Generation Friends

by Saul Austerlitz

  Friends was more than another television show now. In its embrace of the aggressively normal in its storytelling, it was able to expand the spectrum of normalcy until it could also include a lesbian wedding. Television had the power to change minds.

  CHAPTER 7

  LOBSTERS

  The Ballad of Ross and Rachel, Part 1

  The ebbs and flows of Ross and Rachel’s relationship would become numerous, and famous, enough to form their own shorthand language: The kiss in the rain. “We were on a break.” The eighteen-page letter. “I, Ross, take thee, Rachel.” The Las Vegas wedding and the delayed divorce.

  There would be ten seasons of diversions, interludes, setbacks, and warfare in total, interspersed with occasional outbursts of romance, before the inevitable, but much-needed, satisfying conclusion. Cheers’ Sam and Diane, sparring and smooching for five seasons, had set the previous record for maximal sitcom delayed gratification, but Ross and Rachel’s delayed happy ending set what is likely an unbreakable record for holding off on the inevitable.

  And so Friends became something it never expected to be: a master class in postponement. At every turn, when it seemed like each possible impediment to Ross and Rachel’s reunion had been removed, another roadblock magically appeared. Friends was intended to offer viewers an uncomplicated pleasure. And yet, so much of that pleasure was about withholding the very thing fans wanted most. The ballad of Ross and Rachel was rarely sad, although there were moments where, like some of the show’s characters, we were expected to weep over their missed opportunities. But their romance was intended to serve as the tart, occasionally bitter counterpoint to the show’s sweet comedy.

  The conclusion of Friends’ first season had moved Rachel and Ross closer than they had ever been to love, and also further away. Just as Rachel learned of Ross’s feelings for her, Ross was off in China, meeting and falling for his colleague Julie. In an abrupt switch, Friends inverted its central romantic partnership, with Rachel silently pining and Ross obliviously swanning.

  Only Ross would think it was a good idea to go on to his ex-crush, in the second-season opener, “The One with Ross’s New Girlfriend,” about how she was so “funny and sweet and amazing and adorable.” Rachel is now the neurotic and antic one, grabbing the phone out of Ross’s hands as he babbles sweet nothings to Julie and abruptly hanging it up, or attempting to convince him that the sexiest thing he could do would be to delay having sex with his girlfriend.

  Rachel’s jealousy is an unexpected new aspect of her personality and allows the seemingly endless pas de deux of buried emotions to reach a graceful conclusion early in the second season, in “The One Where Ross Finds Out.” Rachel goes out on a date and drunkenly borrows her date’s phone to call Ross. She leaves a sloppy, strangely triumphant message for him: “Obviously I am over you. I am over you, and that, my friend, is what they call ‘closure.’” Spent and sated, she proceeds to toss the cell phone into a nearby ice bucket.

  The next morning, a hungover Rachel is hazy on the details of the previous evening, but when Ross begins listening to his voice mail, she belatedly realizes the enormity of her drunken gaffe and leaps onto Ross’s back in the hope of wrestling the phone away from his ear. She succeeds in knocking the phone out of his grasp, but it is too late: “You’re over me? You’re over me? When—when were you . . . under me?”

  Aniston has a lovely moment here, moaning and covering her face while summoning the courage to acknowledge her emotional turmoil. She looks down and fusses with a couch pillow while haltingly telling Ross, “Lately, I’ve, uh, I’ve sort of had feelings for you.” Rachel is breathing hard, nervously blowing her hair out of her face. When Ross asks her, “Now you’re over me?” she responds with a soft, breathy question of her own: “Are you over me?” The moment is interrupted by Julie, who is ringing the buzzer and waiting with a taxi down below.

  Ross bursts into Central Perk after hours in the next scene, overwrought from the emotional turmoil, and blames Rachel for revealing her feelings just as he was settling in with Julie. “This ship has sailed,” he tells Rachel, and runs off, leaving Rachel crying on the couch.

