Generation Friends

by Saul Austerlitz

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  When Don Ohlmeyer saw Friends’ title sequence, after the first episode was broadcast, he was furious. He called Kevin Bright the next day with a pointed question: “What is that title sequence?”

  “What do you mean?” Bright asked.

  “It’s awful. It’s terrible,” Ohlmeyer blustered. Bright still didn’t know what Ohlmeyer was referring to, and asked him to explain his frustration. “It says to the audience, ‘We’re young, we’re hip, we’re dancing in a fountain and you can’t dance with us.’”

  “You really think it says all that?” replied Bright. Ohlmeyer was insistent that the sequence, in which the show’s six stars fussed with umbrellas and splashed in a fountain, would cause the audience to feel left out, and demanded that Bright reinstate the original title sequence, set to R.E.M.’s “Shiny Happy People,” which had run before the presentation of the pilot.

  Bright’s initial impulse was to fight, but on second consideration, he called back Ohlmeyer and offered a compromise. What if they worked up a new title sequence that was half Bright’s and half Ohlmeyer’s? “Let me see what it looks like,” responded Ohlmeyer. In time for the second episode, Bright put together a new title sequence that mixed clips from the show, much like the “Shiny Happy People” sequence, with the fountain footage. The hybrid version could serve as an under-the-radar refresher in recent developments on the show, being updated every few episodes. In the end, Bright was happy that Ohlmeyer had made such a stink. It was, he believed, one of the only positive contributions Don Ohlmeyer had made to Friends.

  The first season was a mostly steady, occasionally halting process of discovering what motivated the show’s characters. While Ross and Rachel had been ably and efficiently thrust into their own orbits, other characters remained more mysterious to the Friends writers. Joey began life as a leather-jacketed lothario with an outer-boroughs affect and an overflowing little black book of conquests. Testing done after the pilot revealed that audiences found Joey off-putting and more than a little familiar, a Tony Danza–style stereotype.

  The writers took another look at Joey in the hopes of making him more appealing. He was still a ladies’ man, they thought, still someone who preferred a one-night stand to a committed relationship. But now he was more of a guy with a code. The show did not entirely approve of his cocksmanship, although it did regularly laugh off his excesses. But he was now a simpler soul, as writer Jeff Greenstein thought, a kid in a candy store who could not help glutting himself on every possible variety of sweet. Joey was an older brother to the three girls, his urges held in place by the warmth of his affections. And the leather jacket was ditched.

  Monica, too, was a mystery. She was supposed to be a den mother for her brother and their wacky friends, with a healing word for every wound and a bandage for every scrape. But that now felt like too limiting a role, with not enough to do when the other characters were caught up in their own romantic pursuits. The writers privately called Monica “the Riddler,” because all she seemed to do, in the early episodes, was ask the other characters questions and set up their jokes. Courteney Cox was doing fine work in the role, so it was not a matter of the acting. Instead, it was that Monica herself was a kind of riddle, lacking a central core that future plotlines could be built around.

  Kauffman, herself warm and nurturing, had based Monica at least partially on herself but was troubled by the lack of clarity regarding Monica’s motivations. She called a meeting and asked writers to come up with a list of adjectives that might describe Monica. Mike Sikowitz raised his hand and offered, “She’s inquisitive?”

  It took until “The One Where Underdog Gets Away,” the show’s ninth episode, to glimpse a path forward. The plot had Monica preparing Thanksgiving dinner to everyone’s overly demanding specifications. Monica was channeling writer Jeff Strauss’s relationship with Thanksgiving.

  Strauss had planned and cooked his own Thanksgiving dinner since college, inviting friends to share the holiday with him. He was, in his own estimation, simultaneously obsessively solicitous and terribly demanding. He was the guy who told all his friends exactly where, when, and how they would be celebrating Thanksgiving, while also cooking potatoes five different ways to satisfy his picky friends. Like Strauss, Monica was trying to control everyone around her while also fruitlessly seeking to meet everyone’s needs.

