Generation Friends

by Saul Austerlitz

  The second half of Friends would come to be dominated by Chandler and Monica’s burgeoning relationship, and its air of easy warmth would reinvigorate the show. The writers were tasked with finding situations to put Chandler and Monica in that would stretch or challenge them, but the conflicts were smaller and more limited than those granted to Ross and Rachel earlier in the series. Chandler and Monica fight over whether to spend Chandler’s carefully hoarded savings on the wedding; Chandler has erectile dysfunction; Phoebe introduces Monica to a British foodie she believes will be Monica’s soul mate.

  Friends still leaned occasionally on the crisis-and-resolution model, with Chandler the runaway groom taking off before the wedding and needing to be hauled back in to walk down the aisle. But the richer thread of Friends story lines grows out of the audience’s expectations for Chandler and Monica’s relationship, and the ways in which the show subverts or undermines those expectations. Someone does have a baby soon after their wedding, but it is the single Rachel, impregnated by Ross after a secretive one-night stand. Monica thinks she will freak out her husband while they wait for Rachel to give birth by telling him that it is time for them, too, to think of starting a family. Instead, Chandler surprises her by calmly agreeing.

  Friends does not withhold the expected happy ending—this was not that kind of show—but provides it in a manner that encompasses and withstands heartache. Chandler and Monica struggle to conceive, and must eventually come to grips with infertility. “It means that my guys won’t get off their Barcaloungers and you have a uterus that is prepared to kill the ones that do,” Chandler tells Monica in “The One with the Fertility Test,” after spending the day fitfully attempting to masturbate in a doctor’s office. (“It’s not OK to do it in a doctor’s office,” Monica hectors him, “but it is OK to do it in a parked car behind a Taco Bell?”) Friends was a fantasy of adult life as an extension of adolescence, all hormones and cliques, but it was intent on delivering its happy endings only upon completion of its round of meaningfully adult disappointment.

  The last two seasons of Friends were weighed down by Chandler and Monica’s setbacks and regrets. After giving up on having children of their own, Chandler and Monica commence the adoption process, only to find themselves hamstrung once more. Joey insists on dropping off a handwritten letter to the adoption agency in “The One Where Rachel’s Sister Babysits,” and his clumsy use of the thesaurus (“they are warm, nice people with big hearts” becomes “they are humid, prepossessing homo sapiens with full-sized aortic pumps”) convinces Chandler and Monica that their chances of adopting a child have been torpedoed once and for all. “We’re gonna be one of those old couples that collects orchids or has a lot of birds,” Monica moans. Even when Chandler calls the agency and tries to resolve their concerns, Monica remains despondent: “Just tell me on the way to the bird store.”

  Later, in “The One with the Birth Mother,” the adoption manager is convinced that Chandler is a doctor and Monica is a reverend, and refuses to hear otherwise. “I could perform an operation on you and prove it if you’d like,” Chandler offers. He winds up delivering a lovely speech to the birth mother: “I love my wife more than anything in this world. It kills me that I can’t give her a baby. I really want a kid. And when that day finally comes, I’ll learn how to be a good dad. But my wife, she’s already there. She’s a mother. Without a baby.”

  The uncertainty on Friends, as it neared its conclusion, stemmed primarily from the fraught question of Ross and Rachel’s relationship, but it was Chandler and Monica who provided its emotional resonance. They were the ones who were prompting the sudden, lurching adjustments to maturity. The show was growing up alongside its audience. But as Chandler and Monica wrestled with marriage and child rearing, Ross and Rachel were still wrestling with the same twentysomething emotional turmoil they had at the very start of Friends.

  CHAPTER 16

  PIVOT

  The Ballad of Ross and Rachel, Part 4

  The season after London brings the return of panicky Ross, and much of its non-Chandler-and-Monica plot is occupied with his performative ritual of self-abasement to prove to the justifiably suspicious Emily that he is committed to their relationship. He pledges to stop seeing Rachel socially, to the intense dismay of their friends. Rachel, honoring Ross’s fidelity, hides out in her room rather than be caught by Emily—happily hectoring Ross by speakerphone from across the Atlantic Ocean—eating in the same room as her former boyfriend. But the truth will out, and once again, a season finale maneuvers Ross and Rachel into acknowledging the ferocity of their attraction.

