Generation Friends

by Saul Austerlitz

  Lembeck pulled Sheen aside and asked him, “What’s going on? Why are you looking at me?”

  “Can you look at my legs?” Sheen asked.

  “What are you talking about?” Lembeck replied, puzzled.

  “Look at my legs!” Sheen insisted.

  Lembeck looked down, and Sheen’s legs were rattling. The star of Platoon and Wall Street was so nervous to be on the Friends soundstage that his body was shaking uncontrollably. Lembeck drafted Sheen’s brother, actor Emilio Estevez, who was in the audience, to set up two director’s chairs off in a corner and rub his back and quietly coax him to return to the stage.

  This was a challenge, too, for performers not used to the rhythms of filming Friends. Kristin Dattilo, who played a pizza deliverywoman in “The One Where Ross Can’t Flirt,” struggled with the remarkable response some of the punch lines would get from the audience. After Ross flailingly attempted to banter with her about the properties of gas, she and David Schwimmer had to hold for upward of three minutes until the raucous audience settled down enough for them to continue. Dattilo had to remind herself not to break character. She had been in numerous sitcoms before but had never faced an audience as rowdy, or as excited to laugh, as that of Friends.

  Friends depended on the wider audience’s appreciation of these stars, but there were moments when the show miscalculated. Director Michael Lembeck remembered instructing Chris Isaak to pause for a roar of excitement when he took the stage in “The One After the Superbowl,” and then being taken aback when the audience was entirely silent. They did not know who Isaak was.

  Acting on Friends, whether as a star or a guest performer, meant coming face-to-face with the astounding power of the audience’s love and desire, and a fear of what it might mean to let the audience down. Kristin Dattilo was in her dressing room preparing before the shoot when she was interrupted by the disarming sensation of the floor beneath her shaking. Dattilo briefly wondered if Los Angeles had been struck by another earthquake before realizing that it was only the show’s audience, anxiously anticipating the show, stomping their feet in unison. She was feeling in her body, as her bones rattled, what everyone else could only intuit: the passion that audiences had for Friends.

  CHAPTER 14

  IT’S NOT OVER UNTIL SOMEONE SAYS I DO

  The Ballad of Ross and Rachel, Part 3

  Having given fans their happy ending, Friends audaciously snatched it back and demanded that audiences make their peace without Ross and Rachel. The door never fully closed on them, and the show repeatedly juked and feinted in the direction of bringing them back together without ever really doing so. It comes as a shock to later realize, near the end of the show’s run, in thinking about Ross and Rachel as perpetually on the verge of getting back together, that they had in fact been apart for two-thirds of the show.

  Ross and Rachel alternated between tenderness and juvenile bickering, never able to settle into a comfortable routine as friends. At the close of the third season, audiences were left to wonder which door Ross would enter at the beach house where the crew was staying: Rachel’s or that of his girlfriend Bonnie (Christine Taylor). Ross and Rachel had kissed after she admitted she had broken up with him because she was mad, and all seemed on the brink of being restored.

  The writers themselves did not know how they would resolve the cliffhanger; they weren’t sure which door Ross would enter at the start of the next season. So it was something of a surprise even to them that the fourth-season opener, “The One with the Jellyfish,” would dispatch their romance with such brutal efficiency. Rachel’s hopeful smile as he approaches her after choosing her door is heartbreaking, but soon, she hands Ross an eighteen-page letter to read at the end of a late night spent talking, and Ross accidentally falls asleep partway through.

  “Does it?” Rachel asks him the next morning, and Ross, utterly clueless, stumbles his way into an answer: “It . . . does.” Rachel hugs him with relief, and it is not until Ross finally reads the entire letter that he understands what he has agreed to. “It so does not!” he sulks to himself. Ross now realizes he has been asked if he can accept full responsibility for what went wrong in their relationship, so that Rachel can begin to trust him again. (The precise question, however strangely phrased, was “Does that seem like something you can do?”) When Rachel gently slaps his face while telling him that he just needed a bit of maturity and perspective to see the error of his ways, Ross snaps.