  Aniston is the most appealingly vulnerable of the Friends performers, and we feel her hurt in this scene, rejected and trampled and embarrassed all at once. Her sobbing catches Ross’s eye as well, as he looks in from outside Central Perk’s window. The two stare at each other for a long moment, and Rachel tentatively approaches the door. She briefly battles with a tempestuous lock before swinging both doors wide open. Ross and Rachel kiss in the misty Manhattan rain, Rachel’s hands tenderly caressing his face.

  Friends always had an innate sense of its audience’s desires and a compulsion to fulfill its unspoken promises. The audience had been promised a resolution, and “The One Where Ross Finds Out” delivers. But the show was torn between what its audience wanted and what it was best at, and nowhere was this disjunction clearer than in its handling of Ross and Rachel’s romance. The audience, presumably, would have been more than satisfied for the couple to live happily ever after, but almost as soon as Friends provided a successful conclusion, it began to walk it back.

  Ross, still intellectually torn between Rachel and Julie, begins crafting a pros-and-cons list, observing that Rachel is ditzy, obsessed with her looks, and just a waitress. He is inevitably caught by Rachel, who is appalled at seeing her deficiencies spelled out so openly: “Imagine the worst things you think about yourself. Now how would you feel if the one person that you trusted the most in the world not only thinks them too, but actually uses them as reasons not to be with you?” Ross, an oblivious doofus to the last, charmlessly pleads his case: “I want to be with you in spite of all those things.” Rachel is disgusted, and the possibility of their romance appears to fizzle. (Much like the close of the first season, in which Jeff Greenstein had borrowed from Jane Austen to bring Ross and Rachel closer together, this plot development bears notable similarities to Mr. Darcy’s first proposal in Pride and Prejudice.)

  It would take the revelations of “The One with the Prom Video,” midway through the second season, to silently plead Ross’s case for him, and for Rachel to fully overcome her reservations about Ross. At the start of the episode, Ross listens patiently to Phoebe’s explanation of how elderly lobsters hold each other’s claws in the tank. She argues that he and Rachel are each other’s lobsters. When Ross fumblingly attempts to explain Phoebe’s theory to Rachel, she walks off: “We are never going to happen. Accept that.”

  Later in the episode, when Monica is sorting through childhood bric-a-brac excavated from her parents’ house, she comes across a videotape from high school, which she slips into her VCR. Rachel is in a ruffled blue prom dress, her nose markedly larger than it appears now. “How do you zoom out?” we hear Monica’s father call out as the camera settles on his daughter’s zaftig frame. Cox had to be molded into a specially designed fat suit for the sequence, a process that took hours and left her a sweaty mess by the end of the shoot.

  “Some girl ate Monica!” Joey blurts.

  “Shut up!” Monica shouts. “The camera adds ten pounds.”

  Chandler famously responds by asking, “So how many cameras are actually on you?”

  Director James Burrows brought in camcorders to shoot the home-video sequence, dirtying the image with extra noise to give it the feel of an old home movie. Producer Todd Stevens was pleased with Aniston’s fake nose but felt that Schwimmer’s wig and mustache had the perverse effect of making him look older, not younger.

  What initially appears to be a ludicrous flashback is actually a cleverly disguised emotional moment. Ross instantly recognizes the videotape, his face clearly registering that reliving this particular memory will likely be agonizing.

  The comedy is not quite over yet, as adolescent Ross makes his first appearance on the screen, with a scraggly mustache and a lush Jewfro. (“Looking good, Mr. Kotter!” Joey calls out, in a joke th
at likely registers with precisely none of Friends’ millennial audience.)

  When Rachel’s date fails to show, Ross’s mother suggests that the then-college-aged Ross take her to the prom. We see Ross tripping on his way up the stairs, but there is an emotional charge to spotting him in his father’s tuxedo, giving himself a pep talk to “just be cool” as he holds a bouquet of flowers grabbed from a vase.

  Ross comes down the stairs just as Rachel and Monica and their dates, their backs to him, troop out the door. Rachel’s date has at last shown up, and Ross, no longer needed, gulps in surprise, openmouthed with shock. Not only has he lost his chance to go to the prom with Rachel, she has not even noticed his intention to do so.

