Generation Friends

by Saul Austerlitz

  The shouting is reaching a new crescendo of outrage and displeasure when Phoebe, forgotten already, reemerges from the bathroom with a white stick in hand, anxious to share her news: “You guys, you’re going to have a baby. They’re going to have a baby!” Frank Jr., clad in an unflattering gray Members Only jacket zipped up to his throat, raises his arms in Rocky-esque triumph: “My sister’s going to have my baby!” Everyone spontaneously gathers to enfold Phoebe in a group hug.

  “The One with the Embryos” craftily alternates between its major and minor plots, between weightless twentysomething antics and significant life changes. Condon and Toomin’s script expertly switches between the two, letting us sink into the endlessly charming mire of the apartment competition before yanking the floor out with Phoebe’s unexpected announcement.

  Friends is charming for its big-picture portrait of how being young and confused and free gradually evolves into being older and wiser and more rooted, but also for its abiding interest in the absurdities of youth. Phoebe’s announcement is the emotional high point of “The One with the Embryos,” but the episode prefers to end with an image of Joey and Chandler, ensconced in their new apartment, simultaneously leaning back in their painfully ugly, overstuffed leather recliners, releasing twin grunts of pleasure. (The presence of the chairs themselves was inspired by Ira Ungerleider’s attempt, once upon a time, to stay in his La-Z-Boy for an entire weekend.) They proceed to lean back even farther, now both practically recumbent and giddy with pleasure. This is their home now.

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  “Embryos” was a triumph for emphasizing a certain tendency in Friends’ handling of its characters that had previously gone mostly unmentioned. What prior sitcom had expressed so deep an interest in its protagonists’ past lives? Most sitcoms existed in an eternal present, where little change was encouraged or acknowledged, and the past was generally a single, flat narrative arc—Mary Richards moving to Minneapolis, or Gilligan and his friends washing up on a desert island. The idea of mining characters’ histories for narrative material was foreign to the sitcom. But from the very outset, Friends was telling us about what had already happened to its characters elsewhere.

  The show parceled out bits of the past in tantalizingly small dollops. “The One with the Embryos” gave us a heaping helping of information, but most episodes preferred to stop at a stray reference or two, understanding that the past was an endlessly renewable storytelling resource that it would be wise to use sparingly.

  The technique allowed Friends to gesture at a seemingly bottomless reservoir of past adventures. For each character, the glimpses of their past, in both flashback episodes and persistent chatter, offered some additional clarity about their lives prior to Rachel’s arrival at Central Perk.

  The characters were obsessed with their pasts: with how to re-create them, undo them, or eclipse them. Over ten seasons, we learn that Chandler attended an all-boys boarding school, where he played the clarinet, was voted class clown, and thought scale models were cool. His father liked to dress in fishnet stockings and was caught making out with the pool boy. He was once kidnapped by his father after Cub Scouts, took a mime class in college, and broke up with his summer-camp girlfriend because she had gotten fat. He regularly wet the bed after his parents got divorced.

  Rachel’s father purchased her a boat when she was fifteen (her pony was sick, she explained). She was prom queen, class president, and homecoming queen; had sex with Billy Dreskin on her father’s bed in high school; kissed her sorority sister (played by Winona Ryder) after drinking too much sangria senior year of college; and developed a crush on Joey the first time they met.

  Monica weighed two hundred pounds at the age of eleven, and in her earlier, lighter years, enjoyed riding the family dog, Chichi. She hated Ross as a kid and once broke his nose while playing football, and her eating habits taught Ross the mantra “Eat fast or don’t eat.” Her ex-boyfriend Kip was once a key part of their group, only to be excommunicated after the two broke up.

  Joey, whose early life we know the least of, once sold T-shirts during spring break in Daytona Beach, played a copy-machine repairman in a porn film, and assumed on their first meeting that Chandler was gay. He had seven dark-haired, outspoken sisters whom Chandler could not keep track of, and his father regularly cheated on his mother—with her blessing, as it turned out.