  When “The One in Vegas” begins, Joey is stranded in Las Vegas, his much-ballyhooed film shoot having unexpectedly disintegrated. Joey is reduced to working as a gladiator at Caesars Palace, posing with tourists for their snapshots. On a call home, Joey begs Chandler not to come out to Nevada to apologize in person for having failed to summon the necessary belief in his cinematic dreams, but Monica surprises Chandler with a pair of plane tickets for their upcoming first anniversary, and Phoebe, still mad over having missed the trip to London due to her pregnancy (and Kudrow’s real-life one), plans to accompany them. Rachel and Ross both have flimsy reasons for being unable to fly out with their three friends (Rachel has a work presentation, and Ross has tickets to a Van Gogh exhibit), so they agree to fly out the next day. (Who does Ross go to these intellectual events with? It seems unlikely that any of his friends would ever go with him.)

  Monica has confided in Phoebe that she saw her ex-boyfriend Richard (Tom Selleck) and had lunch with him the day before, and when Phoebe accidentally spills the tea on the airplane, Chandler is incensed, although he manfully attempts to mask it, clenching his jaw and contorting his mouth in a failing effort to keep his cool. “You grabbed a bite,” he parrots back to Monica, somehow making bite sound like an obscure word from a foreign language. “I think we should see other people,” Chandler joked after Monica tried to sell him on a portmanteau like “an-Nevada-versary” to describe their trip, but now he is genuinely concerned about the health of their relationship and trying desperately to hide it.

  Meanwhile, Rachel, intrigued by Phoebe’s offhand suggestion that the only reason anyone ever wants alone time in their apartment is to prance around naked, proceeds to do just that. She has forgotten, or conveniently overlooked, that the windows of Ross’s new apartment could be seen from hers. Ross, flipping through a coffee-table book, is distracted by Rachel’s impromptu show and rapidly convinces himself that he is its intended audience. “What kind of game is she playing?” he wonders to himself, while also being perhaps the only man in America who would refer to himself, in his own thoughts, as “Dr. Geller.”

  In the next scene, Ross is knocking on Rachel’s door, leaning on the door frame and barely suppressing a knowing smirk: “Hey.” He hardly gives Rachel a chance to say hello before laying out some ground rules: “This is just about tonight. I don’t want to go through with this if it’s going to raise the question of us.” Ross is already taking off his shoes and disrobing when Rachel disabuses him of the idea that they are about to have a sexual holiday. Now thoroughly ashamed, he hastily picks up his clothes and flees for the door, all the while denying he ever thought Rachel wanted to have sex with him.

  Chandler and Monica almost make up in the next scene before she promises that next time, she’ll make sure to let him know before she sees Richard. Chandler demands that she never see him again, and the two part angrily.

  Rachel and Ross are now sitting together on the plane to Las Vegas, and as Rachel daintily removes her sweater, she mocks him: “Just letting you know this is not an invitation to the physical act of love.” Rachel tells him she is not embarrassed about last night, being more secure than he is, generally speaking, and Ross proceeds to test her claim by unexpectedly shouting for the other passengers to hear: “Hey, lady, I don’t care how much you want it, OK? I am not going to have sex with you in the bathroom.”
Matters escalate from there, with Rachel kissing the balding man in the next row on the head and then blaming it on Ross when he turns around: “I think he just really likes you.” Ross tells their seatmate that Rachel is that teacher who had a baby with her student, and Rachel proceeds to call the flight attendant before dumping water into Ross’s lap. Her friend has had an accident, she tells her; does she have any spare pants he might borrow?

  By the end of the flight, Rachel has fallen asleep on Ross’s shoulder, and he looks down at the pen in his hand, getting a twinkle in his eye that rapidly transforms into an evil glimmer. (Ross never knows when to quit.) In the final scene of the first half of the two-part episode, Rachel says good-bye to the flight attendant while entirely unaware of the handlebar mustache and goatee drawn on her face with indelible ink.

