At the recording of the first episode of Friends, in 1994, the studio audience were given two handouts. One was a cheat sheet to help them differentiate the six main characters, Monica, Rachel, Phoebe, Ross, Joey and Chandler. The other was a questionnaire to be filled in after the recording. In the pilot they had just watched, Monica sleeps with Paul “the Wine Guy” on their first date, and the questionnaire asked: “Do you think Monica sleeping with wine guy makes her (a) a slut, (b) a whore, (c) a trollop?”
Note, there was no other option. The answers were stacked to endorse NBC’s belief that the young Americans the network was desperate to lure would find casual sex a transgression. But the audience weren’t bothered about the sex. They also didn’t seem to notice the lack of an older character to proffer advice and sagacity, another initial NBC request. So Monica remained Monica; and Friends, Marta Kauffman and David Crane’s post-yuppie perennial about six young New Yorkers, was allowed to show its audience a milieu a bit more relatable than Cheers. This was a world in which sex could be had, mistakes could be made, your love life could be DOA, but friends — not disapproving family or, indeed, stuffy media executives — would still be there for you. It aimed to marry the aspirational with the realistic.
In the UK, cable’s Comedy Central screens Friends almost continuously. It was a huge purchase for the channel in 2011: “like buying a small nation”, says the channel’s Jill Offman. “When we drilled down on the research, we found every four years a new generation comes to Friends. It’s like a unicorn in terms of its durability, volume and popularity: very rare.”
Kauffman and Crane’s scripts, loosely based on their experiences living as playwrights in New York in their twenties, were a response to a specific request from NBC, led by its president of entertainment, Warren Littlefield, which wanted a show for young adults — those who might laugh at Seinfeld or Cheers, but saw nothing of their lives in either show. They were people just starting out in the metropolis — and stumbling. “It would be a lot easier if you did it with a friend,” Littlefield is reported to have said. When Crane and Kauffman came in with a pilot script called Friends Like Us, NBC loved it and went straight to casting.
“Our overriding approach was that you should always care about these characters,” says Crane, who is in the UK working on the fourth series of Episodes. “Even though it has to be funny, at its heart the show had to have heart. Our feeling was that you needed to invest in these people. A show like Seinfeld is hilarious and brilliant, but less concerned with caring about the characters.”
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Friends also had durability built into the setup. “If the premise is too specific and too narrow, it’s going to run out of steam,” Crane says. “The fact that they were all single meant we could do any combination of relationships.”
Six characters was more than the sitcom norm at the time, but it gave the show its signature tone. “We went, ‘OK, if we want to serve all these characters, we’re going to need enough storylines so everybody has something to do.’ And that’s how we started telling three stories a week. When we originally pitched it, we said the show should have an overcaffeinated feel. There was a lot more going on than you would normally see in a half-hour show.”
When you watch that pilot again, what is most striking, apart from the haircuts, is the ease between the actors from the first exchange. Episode 1 begins with Monica, Chandler, Phoebe and Joey sitting in the Central Perk, shooting the breeze about a dream they had, a date they’re going on. The lines are sharp — the friends tear into each other, as real friends do — but the rapport is infectious. It’s little glances, nods, smiles that can’t be scripted. It’s not just chemistry: they look and sound like friends.
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“The first inkling that we were on to something was the table read when we first heard all six of them together,” Crane says. “There was something really exciting right there.” The actors also made the roles-as-written better. Dunderhead Joey wasn’t a lummox in the original script, but when Matt LeBlanc came in (an actor who “plays dumb really well”, Crane says), the writers decided to play to his strengths. Similarly, Janice, Chandler’s on-off girlfriend, played by Maggie Wheeler, created her indelible cackle on her own. “The laugh came up in our first rehearsal because Matthew Perry was so very funny,” she recalls. “I knew he was going to crack me up, and I thought I’d better know what to do when that happened.”
The series was always performed in front of a live audience, which meant that if a joke didn’t fly, it was rewritten until it did. LeBlanc recalls: “The writers would go off into this huddle. The new line would be handwritten in pencil in the margin. You wouldn’t even get to say it out loud once — and there you were, performing it. I gotta say, there’s something about that pressure, that having to blindly commit, that makes you better.”