  There is an immediate cut to the kitchen, where Monica overhears Ross returning to his mantra, now delivered at maximal volume: “WE WERE ON A BREAK!” Ross goes on to critique not just the message but the medium itself: “It was five thirty in the morning. And you had rambled on for eighteen pages.” He pauses, bending over to pick up his shoes before delivering the coup de grâce: “Front and back!”

  The two lovers seem to bring out the absolute worst in each other, with Ross a petulant, whining pedant and Rachel a frosty queen bee. “I can’t believe I even thought of getting back together with you,” Rachel tells him. “We are so over.” Ross makes a sad face and pretends to cry before snapping back into martial severity: “Fine by me!”

  Rachel and Ross are apart but continue to define themselves by each other’s absence. In “The One with Joey’s New Girlfriend,” they each wind up in an imaginary relationship—Rachel with a college student, Ross with a woman who is actually just using his services as a babysitter—out of the desire to reduce the other to hopeless jealousy.

  Even when more serious relationships develop, they are continually haunted by what once was. Ross begins to date visiting Brit Emily (Helen Baxendale), and when the two unexpectedly get engaged, Rachel tries her best to make her peace with it. “I’m happy for them,” she announces, before getting flustered and aiming her sights a bit lower: “I’m working on it.”

  Rachel plans to skip the wedding, telling Monica, “It’s Ross. How can I watch him get married?” “I’m not in love with Ross,” she later says to Phoebe, fleshing out her thoughts. “I’m not going to Ross’s wedding because he’s my ex-boyfriend and that would be really uncomfortable, not because I’m still in love with him.”

  Rachel aggressively trims some flowers with a pair of scissors as she carries on: “Hey, I like Ross as much as the next guy. Clearly, I have feelings for him, but feelings don’t mean love. Yeah, I still have loving feelings for Ross, you know—yeah! I have continuing feelings of love, but that doesn’t mean that I’m still in love with him. I have sexual feelings for him, but I do love him.” Rachel finally hears herself and leaps out of her chair, appalled: “Why didn’t you tell me?”

  Friends keeps its attention on Ross and Rachel by framing its emotional story lines through the perspective of their onetime and potentially future love. Ross is off to London to get married—to someone else—and somehow the show’s big question is whether Rachel will attend. Admittedly, she has fantasies of breaking up the marriage before it even begins: “It’s not over until someone says I do.”

  Even after Rachel arrives in London and merely offers Ross her fondest wishes, he cannot seem to shake the image of her from his mind, or the sound of her name from his lips. The fourth-season finale, “The One with Ross’s Wedding,” ends with Ross, gazing into Emily’s eyes, repeating the minister’s words with one crucial, accidental substitution: “I, Ross, take thee, Rachel . . .”

  The writers did not know until late in the season just how they would end the wedding episode; they merely trusted themselves to come up with something memorable. Schwimmer was running lines when instead of saying, “Emily, the taxi’s here,” he said, “Rachel, the taxi’s here.” Greg Malins turned to David Crane and said, “That’s what happens.” Ross would get his bride-to-be’s name wrong. In that pre-Internet era, the writers frantically quizzed each other: Did anyone remember a plot turn like this before on television?

  For someone who appears to live his life in a low hum of consta
nt anxiety, flop sweat perpetually dripping off his forehead, Ross is notably calm in this moment of maximal erroneousness. He smiles sheepishly before restarting, this time taking care to actually insert the name of the woman he is set to marry. It is as if his mouth has spoken a truth that the rest of him is not ready to acknowledge, and he is momentarily at peace.

  CHAPTER 15

  THEY DON’T KNOW THAT WE KNOW THEY KNOW WE KNOW

  Bringing Chandler and Monica Together

  It began as a whim. The process of mapping out a season of Friends was exhaustive, and the show’s writers were intent on trotting out every possibility for a story arc, however dim its chances might be of making it to air. So when the second season was being planned, one of the writers tossed out an idea: “What if we get Chandler and Monica together?”

