Generation Friends

by Saul Austerlitz

  The writers came up with a funny solution to the Branson conundrum, casting him as a souvenir salesman who gets Joey to purchase a ludicrous Union Jack top hat. Branson was no actor, though, and one of the prime challenges of the London shoot was working with the mogul until he could credibly deliver his fistful of lines.

  As it happened, the London episodes would be filmed three times, before three different studio audiences, along with location shots near Westminster Abbey and the Tower of London. The plan was designed more for the sake of inclusiveness than necessity. Given the overseas trip, the show’s producers thought it would be a nice gesture to give as many fans as possible the opportunity to see a live performance.

  The schedule also created an accidental test group, where an audience of die-hard Friends fans would be let in on the secret of Monica and Chandler, and their response gauged. Would there be groans of disbelief at the disappointing plot twist, or would they appreciate the surprise?

  Every Friends staffer and crew member present in London would remember the roar of approval when Monica poked her head out from under the covers in Chandler’s hotel room. The cheers and hoots of delight went on and on, drowning out the performers and shaking the room. For Crane and many of the writers present, the feeling was that the cheers would never end, that bringing Chandler and Monica together as a kind of present for the fans was a stroke of inspiration that could never be topped or replicated. And this happened not just at the first taping, but at each of the three tapings of the episode.

  Crane marveled at the length and intensity of the cheers for the big reveal, which rolled out in wave after wave of excitement and jubilation. The show would end up having to trim a full minute of audience appreciation out of the final cut, leaving only a fraction of the applause for viewers at home to take in.

  Jill Condon was intently watching the faces of the five hundred or so fans present for each taping and carefully studying their responses to the big reveal. The fans, Condon thought, were so thoroughly, uncomplicatedly thrilled that she understood the future plans for the show had suddenly, unexpectedly changed. The fans had not only bought Chandler and Monica sleeping together; they loved it. The plan, going into the season, had been that at most, Chandler and Monica would be a one-off. Now Condon turned to her writing partner Amy Toomin and offered a prediction: “They’re going to be a couple.” The audible pleasure of the London crowds had clinched it.

  Even when the writers returned after the hiatus to sketch out the fifth season, the plans for Chandler and Monica remained modest. The string would be played out over the first four episodes, with Monica and Chandler’s increasingly frantic efforts to keep their friendship with benefits secret from the rest of the crew ultimately leading to the extinguishing of their brief romance. But the stories had a life of their own.

  The writers found that they loved writing for Chandler and Monica together. Their relationship introduced colors to their personalities that had previously been undefined. Neurotic sad-sack Chandler now found himself unexpectedly flummoxed by a meaningful romantic relationship. And obsessive-compulsive Monica was now blessed with a foil who might deflate her controlling tendencies.

  It spoke to Friends’ recurring desire to surprise its audience that another plot thread discussed, and ultimately dropped, during the fifth season involved the entire cast relocating to Minnesota. The idea was that Chandler would be unexpectedly transferred to Minnesota at work. Since there was no urgent reason for the characters to stay in New York, each of his friends would ultimately choose to join him there, and Friends would keep them in Minnesota for half a season. They would discover a magical Midwestern respite from New York, with cheap apartments, friendly neighbors, and subzero temperatures. Everyone knew you could not relocate an iconic show to a frigid destination 1,500 miles away, which was precisely why many of the writers argued they should do it.

  At first, it was a joke, but as the room bantered about it, everyone got more and more enthusiastic about the possibilities. There could be jokes about searching for a coffee place to replace Central Perk. They had begun to work out how they would eventually get all the characters back to New York. They could even reshoot the credits sequence in a frozen fountain!

  Giddy with excitement, they approached Crane, who responded pithily: “Are you out of your mind?” The Minnesota interlude was shelved.

  * * *

  —

  Chandler had begun the series as the painfully awkward amateur comedian, the one who might tell the jokes but would never get the girl. When Rachel acknowledges having a sex dream in the first season’s “The One with the Ick Factor,” Chandler notes, “In my dreams, I’m surprisingly inadequate.” In “The One with the Lesbian Wedding,” the coffeehouse conversation turns to which of the crew will likely be last to marry, and without saying a word, everyone’s eyes turn to Chandler.