  Rachel discovers Ross’s prank when they arrive at Caesars Palace, and Phoebe assumes they have come from a rowdy costume party. Ross adopts a mock-apologetic tone as Rachel stalks off: “Rach, wait! The men’s room is that way.”

  At the same time, Chandler has spotted Monica overseeing a raucous session at the craps table and stalks off with his weekend bag: “See you later, Mon.” He is hurt over Richard and believes he sees the writing on the wall: “I know he’s the love of your life.” “Not anymore,” Monica responds, and Chandler softens, abandoning his plans to flee the city. Monica picks up his bag and is taken aback: “OK, this is empty.” “I wanted to make a dramatic scene,” Chandler responds, “but I hate packing.”

  Now it is Monica and Chandler together at the craps table, with Chandler’s task to pick out numbers to roll, and to up the ante with each roll. If she rolls an eight, they will buy everyone at the table a steak dinner (Chandler chuckles when Monica asks if they will really do that); if she rolls another, they will rent the largest suite at the hotel. Where can Chandler go from here? “You roll another hard eight and we get married, here, tonight.” The audience roars, and Monica turns to face Chandler, a look of disbelief on her face. She shushes the table fiercely: “Shut up! It just got interesting.”

  She asks Chandler to repeat himself and asks if he is serious, and he responds, “Yes. I love you. I’ve never loved anybody as much as I love you.” Monica rolls, and one of the dice flies under the table. Monica and Chandler crouch to study the die, which leans against the table, poised partway between the 4 and the 5. “It’s a four,” declares Chandler huskily, and Monica’s face melts into a smile: “I think so too.”

  As Chandler and Monica gallop toward marriage, Ross and Rachel are getting steadily drunker in their hotel room. Rachel picks up the phone to restock: “Hello, Vegas, we would like some more alcohol, and you know what else, we would like some more beers.” Only after finishing her order does she realize she has forgotten to dial. Ross and Rachel are both disheveled by now, and Ross cajoles Rachel into visiting the casino by agreeing to let her draw on his face with the same indelible marker. Ross struts through Caesars Palace with cat’s whiskers straddling his nose and “ROSS” stamped on his forehead.

  The entirety of “The One in Vegas” has duped us into believing that the A-plot here is Chandler and Monica, and the B-plot is Ross and Rachel. It is Chandler and Monica who are celebrating an anniversary, who are fighting over their relationship, who are talking marriage. Ross and Rachel are doodling on each other’s faces and playing sophomoric pranks on each other, so we can rest assured that “The One in Vegas” will not be advancing their story in any meaningful way. And then Friends plays another one of the tricks it enjoys pulling on its audience.

  Chandler and Monica have prepared for their impromptu nuptials by gathering their something old, new, borrowed, and blue at the casino gift shop. Monica “borrows” a sweatshirt by sticking it under her shirt, and Chandler hurries her along when she sighs over her imaginary pregnancy: “OK, one thing at a time.” Chandler enters the twenty-four-hour wedding chapel at a jaunty angle, strolling in like a visiting English aristocrat in middle-management leisurewear: “Hello, one marriage please.” Chandler jumps out of his seat as the exit music plays for the couple preceding them, clapping his hands and declaring, “OK, this is it, we’re going to get married.” Monica clasps his wrist and asks, “Are you sure you want to do this?”

  Their last-second tête-à-tête is interrupted by a noise at the chapel door, where none other than Ross and Rachel are stumbling out, Rachel’s plastic bouquet of flowers tapping against Ross’s arm. They proceed to drunkenly throw rice on each other (“Hello, Mrs. Ross!” “Why, hello, Mr. Rachel!”) before turning their separate ways, each presumably intending to vomit alone for their first act as a married couple. Monica and Chandler turn to each other in shock, and the season ends.

  Once again, we have been hoodwinked into looking away from Ross and Rachel, only to discover that their story is at the center of Friends. We have been tricked into letting Ross and Rachel surprise us once more.