  The thought was intended less as a permanent shift in the gravity of the series and more as a fun plotline, good for a few episodes before the status quo snapped back into place. But given how much of the first season was dedicated to Ross and Rachel’s fitful courtship, and how much of the second season would likely continue along that track, the general consensus was that it would be far too much of a good thing to work in two romantic relationships among the show’s six protagonists. Writer Shana Goldberg-Meehan thought it seemed “a little desperate.”

  The idea of bringing Monica and Chandler together was dropped, not to return until planning commenced for season 4. The showrunners were planning a season that would culminate in a visit to London, and Crane and Kauffman had determined that Ross would be marrying someone—just whom, they did not know yet—in Britain. But what else might happen there?

  The writers were put to work on hashing out plots, and an idea formed that Ross’s getting married—for the second time, no less—would send the perpetually single Monica into an emotional tailspin. Worse yet, her disapproving parents would be there to further stir the pot. Her parents’ hectoring could lead her to drink to excess at the wedding, but what else might she do?

  Late one night, toward the end of the season, when stories had begun to run dry and inspiration was in short supply, the writers broke up into two rooms and were instructed to come back with ideas for the impending London episodes. When the room reconvened, a proposal emerged that Chandler and Monica would sleep together in London.

  Almost instantly, the writers’ room split into two divergent groups. On one side were the skeptics, who felt the show had enough romantic plotlines already. Creating another romantic encounter between the show’s main characters would only feed the Friends naysayers, convinced that the series was merely an excuse to slap its attractive characters together. A Chandler-Monica plotline smacked of lazy storytelling, of simply running through all of Friends’ romantic permutations until none were left. There was a fear, as well, that bringing Chandler and Monica together would be perceived as near-incestuous. Friends had done so much to establish a sibling vibe between its main characters, and to violate this might offend or dismay the show’s audience.

  Gathered on the other side of the debate were those writers who felt this was the ideal moment to hook up Chandler and Monica. Monica was feeling gloomy and self-pitying, and might seize on Chandler as an emotional chew toy in a dark moment.

  Jill Condon, who came down firmly on the pro side of the debate, was thinking about destination weddings and the ways in which they could prompt people to act in ways they otherwise might not. Condon felt that if Chandler and Monica were together at Monica’s apartment, inertia would forbid their taking so drastic a step, but being in another country, surrounded by all the trappings of wedded bliss, would be another matter entirely.

  No punches were thrown, but the two sides each felt passionate, and the argument in the writers’ room carried on for some time, with each sure that the other was making a potentially series-altering mistake. Finally, those in favor of bringing Chandler and Monica together won out, with a consensus building around the idea of trotting this out as a wholly unexpected surprise.

  Crucially, this idea was always and only intended to be a temporary one. At first, it was presumed that it would be a season-ending stinger—a hilarious capper for season 4, leaving fans buzzing but unlikely to result in any further developments. A few highly oblique hints earlier in the season alluded to the possibility of Chandler and Monica’s getting together when it was still only under consideration. In the opening episode of the fourth season, “The One with the Jellyfish,” where the six friends are on their beach trip, Chandler good-naturedly teases Monica about their going out together.

  As they lie side by side on the beach, Chandler reframes the discussion: “All right, there’s a nuclear holocaust. I’m the last man on earth. Would you go out with me?” Monica’s response is priceless in its lack of enthusiasm: “Eh.” Monica is later stung by a jellyfish, and Chandler, we eventually learn, must urinate on her to relieve the pain. At the close of the episode, Chandler comically pleads his case one final time, and Monica partially bends, offering Chandler her fondness and little more: “OK, all right. I think you’re great. I think you’re sweet and you’re smart, and I love you.” She pauses, and then presses on: “But you will always be the guy who peed on me.”