  Chandler was sexually and emotionally frustrated, and this was the source of his humor, as well as his simmering dissatisfaction. He memorably lashes out at Ross in “The One with the List” as Ross attempts to choose between Rachel and Julie: “Oh, I know this must be so hard. Oh no, two women love me. They’re both gorgeous and sexy. My wallet’s too small for my fifties, and my diamond shoes are too tight!” Chandler knows this will never be his problem.

  He is threatened by other men’s potency. When he begins to date Joey’s ex-girlfriend Kathy in “The One with Phoebe’s Uterus,” he finds himself worrying about how he might compare with his roommate: “We share a wall. So either he’s great in bed or she just liked to agree with him a lot.”

  There is also a less attractive undercurrent to the show that critiques Chandler’s effeminacy as a barrier to romantic triumph; he was regularly shown violating the masculine code via wearing a towel on his head after a bath or blotting his ChapStick with a tissue. Chandler was the one who had to be coached about how not to let his wrist relax too much.

  Chandler and Joey’s relationship notwithstanding, Friends was consumed by the specter of gay panic—of what would happen when its male characters were forced to confront the possibility of sexual intimacy with another man. Friends’ romantically irresolute leading men wrestled with the fear that their masculinity was subject to misinterpretation. Early in the first season, in “The One Where Nana Dies Twice,” Chandler is taken aback when a colleague tries to set him up with a male coworker.

  Chandler, intriguingly, is not horrified to be confused for gay. It is less a mark of Cain than a mistaken identity that he hopes to understand. If he comes off as less inadvertently gay, Chandler thinks, it might be possible to reverse a lifelong cold streak with women. And if people are going to assume he is gay, then at the very least he should be set up with a higher-quality male suitor—a Brian, and not a Lowell.

  Chandler is not gay, but he is perpetually being called out by his friends for his flickering manhood. Chandler is forever catching himself getting too enthusiastic about another man. Chandler glimpses a picture of Rachel’s coworker Tag in “The One with Rachel’s Assistant” and cannot restrain his excitement: “Wo-ho-ho!”

  And yet, Chandler and Joey are allowed to be emotional with each other in a manner mostly closed to other male television characters. Chandler is quiet and awkward in the second season’s “The One Where Joey Moves Out,” unsure what to do with his unruly emotions as his roommate prepares to leave for a bachelor pad of his own. And when Joey finally departs, there is a beautiful self-consciousness to the moment, with neither of the men sure how to acknowledge the weight of the situation.

  When Joey makes a move toward the door, Chandler scoots back to the kitchen counter, running his hands through his hair. “Take care,” Joey tells Chandler, waving his hand half-heartedly toward him. Chandler haltingly steps forward to instigate a hug and then retreats, licking his lips nervously, as if the moment has come and gone. Joey closes the door, and Chandler is left alone with his feelings for a long few second
s before Joey bursts back in and grips him in a bear hug. Chandler smiles in relief and claps his hand gratefully to Joey’s hand atop his chest.

  Chandler and Joey genuinely, uncomplicatedly love each other, and Friends insists that we care about their emotions as much as we might about anyone else’s. It was, in its own way, quietly revolutionary, and a product of Marta Kauffman and David Crane’s insistence on treating the spectrum of sexuality as funny and entirely normal.

  In one of the series’ most affecting episodes, albeit one essentially erased by later developments, Chandler was forced to confront the ghost of his future. Through the first season and a half of the show, the well-named Mr. Heckles (Larry Hankin) shows up unpredictably to rattle and annoy his upstairs neighbors. In “The One Where Heckles Dies,” from Friends’ second season, it is Chandler who finds himself unexpectedly moved by the resonances between the dead man and himself. Chandler digs through Heckles’s things and finds a high school yearbook in which Heckles, too, was voted class clown. He flips through Heckles’s “Big Book of Grievances” and leaps back in alarm when he finds himself pounding on the upstairs ceiling with a broom, just as Heckles did. This, Chandler realizes, is his fate: “This is me. This is what I do. I’m going to end up alone just like he did.”