  Adam Chase and one or two other writers were hanging out on the set, and they noticed Courteney Cox straightening the furniture in her pretend apartment after everyone else had left. She was playing with something hidden between the lines of the script, something inherent to her character that had not yet been fully teased out. Monica was freaking out over invisible dust motes, and Chase realized that they had stumbled into a breakthrough.

  They brought their accidental discovery back to the writers’ room, and Monica, who had previously been opaque as a character, became substantially clearer. The idea of concentrating on Monica and Rachel as roommates, and playing up Rachel’s slovenliness against Monica’s rage for order, gave Monica’s character colors she had previously lacked. Alexa Junge saw it as an ideal opportunity to unleash all of her type-A personality traits and share them with Monica.

  And the new take on Monica as an obsessive-compulsive neat freak illuminated a path forward for the character that allowed the writers to move her away from her Riddler status. The idea that Monica had OCD-like tendencies opened up dozens of potential story lines that had previously remained hidden to the writers.

  The OCD was a fictional addition, but there was a part of Cox that wanted to take care of her friends, that wanted to guide them to the right decisions. Cox was the one who went around the set telling everyone precisely what model of car phone to purchase. Cox was the one who knew how long it might take to rehearse a scene or for one of her costars to go through makeup. She was the one who could sketch a minute-by-minute plan for the next day’s work, factoring in every detail of her five costars’ schedules. Cox would clean up her costars’ dressing rooms when they got too messy. Monica was not Courteney Cox, but there were elements of Cox’s personality that were heightened and exaggerated for the purposes of creating Monica.

  The pilot had featured only Monica’s apartment, along with a glimpse of Ross’s new place. But by the second episode, Kauffman and Crane knew they needed a place for the boys to live as well. The hallway set would come in handy now, as Chandler and Joey were to live directly across the hall. Production designer John Shaffner and set decorator Greg Grande would need to build and furnish a second apartment. The boys’ apartment would have to be smaller, darker, shabbier, and less attractively decorated.

  Grande wanted the boys’ apartment to flaunt Chandler and Joey’s execrable taste. Grande found the ugliest couch he could and then matched it with a workout bench (standard-issue overgrown-adolescent ornamentation) and a pair of unfortunate stools. For Grande, the pièce de résistance was the beige-and-brown cut-pile carpet draped across the floor, which looked like it had suffered a series of catastrophic spills from which it had never been able to recover. Who in their right mind, Grande wondered, would keep such an ugly thing?

  Scenes from early episodes had taken place in Chandler’s white-collar workplace and in Monica’s restaurant, but Kauffman and Crane soon realized that audience interest plummeted as soon as Friends followed its characters to work. (This would change some in later seasons, as the show got craftier about its uses of the workplace.) The writers were intent on demonstrating their lives outside of Central Perk, but audiences truly did not want to depart the charmed inner circle. Eventually, the writers came up with a solution. Instead of venturing out, Friends would bring its adventures back home, with its characters recounting the tales of what had transpired elsewhere. This would be a show in which stories were often retold instead of depicted.

  The workplace would recede into the background on Friends, only occasionally
glimpsed. Ross had his job at the Museum of Prehistoric History, and later a gig as a professor of paleontology; Phoebe worked as a masseuse; Monica went from an assistant chef to having a kitchen of her own; Joey went out for auditions and won a role on the soap opera Days of Our Lives as egotistical doctor Drake Ramoray; Chandler would quit his job to avoid having to worry over the WENUS, the Weekly Estimated Net Usage Systems. (We would see a bit more of the work life of Rachel, whose flourishing career was a key aspect of her character.) There was a shared aura of professional floundering, with Monica losing her job, Joey’s agent suggesting gay porn, and Chandler later desperate for an internship at an advertising firm where he would be a decade older than his colleagues.