  Phoebe and Monica were once roommates, but Phoebe moved out because of Monica’s neat-freak tendencies. Phoebe’s stepfather was in prison, and she believed her father was a tree surgeon living in a hut in Burma. (He was actually, as she later discovered, a pharmacist in upstate New York.) Her stepfather would sell blood on her birthdays in order to afford food for the family. She dwelled on the streets of New York starting at the age of fourteen, never attended high school, and once lived in Prague. She was living in a Gremlin at the age of eighteen with a guy named Cindy who enjoyed talking to his own hand. She got hepatitis from a pimp’s spitting in her mouth, and as a teenager unknowingly mugged Ross on his way out of a comic-book store. She married a gay ice dancer (Steve Zahn) who turned out to be not entirely gay.

  Ross’s childhood report cards were all A’s except for gym class. He skipped fourth grade. As a child, he enjoyed dressing up in his mother’s clothes, pretending to be a middle-aged woman named Bea. He was once so jealous that it was Monica’s birthday that he yanked on his testicles and had to go to the emergency room.

  Ross was a painfully awkward adolescent in love with beautiful queen bee Rachel. In high school, he belonged to the “I Hate Rachel Green Club” along with his friend Will (Brad Pitt). He received a 1450 on his SATs, or so he said; Monica reminded him that he actually got a 1250.

  As a junior in college, he went to Disneyland with Chandler and ate ten tacos from a hibachi in a stranger’s trunk in the parking lot, causing the park to temporarily be renamed “the Crappiest Place on Earth.” He once had a threesome with Carol and Susan in which he was mostly left holding the women’s coats.

  The deliciously slow drip of information about the show’s characters was a brilliant strategy of encouraging viewers to think of Friends as an extension of their own social life. Crane was adamant from the outset that he would not engage in the blatant exposition that many other sitcoms felt the need for. There was nothing more loathsome, in his mind, than the kind of pandering that shows often did in order to rapidly explain how their characters knew each other.

  Crane refused to immediately clarify just how it was that these six characters had become a crew and preferred to let it unfold over the course of the first few episodes, to the dissatisfaction of the critics who reviewed the show. That deliberate reticence, in which the show held back information from its audience, encouraged Friends’ desire to continue filling in details long after another show would have settled into an eternal present.

  The past was prologue for Friends because it was a helpful participant in the illusion the show sought to form. Friends was silently devoted to the proposition that its characters were our friends. Watching a new episode was like coming home.

  CHAPTER 13

  THAT ONE DIDN’T SUCK

  Producing the Show

  On the day during the 1997–98 season Tate Donovan first came to the Friends set as a performer, ready to play Rachel Green’s new love interest, Joshua, he believed he knew where to go. When the production assistant tasked with escorting Donovan offered to show him to where he would get prepared, Donovan began heading toward the dressing rooms. “We’ve got a lot of actors,” the production assistant told Donovan, guiding him in another direction.

  Donovan followed him down a long corridor, out of the soundstage, and along an alleyway. They finally arrived at a trailer that Donovan thought would have been appropriate for a bit player from the 1940s. It was a rickety wooden contraption with a ragged bit of carpeting on the floor, no running water, and no air-conditioning. It was swelteringly hot.
Donovan saw his wardrobe inside and a note from the producers that read, “Welcome to the show! We’re so happy to have you!” Donovan gulped and made his way inside, ready to prepare himself for his performance.

  All dressed, Donovan returned to the soundstage, where the cast was gathered, silently staring at him, expectant. When nothing was forthcoming from Donovan, a collective groan emerged from the stars of Friends. “You’re the worst!” one of them shouted. “You’re the worst person to play a practical joke on! You won’t even complain about the worst dressing room in the world!”