  Chandler is now wearing Heckles’s bathrobe, nearly shouting at his friends about the future he glimpses for himself: “You’ll see. You guys are all going to go off and get married, and I’m going to end up alone.” He asks Joey if he plans to invite him to spend the holidays with his family in the future. “Heckles Dies” is one of the left-field gems of Friends, taking what could have been a hackneyed sitcom plot and transforming it into a cry for help. Fittingly, the episode reaches its peak when Monica kneels next to Chandler’s chair and seeks to soothe him: “You know what you want now. Most guys don’t even have a clue. You are ready to take risks, you’re ready to be vulnerable and intimate with someone.” And seasons later, it is Monica who will save him from what might have been.

  On Friends, no secret could stay hidden for long, but the writers decided that it would be amusing to give Chandler and Monica an extended opportunity to protect their clandestine relationship from the gaze of others. Upon their return to New York in “The One After Ross Says Rachel,” Monica feelingly tells Chandler that their time together in London meant a lot to her, as she was going through a difficult time with Ross’s wedding. Chandler responds in kind, after a fashion, telling Monica that it meant a great deal to him as well: “You’re really hot.” The end of a meaningful but brief fling has arrived, with everyone’s feelings accounted for, until Chandler bursts back into the room with a question: “I’m still on London time. Does that count?”

  In the next episode, “The One with All the Kissing,” Monica hides under the water when Joey walks in on her in the tub with Chandler. Chandler must explain why he has suddenly been seized with the urge to take a bath—and in Monica and Rachel’s apartment, no less. Joey asks Chandler if he would like some takeout chicken, and he demurs, anxious to get rid of him. But when Monica pops up breathlessly from underwater, she requests some chicken, and Chandler must call Joey back to the bathroom to place his order. Chandler asks for a Coke, and then howls in pain before switching to a Diet Coke (possibly a callback to the stars’ misguided ad campaign for the beverage). Once again, Friends has managed to tell a fabulously dirty joke without saying a word; one imagines a piqued Monica yanking on Chandler’s balls to get a reduced-calorie cola.

  Chandler, we rapidly understand, is a man thrown into the deep end without first learning to swim, scrabbling for a foothold that will not reveal itself. On his way to work, he absentmindedly kisses Monica, and then must kiss Rachel and Phoebe as well, passing it off as a newly acquired European affectation. The sequence emerged from an experience of writer Wil Calhoun’s, when he was just beginning to date his future wife. Calhoun had once absentmindedly kissed her before their relationship was public knowledge, and he thought that Chandler could make a similar mistake.

  Chandler has never been entirely comfortable with physical expression, so watching him attempt casual kissing comes with an added frisson of delicious awkwardness. Monica, too, is not entirely limber in the ways of relationships; when Rachel and Phoebe complain of Chandler’s new Maurice Chevalier impression, she chimes in, too: “It makes me wanna puke.” And Chandler does not yet understand the distinction between a girlfriend and a buddy. At the end of the episode, he tells Monica that it’s too bad that Rachel and Phoebe did not, in addition to witnessing them kissing, also see them having sex (the implication being that Chandler would then have a sexual free pass with them as well). Monica tilts her head skeptically and asks, “Do you know anything about women?” Chandler thinks it over and offers a disarmingly honest answer: “No.”

  Chandler is not underselling himself in the slightest; he genuinely has no idea how to comport himself in a relationship. After Monica asks him to come switch rooms during a weekend getaway, he is frustrated at missing a high-speed chase on television and tells her to give it a rest: “Jeez, relax, Mom.” You can hear the audience audibly gasp at Chandler’s relationship faux pas.

  Chandler’s first instinct on being cornered is to lash out with his wit. After a disastrous secret weekend getaway in “The One with the Kips,” during which he and Monica each pretend to be attending a work event, Monica complains that no one appreciated the food at her wholly imaginary chef convention. Chandler, clearly thinking of his and Monica’s floundering relationship, acidly observes that “maybe it was the kind of food that tasted good at first, but then made everybody vomit and have diarrhea.” (Joey catches them in their lie by noticing their similar stories of spotting Donald Trump while waiting for an elevator, an anecdote that, needless to say, plays notably differently in 2019 than it did in 1998.)