  Monica, heretofore unaware of her brother’s teenage gallantry, sits up, exclaiming, “I can’t believe you did that!” And Rachel, rising out of her seat, approaches Ross, who is standing uncomfortably near the door, the camera tracking fluidly along with her. She strides over to him, puts her hands to his chest, and kisses him, to the roars of the audience and the visible pleasure of their friends. Chandler pounds Joey on the back with his fist, Monica wipes her eyes, and Phoebe claps her chair with glee. “See?” she shouts. “He’s her lobster!”

  Burrows argued fiercely for the blocking of the scene, believing there was no way that Ross would not get up and head toward the door once he realized what they were going to be watching, in a fruitless attempt to maintain his pride. And having Rachel cross the apartment to kiss Ross would mask her intentions until the very last instant. Marta Kauffman was on the set as “The One with the Prom Video” was shot and listened as the audience erupted in pleasure when Rachel kissed Ross. “That didn’t suck,” she thought.

  Contrary to the fantasies of its fervid fan base, or the woman who had approached Kauffman on Larchmont Boulevard, the creators of Friends had not emerged with a fully mapped plotline for the show ready to go. They were only ever a few episodes ahead of the curve, having a broad sense of how a given season might unfold but with many of the specifics remaining to be determined in the writers’ room. There was never a detailed sense of where Ross and Rachel would go once they got together, and the show seemed flummoxed about what to do with them once they were involved. Could Friends thrive with Ross and Rachel happily in love? And what would such a show look like?

  CHAPTER 8

  COULD I BE WEARING ANY MORE CLOTHES?

  Friends and Style

  John Shaffner had fond memories of his apartment at 344 West Fourteenth Street, just off Ninth Avenue, a sixth-floor walk-up he shared with his partner Joe Stewart, with transoms over the doors and panel molding on the walls. It had been the grungy, pre-gentrification, “Ford to City: Drop Dead” New York, and when Shaffner was called in to mock up a set for a New York City apartment for Friends Like Us, he knew immediately that he wanted to draw on those places and those experiences.

  Designing a multicamera television set was much like designing the sets for a play. There were only three walls, and the absence of a fourth wall meant that everything that would have to appear in a room—doors, windows, furniture—would fill a more compressed space. Much of a set designer’s work revolved around the art of visual trickery, taking an empty space and creating depth, studding the space with objects of visual interest, finding methods of crafting a foreground, middle ground, and background for actors and directors to work with.

  Building a set was meant to do two things, one instantly obvious and the other not. A set had to solve all the problems introduced by the pilot, but a good set would also establish a template flexible enough to encompass an untold number of future stories, and to make the creation of those new stories as effortless and fruitful as possible.

  Shaffner thought it would be true to the New York spirit to have each of the bedroom doors open directly into the main space. Shaffner placed the bathroom at the other end of the living room from the bedrooms, figuring that the path from bedroom to bathroom would allow for all manner of fruitful encounters.

  Kevin Bright was also looking for a color palette that extended beyond the traditional neutral colors of most other sitcoms. No grays, beiges, or browns; Bright wanted colors that popped off the screen. Bright had recently painted his own house in vivid colors. He approached Shaffner and asked him: What did he think about trying a purple set?

  The kitchen, too, was designed to have the patched-together look familiar from so many Manhattan starter apartments. Figuring that Monica was a foodie, Shaffner upgraded her stove to something a bit more elegant, but everything else stayed scruffy.

  Shaffner and Stewart went to lunch with James Burrows on the Paramount lot and showed him the apartment model. Burrows approved but suggested that the apartment have a more interesting window. It might be nice to have something more visually stimulating to look at. Burrows suggested something along the lines of a skylight, and Shaffner and Stewart snuck a look at each other. A skylight might have sounded good but was instantly out of the question. How would a television show feature a window built into the roof when there was no roof to the set?

  But something Burrows said nagged at Shaffner, and he began to rethink his setup. The windows were a little ordinary, and could be replaced with something a bit grander. What if, instead of a skylight, they were to feature a kind of artist’s-studio window?