  The idea of guest-starring on Friends was stressful, with Donovan, a regular in the show’s privileged inner sphere in its early years as Jennifer Aniston’s longtime boyfriend, feeling concerned about being perceived as an idiot who fell into a role on his girlfriend’s show and tripped over his own shoelaces. Donovan could only imagine how much more stressful it would have to be to carry the show, and to know that tens of millions of lay critics would be assessing your performance, week in and week out. He began taking mental notes to see how they coped with the challenge of Friends.

  By the time Donovan met Aniston, Friends was already a phenomenon, and its stars had formed a closed circle to protect themselves against the prying eyes of the world. Donovan would hang out in Aniston’s dressing room before rehearsal was about to begin and watch Matthew Perry amble by, his pants around his ankles, pretending as if nothing was the matter. Comedically speaking, at least, Perry was the leader of the group. Everyone had adopted Perry’s semisarcastic, stating-the-obvious-with-a-twist style as their own when the six actors hung out together.

  Courteney Cox had been the most famous performer on the show when it premiered and could have seen herself as having the most to protect, but Donovan was amazed at how much she might reveal about herself in a ten-minute conversation. He would come away fully caught up on her diet problems, her cosmetic regimen, her personal life, and a host of other topics to boot.

  Donovan particularly liked Lisa Kudrow and her husband. He and Aniston spent a Christmas in Hawaii together with them, and Donovan found them easy to talk to. The three of them found they had a great deal to say to each other about theater and books and culture.

  Matt LeBlanc was the kind of guy who would wrap his arm around you and make you feel welcome wherever you were. Of all the show’s stars, David Schwimmer was the toughest to befriend, initially. Schwimmer, who eventually warmed up, was every bit as competitive in real life as Ross was in the first season’s “The One with All the Poker.” Donovan remembered playing volleyball with Schwimmer and being taken aback to find Schwimmer maniacally spiking the ball, as if he were intent on ritually slaughtering his opponents.

  And as a regular attendee at the weekly tapings of Friends, Donovan would sit in the audience and watch his girlfriend perform, and be stunned by her versatility. Not only was Aniston beautiful, he thought, she was an incredibly gifted actor. And while Donovan suspected comedy was not even her strongest suit as an actor, she was remarkably good in every scene she was in.

  Given the intense pressure of the outside world, it was substantially easier for the stars of Friends to share their private lives with their costars as well. There was an entire solar system of false or misleading or intrusive information out there about each of them, and a nation of hungry gossip readers desperate for a glimpse of their favorite friends. All of which made it more pleasant to celebrate birthdays together or get together at each other’s houses on weekends. The tabloid stress made them even closer than they might have been otherwise. It was an education to be inside the bubble of stardom.

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  —

  After the first season, which worked on a Tuesday shooting schedule to accommodate James Burrows, Friends episodes were traditionally made over a five-day stretch, beginning on Mondays with a table read and ending in front of an audience on Friday evenings. The first three days were devoted to rehearsal, with the cast and director walking through the week’s script. Those Mondays, Tuesdays, and Wednesdays made television feel like a theatrical production, with no cameras or technical crew present. It was the actors alone in a room with that week’s chosen director, working through the scenes, figuring out blocking, entrances and exits, and the nuances of line delivery. The director would also sit in on a tone meeting with Kauffman and Crane, in which they would be walked through the nuances of the script. Early in the season, the script would have been long since completed. By the end of the season, scripts would still be labored over in the writers’ room until just before the week started.

  Kauffman saw every possible variety of acting prep during her tenure at Friends. Sometimes actors would come in and nail their performance during the first table read, and then spend the entire week trying to get back to where they had started. Others would whiff at the table read but steadily build their performance until they were ready by Friday.

  At the end of the day on Tuesday and Wednesday, the cast would do a full run-through of the episode for the writing staff. This was generally the first opportunity the writing staff had to see their script performed, and the run-through would serve as a chance for both the writers and the performers to identify which parts of the script did and did not work. The run-throughs on Tuesdays and Wednesdays would also give the writers and showrunners an opportunity to provide notes to the directors. If they felt that certain lines were not being struck properly or wanted to change the orientation of certain scenes, they would speak to that week’s director and make suggestions about how to rework a given moment. The cast could also ask questions or make suggestions about potential changes to the script.