  But Friends finds an emotional truth, and not just a funny argument, in this outburst. Chandler comes in assuming that Monica is planning to break up with him as a result of their fight. Monica disabuses him of that notion, realizing something about her newly minted boyfriend as she speaks: “Chandler, that’s crazy. If you give up every time you have a fight with someone, you’d never be with anyone longer than—ohhh.” Monica lifts her palm, then slaps it forcefully on her thigh, having understood that this might be the source of Chandler’s lifelong relationship drought. She puts her arms around him and squeezes his shoulders: “Welcome to an adult relationship.” (Chandler smiles, then moves back a half step: “We’re in a relationship?”)

  The clumsy attempts at deception carry on for more than half of the fifth season, with both Chandler and Monica scrambling to protect their secret from the prying eyes of their friends. Chandler comes home from work with champagne, and when he discovers the gang together at Monica’s, he releases a Three Stooges noise of disappointment, followed by a hastily composed cover story: “I’m so glad you guys are all here. My office finally got wrinkle-free fax paper.”

  Joey is put to work as a coconspirator in their cover-up, pressed into service as the fall guy in their increasingly slapdash excuses. “All right,” Joey says, reluctantly agreeing to Monica’s demands, “but you do it with me once.” (Joey’s overgrown-frat-boy antics, including this half-hearted demand to have sex with Monica, his longtime friend and his roommate’s girlfriend, might play a bit differently in 2019.) When a pair of Chandler’s boxer shorts is discovered at Monica’s, Joey grumblingly takes the blame: “I’m Joey. I’m disgusting. I take my underwear off in other people’s homes.” Later, Joey’s date spots Chandler and Monica’s video-camera setup, presumably for recording one of their trysts, and storms off, convinced he wants to tape them having sex. “I’m Joey,” he says wearily. “I’m disgusting. I make low-budget adult films.”

  At the apex of “The One with Ross’s Sandwich,” the season’s ninth episode, Rachel discovers a nude Polaroid of Monica and accuses Joey of taking the pictures through a peephole. Chandler, emba
rrassed by all the punches his roommate has taken for him, steps in and says Joey is a sex addict. This leads to an escalating cavalcade of faux revelations, beginning with Joey’s “acknowledging” that he slept with Monica in London. (Chandler cringes but tells Monica, “Well, let’s see what everybody thinks of that.”) Rachel asks Monica about the underwear, and she shamefacedly tells everyone that she was keeping it as a souvenir, going on to say that she set up the camera to “entice” Joey: “I’m Monica. I’m disgusting. I stalk guys and keep their underpants.”

  Eventually, in “The One with All the Resolutions,” Rachel figures it out, listening in on one of Monica’s phone calls after she announces she is off to do the laundry yet again. She picks up the phone and hears Chandler chuckling at their deception: “Laundry—is that my new nickname?”

  Rachel and Joey feel each other out, circling each other warily like gunslingers before a duel.

  “Do you know something?” Joey asks, and Rachel asks him the same question.

  “I might know something,” Joey answers.

  “I might know something too,” says Rachel.

  But neither feels able to reveal what they know, and they slowly turn toward each other: “You don’t know.”

  The charade culminates in one of the most joyous and comedically rewarding half hours of television of the 1990s, “The One Where Everybody Finds Out.” Phoebe is helping Ross move into his new apartment, conveniently located within eye line of Rachel and Monica’s windows. Phoebe spots Chandler and Monica across the way and waves, then sees them reach for each other. Phoebe turns around in horror-movie shock: “My eyes!”

  She retreats to Central Perk, where she compares notes with Rachel and Joey. “I think it’s great—for him,” she decides. “She might be able to do better.” Joey argues forcefully for telling Chandler and Monica that they all know, but Phoebe suggests they have “a little fun of [their] own” and keep their secret a secret. Phoebe wins out, of course, and commences flirting outrageously with Chandler in the hopes of prodding him into revelation.