Generation Friends

by Saul Austerlitz

  The sports world was about to be rocked by the news that, for the first time in ninety years, there would be no World Series played that fall, due to a labor strike. Quentin Tarantino won the Palme d’Or at Cannes for his neo-Godardian crime film Pulp Fiction, which resuscitated the moribund career of John Travolta, and the dominant film of the summer would be the overpraised, conservative Forrest Gump, in which Tom Hanks’s title character was present at much of postwar American history while serving as proof that all was as it should be. Independent film was ascendant, with Miramax, run by the later-to-be-disgraced Harvey Weinstein, leading a phalanx of new voices with films like The Crying Game. In the mid-1990s, film was still considered the primary visual medium of the American arts, attracting exciting new voices like Tarantino, Todd Haynes, John Singleton, and Allison Anders. Television, by comparison, while it had produced exciting new series like Seinfeld and NYPD Blue, was considered a backwater, a place you went when the movies didn’t work out, whose audience was far less discerning than film’s.

  Meanwhile, a coffee company that had originally been started by two teachers and a writer in Seattle had begun to expand beyond the Pacific Northwest. Starbucks had opened stores in Portland and Chicago, and then targeted California, tackling San Francisco and Los Angeles. The company had gone from eleven stores in 1987 to one hundred sixty-one stores only five years later. Coffee was suddenly big business, and Starbucks was rapidly becoming the name most prominently associated with coffeehouse culture. With its oversize plush chairs, its soothing soundtrack of folk, indie rock, and world music, and its distinct language (who decided that a “tall” would be one of the smaller sizes for its drinks?), what had once been associated with college campuses and Greenwich Village was soon to be a nationwide phenomenon. Coffee was no longer solely a matter of dumping hot water into powder over the kitchen sink; it was now an entire lifestyle, with a culture of (occasionally harried) leisure to accompany it. Young Americans would not just drink coffee for a burst of caffeine; they would lounge around in coffeehouses, bantering, laughing, and trading confidences, seizing on the relatively new spaces forming in cities across the nation and making them their own.

  As president, Littlefield was carrying with him the message he had received from the legendary former NBC CEO and chairman Grant Tinker earlier in his career. Tinker had continually sought to remind Littlefield and his colleagues that the audience was not an alien race. What shows were his employees breathlessly anticipating each week? What series would convince them to cancel their plans and rush home, in this pre-streaming era, to catch the latest episode? Those were the shows they should be making. It was time for stories that spoke to the audiences they craved, that were about young people.

  And if the story of the sitcom could be said to have followed an arc, one of the major changes that had unfolded across the four decades of television history had been the shift away from the family show. Television had begun as a domestic medium, a place for families to gather in their living rooms to watch other, fictional families in their living rooms. It had been a feminine counterpoint to the increasingly masculine sphere of the movies. But over time, the domestic families of Father Knows Best and Leave It to Beaver had given way to the workplace families of The Mary Tyler Moore Show and M*A*S*H.

  With the American family dissolving and re-forming in unimaginable new patterns, the sitcom increasingly preferred its groupings of colleagues and squads. The 1980s had seen a resurgence of the family sitcom, with the former B-movie-star-turned-national-father-figure Ronald Reagan inspiring a wave of sturdy sitcom dads like The Cosby Show’s Heathcliff Huxtable and Family Ties’ Steven Keaton. Ratings indicated that younger audiences, less likely to be married or raising children, mostly preferred to see themselves reflected on their television screens, and even older, married viewers were often happier watching a crew of friends bantering.

  Seinfeld was a show like that. The specials department at NBC, not the prime-time programming team, had picked up the pilot in 1989. Rick Ludwin and his group had fallen in love with a stand-up comedian named Jerry Seinfeld. Seinfeld and fellow comedian Larry David had spent an afternoon walking around a Manhattan deli and talking about the strange products on display there, belatedly realizing that their aimless banter could form the foundation of a new kind of television series. The pilot flopped with audiences, and NBC expressed little enthusiasm for the show, but Ludwin’s fierce advocacy bankrolled a four-episode run, and eventually got it an invitation for a fuller second season.