  Sixth-season opener “The One After Vegas” milks a good deal of humor out of Ross and Rachel’s being completely unaware of their hasty, drunken marriage. Where Rachel is horrified and intent on immediately undoing it, Ross takes a perverse kind of pleasure in silently walking around knowing that he is actually married to Rachel. He spends a good chunk of the first half of the season obsessing over the notion of being a man who has been divorced three times before the age of thirty and rejects that identity. Ross sees himself as now down at the bottom of the dating barrel, with only quadruple divorcés, murderers, and geologists to keep him company. He tells Rachel he has gone ahead and filed for the divorce when in fact he has not.

  When Rachel catches him out in his lies of omission, she tells Ross she has never been this mad with him before. Ross has a knack for always knowing precisely the wrong thing to say: “What about the time I said we were on a break?” He pleads with Rachel to cooperate with their sham marriage: “How is this going to affect you, really?” Ross knows the way to his pseudo-wife’s heart. He offers to let her put together a wedding registry and keep all the gifts.

  So why do we root for Ross and Rachel to wind up together, given all the carnage of their abortive relationship and its many failed reboots? The answer speaks to the triumph of hope over experience and our innate desire for happy endings. Ross and Rachel were so calamitously ill disposed toward each other that the show had seen fit to establish a second couple (albeit one that had started as merely a brief interlude) simply to restore some order to Friends’ notion of what a romantic relationship might be. Ross and Rachel were constantly being jostled out of alignment by circumstance, but the show was silently promising us that even a single moment where their heartbeats could pause and align might be enough to reset their entire relationship.

  We knew, intellectually, that Ross and Rachel were not quite right for each other, an ill-suited match of temperaments and interests, but we rooted for Ross and Rachel because we were rooting for the idea of love, for the idea that two people could find their way to each other, no matter the obstacles. This was a deeply powerful sentiment, whether you were, like Ross, a two-time divorcé, or a fifteen-year-old boy nursing his first crush.

  Ross and Rachel’s story was, more than anything else, a remarkable exercise in continuity. It would take 236 half hours to resolve the question of Ross and Rachel, to determine whether we would get the happy ending we craved or not.

  In truth, this was not quite right; we knew that Friends would ultimately grant us that happy ending, but we did not know when or how. Friends’ Ross and Rachel story line was an exercise in delayed gratification. Seen from one perspective, Friends was ludicrous. What couple, even a fictional one, waited ten years to figure out if they wanted to actually be together or not? But Friends asked for patience. It asked us to withstand our hunger for immediate resolution. There was no real end; there was just the next installment.

  CHAPTER 17

  NOT ACTIONABLE

  Lyle v. Friends and the Long Tail of a Laws
uit

  Amaani Lyle sat on the table, her legs folded underneath her. Producer Todd Stevens had received her résumé and invited her for an interview to be a writers’ assistant on Friends. She met with Adam Chase and Greg Malins, who were in chairs across the room, and the entire meeting was the three of them bantering and trading jokes. They offered her the job, and the twenty-six-year-old Lyle cried tears of joy at the thought of being a writers’ assistant for the sixth season of one of the most beloved series on television. This was going to be great.

  The job of writers’ assistant was simultaneously grueling and invigorating. The main responsibility of the writers’ assistant was to assiduously monitor the conversation in the writers’ room and write down any relevant ideas or thoughts the writers spit out. Often, the writers would want to go back and review ideas that had come up a minute or an hour prior, and a detailed record of the discussion was essential to the work of comedy writing. Writers’ assistants could never zone out, never lose the thread of the conversation.

  The work was invigorating, though, because serving as a writers’ assistant was the only trusted route to becoming a television writer. Assistants were universally understood to be writers-in-training and were invited to offer pitches or story suggestions—occasionally. Too much, and the writers might conclude that you were not doing your actual job of transcription. The assistant’s job was a kind of writing boot camp, placing young writers in the vicinity of the work they hoped to soon be doing themselves. Assistants sought to survive the punishing period of service before they could be welcomed into the inner circle.