  Most weeks, the writer of the episode—the person who had been designated by Crane and Kauffman to get the writing credit, the team nature of the effort notwithstanding—would be on set, there to field questions and concerns from the performers. “Is there a better joke here?” they would sometimes be asked, and the writer would bring the request back upstairs to be fulfilled. Everyone was expected to be professionally and emotionally invested in making the show the best it could be. Producer Todd Stevens had once been disturbed by a persistent hum of background noise during a run-through, and had stormed backstage to discover a crew member eating Triscuits with peanut butter and watching television. Stevens fired him on the spot.

  During this early part of the week, potential weaknesses with the story were identified, and the writing staff was dispatched to repair faulty or misshapen lines, or offer alternate suggestions for actors struggling with a particular word or phrase. There were times, as well, when entire plotlines fell apart on first impact with performance, and the writers would have to leap into action to repair a damaged story line or replace it wholesale—even as they were engaged in writing new episodes for the weeks to come.

  In the pre-Internet era, production assistants would have to physically deliver updated copies of the script to the performers, producers, crew members, network execs, and Warner Bros. staff assigned to the show. Starting from the table read, each night ended with a PA delivering three hundred updated scripts to people’s homes and offices, whether it was ten P.M. or five A.M.

  Scripts would come in in various states of repair, often depending on their placement in the season. Early in the season, the cast would often work with crisp scripts that had been polished in the off-season. By the end of the season, the pressure of writing twenty-four new scripts each season began to add up, and it was notably more likely that unpolished or crude material might be in need of major revisions. Tuesday’s run-through would generally send the writers back to repair or adjust their script, often substantially, and Wednesday’s run-through reflected those changes.

  Meanwhile, the producers and crew were busy preparing new sets for that week’s episode. Some episodes might not venture beyond Central Perk and the familiar apartment sets. Others might require new workplaces, doctors’ offices, apartments, or even more. The tackle-football g
ame in “The One with the Football” demanded the use of an entire second soundstage to fill the role of a public park.

  The crew often faced significant challenges turning around needed props and sets under such conditions. During the week of shooting “The One with the Dollhouse,” property master Marjorie Coster-Praytor had to spend her time traveling from shoe store to shoe store and asking if she could purchase any shoeboxes from them. To design a charmingly homemade dollhouse for Phoebe, she would need about ten shoeboxes. And since the dollhouse would eventually catch fire, Coster-Praytor had to build six separate models, meaning she was in search of sixty shoeboxes in total. When shoe stores could not provide enough, Coster-Praytor was reduced to begging wardrobe for spare shoeboxes.

  Meanwhile, she was also shopping for a Victorian-style dollhouse that might serve as Monica’s cherished inheritance, finding one she liked at a miniature-specialty store and asking them to refurbish it to her specifications. Miracles like this would have to be accomplished every week on Friends. At the end of the episode, Coster-Praytor burst into tears watching Phoebe’s dollhouse, over which she had taken such pains, burn.

  And sometimes the crew’s work was a collective endeavor. Coster-Praytor was tasked with the challenge of determining just what the giant poking device, used to prod Monica and Rachel’s recumbent, and possibly dead, neighbor Ugly Naked Guy in “The One with the Giant Poking Device,” might be made from. It was ultimately Matt LeBlanc, who loved to visit the props department and see what they were working on, who suggested just the right type of aluminum to purchase.

  Thursday was camera lock-in day. The work of the prior three days was presented to the crew, who layered in their contributions. The camera crew took note of, and occasionally adjusted, the blocking. The sound crew figured out how best to capture the dialogue. There were further rehearsals, but the process no longer felt like a theatrical production. This was now clearly a television show, and many of the decisions and fixes made on Thursdays came from taking the preceding three days’ work and translating it for the necessities of television.