  Seinfeld rewrote the rules of the sitcom. Its characters were amoral, callous, and self-centered. There were no meaningful romantic relationships on the show; the one partnership heading toward marriage would later be brutally, hilariously interrupted by a batch of poisoned envelopes. And yet, NBC understood that part of the attraction of Seinfeld was its aura of charming Manhattan singles in pursuit of true love—or at least a fruitful one-night stand. Much of Seinfeld was turned over to the logistics and limitations of big-city dating, with many of its most memorable moments, from “They’re real, and they’re spectacular” to “Not that there’s anything wrong with that,” stemming from relationship stories. People enjoyed watching George and Elaine and Kramer sitting on Jerry’s couch and bantering, and NBC was betting that there was a huge untapped market for series similar to Seinfeld, the third-highest-rated series of the 1993–94 season after 60 Minutes and Home Improvement. The search for the next Seinfeld was on.

  Each morning at six o’clock, Littlefield received a fax from the research department, based in New York, with the overnight ratings. It was like a daily report card, delivering updated assessments of the audience’s feelings regarding NBC programming. As Littlefield perused the overnights from San Francisco and Houston and Atlanta, he thought about what it must be like to be a young person starting a life in one of those places. Rent was expensive, jobs were scarce, and moving somewhere new, beyond the reach of parents and old friends, could be lonely. Littlefield considered his own formative postcollege years, living with roommates in the suburbs of New York and taking the commuter train to work daily. It had been harsh and unromantic, but it had also been a testing ground. To be young was to scuffle, but it was also to discover the world afresh. ABC was flying high with blue-collar comedies like Roseanne and Home Improvement, and CBS was devoted to its older audience, seemingly unaware of the advertising pot of gold that Littlefield was chasing. No one was serving the younger viewers Littlefield had in mind.

  Littlefield put out a call to writers and producers he had worked with: Bring me ideas for shows about young people. He was in search of stories about breaking away, about stepping out, about finding yourself. Littlefield was convinced that older audiences could easily be compelled to watch a show in which they communed with their younger selves, but younger audiences could never be cajoled to watch characters living lives they had not yet experienced. Littlefield didn’t want any more pitches about crusading lawyers or wholesome single dads; he wanted clever, warmhearted shows with instantly recognizable characters. He wanted a kinder, gentler Seinfeld—less New York and less Jewish (while maybe still retaining some of the original’s Semitic, five-boroughs appeal). He didn’t get it.

  The first batch of pitch meetings came and went, and a few scripts were given the green light for development, but nothing of substance propelled itself forward. None of them felt unique, and Littlefield went about his business, conscious that there was an opportunity that might vanish. Another network might grab the reins, and NBC’s chance to win over a new generation of viewers, and the resulting advertising dollars, might dissipate.

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  For television writers, pilot season, the weeks when writers proposed new concepts for television series to the networks bidding for their services, was a hectic flurry of all-night writing sessions and snap decisions that even the people involved could hardly remember. To maximize one’s options, it was customary for
working writers to pitch two, or even three, pilots to networks, in the hopes that one might catch fire. Marta Kauffman and David Crane were hoping to expunge the bad taste that still lingered in their mouths from the preceding season.

  Jeff Sagansky at CBS had been happy to listen to Crane and Kauffman’s pitches during the 1993 pilot season, including an idea for a musical show with original songs each week, but had his own ideas. He was looking for a white-collar version of the bickering, loving family of Roseanne, he told them, and was not much interested in anything else. Kauffman and Crane came back with Family Album, which was meant to fulfill Sagansky’s desire.

  Crane believed that some shows fed you exciting angles, new story lines, and rich characters, and some simply didn’t. Family Album, about a California doctor (played by Peter Scolari) who moves to Philadelphia along with his family to look after his parents, didn’t. After six episodes, CBS canceled the show. Kauffman and Crane concentrated their efforts on the next pilot season.

