotion of the finale was dependent on ten years of accumulated feeling, none of which Shales shared. “Friends,” he acidly argued, “was not so much creatively conceived as cunningly concocted. It was less a show than a hunk of commerce—a commercial for a generation that was interrupted by commercials for sponsors’ products.” The idea of a commercial for a generation offended Shales’s sensibilities, but was this really so different from Warren Littlefield’s desire, all the way back in 1994, for a new series that spoke to the fears and desires of a generation that had previously been little represented on television?

  In his Slate article, Suellentrop argued that Friends was something other than a sitcom, noting that Friends regularly extended its plotlines over multiple episodes, expecting viewers to be familiar with all its past narrative twists and turns. The show, he said, had more in common with a serial drama like The X-Files than other sitcoms: “Episodes are occasionally self-contained, but most expand upon series-long story arcs that grow more convoluted and harder for non-devotees to follow with each passing season.”

  In 2004, it was only just beginning to become clear that this model, in fact, would serve as the future of television, ranging from direct imitators like How I Met Your Mother to Peak TV gems like BoJack Horseman and Crazy Ex-Girlfriend. One of Friends’ great insights was that the era in which fans would tune in to be painlessly amused for thirty minutes was now over. Something, some emotional nuance or narrative complication, would have to keep them invested.

  “You don’t tune in to Friends to watch wacky hijinks—Will Chandler get stuck in an ATM booth? Will Phoebe land a music video?—but to find out what happens next in a plotline you’ve been following,” argued Suellentrop. To which Marta Kauffman and David Crane would likely reply that this had been the intention all along. The comedy and the drama had always been intertwined, and critics’ belated realization that Friends was something other than a standard-issue sitcom was only their catching up, at long last, with what the show’s audience understood all along.

  CHAPTER 23

  OFF THE PLANE

  The Ballad of Ross and Rachel, Part 6

  Ross and Rachel share a postcoital moment at the start of the series finale, “The Last One.” “This guy at work gave me Sex for Dummies as a joke,” Ross tells her after she compliments his “new moves.” “Who’s laughing now?” Later on, Rachel, still exultant, holds hands with Ross and tells him, “I woke up today with the biggest smile on my face.” Ross has already talked himself around to the understanding that he wants to be with Rachel now (Phoebe exuberantly remarks, “I feel like I’m in a musical”) and is poleaxed when she goes on: “It was just the perfect way to say good-bye.”

  Ross has built up a decade of collected wishy-washiness to overcome, and to properly hit all its beats, the finale must feature a moment of genuine, unfeigned clarity. Joey, snapping back to his traditional role as adjunct relationship therapist after his brief tenure as romantic rival, offers Ross some advice shortly after Chandler and Monica’s twins arrive home for the first time. Rachel has just left without Ross’s taking the opportunity to share his feelings, and Joey gives him an out by suggesting to him that this last night together might be the ideal way to get over Rachel. “I don’t want to get over her,” Ross declares. “I want to be with her!” The audience roars, and the path is cleared for the last of the show’s now-trademark races for romance.

  Ross dashes to the airport to intercept Rachel before she flies off to Paris.

  After an interlude at the wrong airport, he finds Rachel, about to board the plane. (Emma is to follow with Rachel’s mother.) Ross at last says the things he should have said long prior: “The thing is, don’t go. Please stay with me. I am so in love with you. Please don’t go. I know, I know, I shouldn’t have waited till now to say it, but that was stupid. I’m sorry, but I’m telling you now, I love you. Do not get on this plane.” Rachel is touched but already drifting away: “I can’t do this right now. I’m sorry.” She boards the plane, and Ross is left undone, hugging Phoebe forlornly, his eyes pricked by tears.

  A somber Ross returns home, only to discover an answering-machine message in which Rachel calls to apologize. She
loves him, too, and we hear her clambering out of her seat and struggling to deboard the plane before it takes off. “Did she get off the plane?” he asks the machine, fumbling with its buttons. “I got off the plane,” we hear a disembodied voice say, and there is Rachel, standing at the door. It is a nice moment of resolution for the show, a calming finale to a decade of Sturm und Drang.

  “This is it,” they both agree, and even Ross’s callback/joke—“unless we’re on a break”—is one final reminder of what was and no longer will be. “Don’t make jokes now,” Ross chides himself, and we can understand this as a kind of final word about the show as well. Always both a comedy and a soap opera, Friends ends by telling itself to cease with the jokes. There will be no further jokes beyond this point, the show is informing us, at least in part because humor, in the world of Friends, always threatens to undo or undermine romance. This will be a happy ending—period.

  There was something to be said, too, about the way in which Friends had unconsciously adopted the mind-set of Ross when it came to its central romance. Ross and Rachel had previously broken up because Ross had been unable to treat his girlfriend’s career with the respect it deserved. And here, once more, was Rachel on the cusp of a major career opportunity, being forced to consider what she valued more: her job or her relationship. (It was an intriguing, if coincidental, development that both Friends and Sex and the City ended that same year, with its protagonists balancing romance and work, New York and Paris.)

  Rachel picks Ross and New York, continuity over change, but perhaps we might spare a moment for what Rachel gives up. The potentially life-changing job with Louis Vuitton in Paris is abandoned, presumably in favor of a return to the same job Rachel had already held. Why did it have to be an either/or for Rachel alone? If Ross had wanted to be with Rachel at all costs, why hadn’t he offered to pack up and join her and their daughter in Paris?