  Ross, who has somehow managed to complete a doctorate by the time we first meet him, is treated like a walking punch line, his scientific bent proof positive, for his friends, of his irredeemable geekiness. Friends knows it can only occasionally rouse itself to express any interest in its characters’ professional lives and chooses to make light of it. When everyone at Central Perk offers suggestions about why their bosses seem to hate them, Joey takes umbrage: “Or maybe it’s because you’re all hanging around here at eleven thirty on a Wednesday!”

  The cast would get together on Thursday evenings each week to watch the latest episode of the show together as it aired. They would use the opportunity to exchange notes about how to improve the show, and even about each other’s performances. At the very start of their time together, Courteney Cox had asked her costars to give her any notes they might have about her performance, and the weekly watch parties extended the custom, giving the actors a place and time of their own to discuss what they wanted to see from the show.

  Ross and Rachel’s burgeoning relationship was the driver of much of the building enthusiasm for Friends. And the slow-burn technique, in which romance was forever being delayed, was incredibly effective at creating momentum for the show. The strategy was clearly descended from that of Friends’ Must-See TV predecessor Cheers, which had Ted Danson’s lusty bartender Sam and Shelley Long’s intellectual barmaid Diane push and pull at each other for five full seasons. Cheers had proved that will-they-or-won’t-they could be a highly effective sitcom strategy, wielding romance and emotion as a counterweight to comedy, and using its ebb and flow to keep viewers tuning in consistently, week after week.

  The show allows us to stand a half step ahead of its characters. As the first season progressed, audiences watched Ross and Rachel smile at each other, listened to the soft tones of their polite conversations, sensed something brewing between them, even as Ross was crippled by post-divorce doubt and Rachel was struggling to catch up with the working world she had hoped to bypass entirely.

  Ross moped through much of the first season, the loss of Carol still stinging, and the notion of having lost her to a woman the lingering humiliation that he cannot forget. Rachel shook him out of his self-absorption, her presence luring him back to the world. In “The One with the Sonogram at the End,” the first episode after the pilot, Ross looked over Rachel’s shoulder, moaning in combined pleasure and agony, when she asked him, “Didn’t you think you were just going to meet someone, fall in love, and that would be it?”

  “The One with the East German Laundry Detergent” (season 1, episode 5) brought the two characters together in quasi-romantic circumstances for the first time since the pilot, for an activity that Ross saw as a date and Rachel treated as laundry day. Rachel, new to the world outside suburban Long Island, admits to being a “laundry virgin.” Ross, rising to the occasion with a clever double entendre, tells her, “Don’t worry, I’ll use the gentle cycle.” At the end of the episode, Ross steps up to save Rachel’s cart from a pushy interloper, and Rachel unexpectedly kisses him out of gratitude. Ross takes a step back, fondles a pile of sheets, and then walks directly into an open dryer door.

  We are jolted out of what we come to believe is our private secret, shared only with Ross, in “The One with the Blackout,” when after Ross argues that passion burns out, replaced by trust and security, Ross tells Rachel, “I see a big passion in your future.” We can practically see Ross’s mental gears turning frenziedly as he parses Rachel’s reply of “You’re so great”; until Joey, flopped sidelong in a chair, breaks the spell: “It’s never gonna happen.” Joey goes on to explain that Ross has spent too much time in “the friend zone” (a now-familiar, somewhat sexist relationship concept first introduced here) to escape it now: “You’re mayor of the zone.” “Blackout,” which was supposed to be part of a network-wide themed block of episodes (only Seinfeld chose not to make use of the blackout) and featured Chandler trapped in an ATM vestibule with Victoria’s Secret model Jill Goodacre, felt to the writing staff like the first episode that got an audience buzzing about Friends.