  Kauffman and Crane had cocreated the critically admired HBO comedy series Dream On (1990–96), in which Brian Benben’s randy divorced book editor ran through a seemingly infinite array of beautiful young women interested in bedding him. Benben’s Martin, raised by television, finds his endless romantic snafus punctuated in his mind by clips from old movies and TV shows, offering a stream of witty and arch commentary on the show’s plotlines.

  Dream On was a superb opportunity for Kauffman and Crane, but they were surprised to discover how exhausting it could be to produce a show with only one star. Benben was a fine actor, but given that he had to appear in almost every scene, production could become a slog. If Benben was tired or under the weather, the show would have to halt until he recovered. It was simply too much pressure to place on one performer. The next time they had an opportunity to put a show on the air, Kauffman and Crane promised themselves, they would work with an ensemble.

  The failure of Family Album had dinged their reputation some, which meant that the next show had to be fresher—had to be something that emerged from their own hearts and memories. For the 1994 pilot season, Kauffman and Crane hammered out three new ideas. Dream On had made them a sought-after commodity at the networks, who were looking for something equally creative, if less sexually explicit. They talked it over with Warner Bros. Television president Leslie Moonves and the other Warner Bros. executives and settled on a plan, based on the four networks’ open time slots for the fall and their rough preferences regarding what kinds of shows, and audiences, they were in search of. At the time, there were only four broadcast networks producing original programming, and independent production companies like Warner Bros. would create shows that they might sell to any of the networks.

  They would begin with their idea for a show about high schoolers who express their feelings by bursting into song, a kind of Glee two decades before Ryan Murphy’s show. ABC had told them that they wanted their own Dream On, but when they came back with the idea for a single-camera comedy, the network was disappointed. They wanted to know where the laugh track was. Dream On had no laugh track, either, but it was rapidly evident that ABC was not ready yet for single-camera comedies like The Larry Sanders Show, which was generally considered to be for more sophisticated audiences than the traditional three-camera sitcom setup still prevalent on network TV. ABC passed on the high school show—“As soon as a couple of words left our mouths, their eyes glazed over,” Kauffman would tell a reporter—but the other two moved forward. Networks paid lip service to the idea of breaking the rules, but more often than not, they preferred the rules to the chaos of the new.

  Fox took the next step and ordered a script for their show Reality Check, a single-camera series about a teenage boy with a vivid imagination. The idea was that, as with Dream On, audiences would be afforded glimpses into the mind of its protagonist—first called Harry, then later renamed Jamie. And there was still one more idea to hash out, a comedy series about twentysomethings that they believed might be a good fit for youth-oriented Fox as well.

  They had come up with the idea while sitting at their desks in their Warner Bros. office, surrounded by posters from their New York theatrical productions, taking up a pose similar to the ones they had struck in other rooms for the last decade and a half. Kauffman and Crane had met as sophomores at Brandeis University when they were both cast in a production of Tennessee Williams’s Camino Real. Kauffman played a prostitute, and Crane was a street waif.

  When he was growing up, Crane was sure he was going to be an actor. He would watch his favorite television shows, smart, character-based series like The Mary Tyler Moore Show, and daydream about what a career as a performer might be like. Crane imagined a life in the arts, and being an actor seemed like the most straightforward route to success. When he arrived at Brandeis University, Crane dove into the school’s theater scene, and it took a number of years before he came to a realization: He was not, and would never be, much of an actor.

  After Camino Real, Kauffman was asked to direct a production of Stephen Schwartz and John-Michael Tebelak’s Godspell at school and approached Crane about casting him in the show. Crane turned down the part but offered to codirect, and a partnership was formed. They bonded over their mutual affection for The Dick Van Dyke Show and its miniaturist plots. The presence of Rose Marie as a member of the show-within-the-show’s writing staff had demonstrated to Kauffman that women could be television writers, even if Kauffman felt like Rose Marie’s character, Sally Rogers, was around mostly to order sandwiches for the other writers.