James Burrows, a veteran of Cheers and Frasier, directed the pilot. After he saw the audience reaction, he took the cast to Vegas on a private jet, and they all went out to dinner. “You will never be able to do this again,” he told them. “Your life is going to change.”
Perry’s description of how his life changed is both succinct and a little sad. “I was 24 when I got it, and I was 34 when it was done. I struggled with alcoholism and drugs throughout, yet I became a very wealthy man and was very creatively stimulated the entire time.”
Friends was first broadcast the year after the invention of the mass-market web browser. Not only were the cast the toast of more than 20m living rooms, as their success grew, the rise of the internet rendered them public property 24/7. This was a whole new way to fuel a mania. It also helped create a predictable backlash. “The first two years, everybody loved us,” Perry says. “Then year three, for some reason, everybody just decided to be against us. They thought we were making too much money and we were jerks. Then, season six, people loved us again. We weren’t doing anything differently.”
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It didn’t help that never before had a viewing public been made so aware of what the stars were being paid. Yet the series continued to clock up 20m-plus viewers. It made for a bewilderment of conflicting emotions. When news of the cast’s demands came out each year, it was only because the public loved the characters so much that they were so incensed at the actors playing them. How could they hold us to ransom, treat us so?
The Friends found themselves labouring under a new type of celebrity. After series five, the show went into syndication and was on almost continually around the world. The DVD boom meant that viewers could also own and watch Friends in perpetuity. The six leads had all of a movie star’s money and fame, but none of the mystique. This has dogged Aniston ever since, an exceptional comic actor who has somehow become a plaything of the gossip magazines. Perry, most famously, couldn’t cope with the scrutiny, turning to alcohol and prescription medication. Even now, he has a conflicted relationship with the show that made him very, very famous.
“I’m known for something that was good, and it was on for so long, and I was on television. So people think they know me. But if somebody goes ‘Yo, Chandler’ these days, I don’t like that. I’m tired of it. But then they’ll go from ‘Yo, Chandler’ to ‘What an asshole’ in two seconds.”
LeBlanc, like his character, is more dispassionate: “Everyone calls me Joey. It’s not going to go away. And I’m proud of having been a part of that show — it was a highlight of my life.” Indeed, it is with pride that LeBlanc, now 47, speaks of Friends enjoying a resurgence. “There’s a whole new generation of kids discovering it for the first time, so, if anything, interest is ramping up again. It has this timeless thing about it, because it’s about a stage in your life everyone can relate to, when you’re done with school, but your life hasn’t quite started, and your friends are your family.”
The show’s premise — that these six characters can somehow live gilded lives in a gorgeous Village apartment — should be mildly repellent to a younger generation. Yet it isn’t. It may be that at a time when Generation Y are finding jobs hard to come by, and owning their own home is a pipe dream, Friends has acquired a new relevance.
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“We were looking at a time when the future was more of a question mark,” Kauffman has said. “Everybody knows that feeling.”
...and with benefits
Friends was, and remains, an extraordinary cash cow. Here’s how you go about making yourself exceedingly wealthy from a sitcom.
Be good
The series was nominated for Emmys 63 times. Its finale was the fourth most watched series closer in American TV history, with 52.4m viewers, and it never fell below 20m in its entire run there.
Get well paid
In the first series, each of the six leads earned $22,500 an episode. After the third series, they operated an all-for-one and one-for-all negotiating strategy that eventually saw them being paid $1m each an episode. By the end of the run, Friends was costing more than $10m an episode to make. It actually lost money on ad revenue (which was up to $2m for a 30-second commercial by the finale), but it offered a halo effect to the shows before and after it on “Must See Thursday”, so NBC thought it worth the outlay.
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Play the long game
In the US alone, the 236 episodes have generated $944m in syndication fees. Friends may eventually supplant Seinfeld ($3bn in syndication) as the most lucrative TV show of all time.
Know your onions
The Friends cast were canny. They were the first TV stars to diversify their pay cheques, meaning they negotiated for residuals and syndication royalties on top of their salary. The sum is not mentioned, but each of them could still be earning $20m a year from repeats.
Comedy Central celebrates the Friends 20th Anniversary every day from 5pm