  Friends appeared to be closing the door on Chandler and Monica, although a lovelorn Chandler, heartbroken over his crush on Kathy, touchingly asked to sleep on her couch in “The One with Joey’s New Girlfriend.” Then the planning for London commenced in earnest, and the writers decided to expand the Chandler-Monica surprise. There would still be the shock of seeing them together in bed, but now we would also get a touch of the aftermath—of their twin panic attacks at the thought of what they had done and of how their friends might respond if they found out.

  London happened in large part because of VHS sales. Friends was an enormous hit across the world. Overseas, Warner Bros. had sought to capitalize on the success of Friends by releasing the show on videocassette for home viewers. (The show was on the air in numerous foreign countries, including the UK, Ireland, Australia, New Zealand, Canada, the Philippines, India, Greece, and Albania.) Word trickled out to Kevin Bright that Warner Bros. had sold $125 million worth of Friends videocassettes in the United Kingdom alone. He realized it was past time to rethink the potential of television on home video. He proposed a Friends video compilation for the American market to Warner Bros., who were initially lukewarm to the idea. The British were collectors, he was told, and Americans would refuse to pay for something they were already receiving for free. Eventually, Bright proposed including deleted scenes from episodes, and The Best of Friends Volume 1 wound up selling over a million copies in the US.

  Bright began thinking about the vast British audience for Friends videocassettes and came to the realization that finding a credible reason for Friends to film in London could make for a remarkable coup. And once he commenced planning, he decided that it might be more feasible than he had initially thought. If Friends were to film its fourth-season finale, in which Ross was to get married, on the lot in Los Angeles, they would still have to build all-new sets for the church, reception hall, and hotel rooms. The differences in cost between building the sets on the Warner Bros. lot and in Britain would be minimal.

  Still, the cost of transporting hundreds of crew members across the Atlantic, along with thousands of pounds of equipment, was prohibitive. Bright was approached by Virgin mogul and virtuoso self-promoter Richard Branson, who offered to provide seventy-five upper-class tickets on his Virgin airline with only one proviso: He wanted to appear on the show. Bright gulped, and agreed to approach the show’s writing staff with an awkward request: Please find a role that Richard Branson might play.

  Set decorator Greg Grande went out to London a month early to scout locations and prepare sets. The wedding would take place in a burned-out church. And while the scenes would ultimately be shot on a soundstage, Grande toured local churches in search of aesthetic inspiration. Over the cour
se of the next two weeks, Grande tracked down elegant wrought-iron gates, candelabras, and chandeliers for a ruined-Gothic vibe. He put stones and rocks to work as rubble inside the church set, and when standard-issue church pews would not fit the space, Grande made use of damaged chairs and furniture to preserve the charred aesthetic. He even designed special double-wicked candles that would give off a fuller-bodied, brighter light. (The show remembered everything, it seemed, except to have Ross’s son, Ben, attend his father’s wedding.)

  Jill Condon was walking through LAX with the cast and crew on their way to London and was stunned to see the cameras stalking the stars’ every move. She knew how enormously popular they were, but it was something else entirely to be exposed firsthand to their fishbowl existence. She didn’t know how they managed.

  The writers worked daily with the actors but rarely spent time with them, and London was an opportunity for the two wings of the show to interact under less stressful circumstances. Condon was pleasantly surprised to discover how much she enjoyed talking to Lisa Kudrow, or how Jennifer Aniston would squeeze her arm as she walked by on set, just two overworked, exhausted young women sharing a moment together.

  Everywhere they went in London, the cast and crew were shadowed by hordes of fans, directed by newspaper and radio reports pointing them to the day’s location. Paparazzi were swarming, and Todd Stevens grew concerned about the physical well-being of his cast. He had been concerned that not enough security was being provided for London, and when they were surrounded by screaming fans, he felt he had been proved right. The fans were persistent, but they were also easily won over. After the stars took photos with some of the crowd, they willingly departed, allowing the shoot to continue.