  For the knowing architectural eye, Monica’s place was meant to resemble a once-grand apartment that had been chopped into smaller pieces. Burrows particularly liked a post and beam that Shaffner had designed as a quasi-separation between the kitchen and the living room. The post and beam appealed to Burrows as a visual trim for the space, an attractive background detail that would subtly remind viewers of the space’s forlorn elegance.

  Shaffner took the model home and got out his watercolors. He smeared light purple paint all over the model and brought it back to the lot for Bright’s perusal. Bright was pleased. He wanted something noticeably different from the flat white rectangles of most network sitcoms. TV preferred everything in shades of blue, and Bright was hoping for something that felt less interchangeable. Shaffner painted the kitchen green and turquoise, colors he believed would work well with lavender.

  Having designed Rachel and Monica’s apartment, Shaffner now turned his attention to the coffee-shop set. New York was often a spooky, scary place, full of unforeseen difficulties and intimidating strangers. This sitcom New York, though, was intended to be notably gentler. Hardly anyone would lock their door on a show set in a city where 1,946 people had been murdered in the past year. It was to be a New York rendered at the scale of a small town, and the coffee shop would be its town hall, meeting place, and main square. It was the centerpiece of a show intended to reclaim urban life for an affluent white demographic. This was to be their New York—carefully scrubbed clean of all grime and much of its multicultural, many-voiced variety. Shaffner asked a friend who still lived in New York to wander around downtown and take photographs of any coffee shops that looked quirky and that suggested the possibility of settling in for a long chat with a friend.

  Shaffner’s sets would have to be fleshed out with furniture, décor, and everything else that might be necessary to give off the impression that real people, with their own taste and their own sense of style, lived there. Set decorator Greg Grande came in to put together some boards mocking up what the apartment might look like fully dressed. Grande had worked with Kauffman and Crane on Family Album and had been sent the script for Friends Like Us when they were about to shoot their pilot. Grande met with them, and after discussing the characters in depth, they collectively came to the conclusion that they were dealing with twentysomethings with little money to spend. Grande imagined Monica as a young woman who might spend her weekends at thrift shops and garage sales, on the lookout for just the right piece for her apartment.

  The coffee shop would be similarly eclectic, with a rotating array of artworks adding some visual dash to the set. Grande wan
ted it to feel comfortable and welcoming, a community center for a roving crew of urbanites.

  In the late 1980s, Greg Grande had frequented the same coffee shop as Kauffman and Crane. He would stop in to grab some coffee at Insomnia Café and would be inspired anew each time by the fabulously quirky décor inside. When it came time to dress the set of the new show’s coffee shop, Grande thought again of Insomnia Café and wanted to model the set’s look on what he remembered. Grande’s job was to outfit the set and make it feel like a place where its characters lived, complete with furniture, rugs, décor, kitchenware, and anything else the audience might see.

  Grande had his traditional circuit of haunts he would visit when on the hunt for décor for a new show. He visited the Warner Bros. prop house and was particularly enamored of its third floor, crammed full of Empire chairs, Gothic furniture, and old phonographs. Grande was taken aback by the abundance of inspirational material here and believed that this jumble of mismatched furniture was the precise look he was in search of. The pieces Grande wound up picking out were leftovers one step away from a trip to the dumpster. The couches were ripped, the chairs were tattered, but they had a kind of disheveled beauty to them.

  The network executives were appalled. Why would an NBC show meant to appeal to classy, affluent viewers display such threadbare junk? And who would drink their coffee in such a pit? Warren Littlefield reluctantly accepted the look but was disturbed by the rips in the furniture and insisted that the back of the Central Perk sofa be covered to hide the rip in the fabric. By the third episode, Grande had reupholstered the couch.

  Monica’s apartment would be exceptionally spacious and elegant for a young woman’s home, and Grande wanted to demonstrate her taste and stylishness. Grande was a superb designer, but there was just one problem: He had never been to New York. Shaffner pulled him aside and told him that when you lived in New York and didn’t have a lot of money to spare, you would go out the night before trash pickup and scour the streets. There were all manner of hidden gems to be discovered among the detritus, and any New York apartment occupied by twentysomethings would likely be a mix of street-corner finds, family heirlooms hauled out from garages and attics, and thrift-store purchases.