  Ross is a wounded teddy bear, pining for an unattainable crush, but there are darker hints of a less likable version of Ross to come. After Rachel meets Italian hunk Paolo (Cosimo Fusco), Ross pulls him aside to tell him that he and Rachel are “kind of a thing,” saying, “Rachel and I should be together.” There is something creepy about Ross’s blatant interference in Rachel’s romantic life and in his blithe assumption that he knows what Rachel wants, in the complete absence of any such assurances from the woman he yearns for. Audiences loved Ross, the show’s first breakout character, but there were intimations here already of what later audiences would find so off-putting about him. Ross was a romantic, but he was also a particular kind of romantic who believed his emotions conveyed a sense of ownership of his beloved.

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  For Kudrow, the first season was full of “pinch me” moments, where she realized that all the career struggle that had preceded this moment had led her to this privileged place. Kudrow kept pulling the producers to the side in down moments with a single question: “Are the ratings good enough?” She wanted to know if Friends was long for this world, or if she would be back to hustling for auditions come next pilot season.

  The first genuine test of the show’s lasting power would be the “back nine.” New series were often green-lit for an initial run of thirteen episodes. This allowed the networks an opportunity to reassess a show’s development midway through the season—and to avoid throwing an entire season’s worth of money after a disaster. To be picked up for the back nine was to receive a full twenty-two-episode order, rounding out a complete season of the show.

  The ratings indicated that Friends was adeptly finding an audience a handful of episodes in, so property master Marjorie Coster-Praytor was shocked when, one morning, Crane and Kauffman summoned the cast and the crew to the stage and announced that they had bad news and good news. “The bad news,” Kauffman told them, “is that we did not get picked up for the back nine.” A ripple of shock spread through the gathered crowd. Everyone felt that they had done good work on Friends. How could it be that they weren’t being picked up? Kauffman let the news sink in for a long moment before carrying on: “The good news is we got picked up for eleven.”

  Cast members were crying with joy at the powerful vote of confidence from NBC, which was only further emphasized when they arrived at work the next morning to find none other than NBC president Warren Littlefield, clad in an apron, serving omelets to the Friends team.

  For the remainder of the first season, Ross’s friends would watch him silently pine for Rachel alongside the audience and provide a stream of acerbic commentary on his longing. Chandler spies on Ross watching Rachel bend over to pour coffee at her new job at Central Perk at the start of “The One with All the Poker” and swiftly bursts his bubble of soulful yearning: “Could you want her more?”

  Chandler’s quip was a reminder that Friends created its own language and its own conversational styles. The “Could you . . .” setup, conjoined with Perry’s placing the accent on the unexpected want, became Chandler’s instantly recognizable verbal tic. The writers soon learned never to italicize
any word of Chandler’s dialogue, as Perry would inevitably select an entirely different word to emphasize. Joey became famous for his three-word come-on, usually delivered as his eyes lavishly caressed a woman’s body: “How you doin’?” Ross would wind his way with exaggerated slowness through a line, stopping to interrupt his thought, raise an eyebrow, or pause significantly. Perhaps this was what Burrows had warned the cast about when steering them away from catchphrases, but Perry in particular managed to use his off-kilter verbal rhythms to surprise audiences nonetheless.

  Of all the first-season episodes, “Poker” is perhaps the most emotionally resonant, with Ross and Rachel sparring for an audience of their friends during a male vs. female poker game. The script, inspired by the poker games in Burrows’s dressing room, expertly toggles between the manufactured drama of the poker table and Rachel’s anxious wait for news about a potential job offer. Ross, his masculine braggadocio always a paper-thin membrane covering a deep well of insecurity, crows that he will not be taking it easy on Rachel once the cards are dealt. When the game is interrupted by a call for Rachel, informing her that she did not get the job, Ross’s desire to flirtatiously squabble instantly evaporates.

  Ross ultimately folds, the camera zooming in on his face as he calmly admits defeat: “When you don’t have the cards, you don’t have the cards.” He then directs Chandler’s and Joey’s attention to Rachel on the other side of the table, pointing at her and telling them, “But look how happy she is.” The three guys look at each other for a long beat, then everyone dives for Ross’s cards.