  Kauffman had been an aspiring actor and writer as an adolescent when an AP English teacher told her that she was the least perceptive student he had ever had. She would, in case she bore any illusions to the contrary, never be a writer. The high school senior accepted her teacher’s harsh verdict and began her time at Brandeis University primarily interested in acting. It took some time for the sting of her teacher’s comments to wear off enough for her to realize that she enjoyed writing substantially more than acting. What’s more, she was good at it.

  Kauffman and Crane branched out from directing to writing their own original material. Their show Personals, a musical about characters who place personal ads, was well received at Brandeis. After graduation, Kauffman and Crane moved to New York and began writing shows of their own in earnest, along with Seth Friedman. Kauffman and Crane contributed songs and poetry for the musical A . . . My Name Is Alice (1984), a revue conceived and directed by Joan Micklin Silver and Julianne Boyd. Alice was a compendium of songs about women, with Kauffman and Crane contributing a song called “Trash”—although, notably, not the number called “Friends.” Personals received an off-Broadway run in 1985, with Kauffman’s husband, Michael Skloff (who had once been Crane’s roommate), serving as musical director and composing some additional material for the show.

  Alice’s success—New York Times theater critic Frank Rich called it “delightful”—attracted the attention of an agent, ICM’s Nancy Josephson, whom they signed on with. They worked on a series of shows for TheaterWorksUSA, which commissioned musical theater for inner-city children, and then were approached by the rights holders to the Dudley Moore film Arthur. Kauffman, Crane, and Skloff were hired to put together a musical version of Arthur, which occupied the next five years of their careers before stalling.

  After Crane and Kauffman had been working in New York theater for about five years, a young television agent came to the theater one night to attend their latest show. She approached the partners after the show and asked them if they had ever thought about writing for television. Neither had, but the agent strongly encouraged them to give it a try.

  Most writers looking to transition to television would move to Los Angeles and look for a staff-writer job on a show, but Crane and Kauffman wound up taking an unexpected route. Neither was ready to leave New York, or the theater, so the agent recommended that they come up with ten ideas for new shows. She would
take them and shop them around, and see if she could drum up any interest in them.

  Crane and Kauffman painstakingly came up with the requested ideas and began flying out occasionally to Los Angeles to pitch them in person. Theater was engrossing and emotionally rewarding, but when the two writers turned thirty with little financial success to show for their efforts, California beckoned. They took a job in development for Norman Lear’s production company. They were in the television industry but still were not in a writers’ room, where they would have been working on someone else’s show, fleshing out someone else’s ideas, and serving someone else’s concepts. Consciously or not, Crane and Kauffman were intent on protecting their voices from the incursion of other influences.

  On Dream On, which had developed out of a desire to utilize the rights to Universal’s film library, Crane ran the writers’ room with Kauffman, who also oversaw the onstage work, and Kevin Bright, who had become their partner, took charge of postproduction. Each of the three partners had their own discrete but overlapping role, allowing them control of a single aspect of television production while also ensuring that the others were aware of, and included in, their work.

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  For as long as he could remember, Kevin Bright had known he did not want to be in show business. His father, Jackie, had started off as a vaudeville comic and then transitioned into work as a personal manager for Catskills acts. He would book comedians and other performers for breakfast and brunch acts, or to appear on cruise ships. Jackie would bring Kevin to the Concord Resort Hotel, part of the legendary Borscht Belt. Bright’s family had photographs of him as an exhausted little boy asleep in the lap of none other than Sammy Davis Jr.

  Kevin knew he was not cut out for the life of the showbiz hustler. By the time he enrolled in college, he had decided to study philosophy, which was about as far away as you could get from the Catskills. After he enrolled in an elective film course, he realized philosophy was not in the cards for him. Entertainment had possibilities that were tremendously appealing to him. Bright transferred to Emerson College in Boston, which had a highly regarded film-and-television program, and decided to immerse himself in the very thing he had always thought was not for him.