Lyle was familiar with the demands of a life in the arts. Her father, Bobby Lyle, was a celebrated jazz musician who had worked with the likes of Bette Midler, Al Jarreau, and Anita Baker. She grew up in Los Angeles, attending the UCLA Lab School with the likes of Leonardo DiCaprio, and was one of the few African-American students at the Oakwood School, where she had taken drum lessons and performed in plays. After high school, Lyle attended Emerson College in Boston (Kevin Bright’s alma mater), where she initially saw herself as an actor or director. But writing was something she had always been good at, and she became enamored of the dry, deadpan humor of Steven Wright and early Woody Allen. After working on independent films, a stint as a travel writer for AOL, and a job booking talent for a talk show hosted by Tim Conway Jr., Lyle was hired by Nickelodeon as a writers’ assistant.
During the brief interview, Chase and Malins had mentioned that Friends was a raunchy show, full of sexual innuendo, and that working in the writers’ room would likely require a comfort with sexual banter. Lyle indicated that this wouldn’t be a problem, saying it would be nothing she had not encountered already at Nickelodeon.
After a month or two on the job, Lyle realized just how difficult working on Friends was going to be. The hours were punishing. Even six seasons in, eighteen-hour days were still happening regularly. While others working jobs with more normal hours might have been putting their children to bed or turning on Frasier, the writers on Friends were settling in for the second half of their workday.
It was the nighttime, Lyle believed, when the wheels started to come off. She noticed a peculiar dynamic, wherein certain male writers, likely frustrated with the endless hours imposed by Crane and Kauffman, began to waste others’ time with extended diatribes and rants. Lyle felt trapped in the room as writers acted out, delaying her and everyone else from getting to go home. While most women happily took part in the writers’ room discussions, their contributions every bit as raunchy as their male colleagues’, other women on the Friends writing staff over the course of its run found it a workplace environment that discouraged them from staying on.
Writing a show like Friends undoubtedly required a dirty mind, and Lyle had no objection to that. But the writers would hit a plateau each evening and transition from working to trying to make each other laugh with scurrilous or scatological jokes. Lyle was not a wilting lily, but she saw the jokes as reflective of a certain brand of unthinking humor that dominated the room.
All the writers then on staff would later strongly dispute her account in their depositions, describing most of it as wild mischaracterizations and outright lies. They had never made any sexual comments about the actors on the show, as Lyle claimed. Finding comedy was never precise, and the hunt required numerous tangents and interludes before locking on to anything usable. In some of the specifics of her later account, Lyle seemed to be missing the relaxed-workaholic tone of the writers’ room, in which joking asides were often transformed into usable material for the show. For Friends, at least, the crudeness was an integral part of the work.
Lyle did not complain at first. Instead, she wanted to contribute her own original ideas to the show, like casting her father’s then-wife, Days of Our Lives star Tanya Boyd, as a potential love interest for Joey. Lyle was taken aback to be called into the office by Todd Stevens shortly after and told that there were concerns about the pace of her typing. Some writers felt Lyle was too slow and was getting ahead of herself by pitching story ideas so early in her tenure. It was necessary for her to first grasp how to do her own job before taking on theirs. Lyle was surprised because she had gotten generally positive feedback from the writers and, if anything, had been critiqued for typing too much.
After the meeting, Lyle tracked down Malins, who told her she was looking down at her screen too often while typing. Lyle responded that she was often being asked to delete material she had already typed, which was why she was studying her screen. She offered to bring out her notes for review. The show ended up purchasing a typing program so she could improve her speed and fully capture the conversation in the writers’ room. Nonetheless, they ended up issuing a number of warnings to Lyle about her typing.
Lyle was fired a short time later, along with a male writers’ assistant who had also been warned about the quality of his work, after only four months on the job, told she was still typing too slowly to capture all the material in the writers’ room. Lyle sought a meeting with some of her superiors at Friends to understand why she had been fired. She never received a response from Marta Kauffman, which particularly stung. She had attended the same schools as Kauffman’s children. Didn’t a female showrunner have some responsibility to her female employees?
The manner of Lyle’s dismissal was mystifying to her. But it was what came next that made Lyle’s name a familiar one to law students. After being fired, Lyle planned to let the situation go. But she started talking to a friend whose mother was a coach and counselor, and she strongly suggested hiring a lawyer. This struck her as a textbook example of a hostile workplace. Lyle agreed to file a lawsuit. She was not claiming that anyone had harassed her or made sexual remarks toward her; rather, she was arguing that the talk in the writers’ room crossed a line.
About a month after she was fired, Lyle was invited to a party at the home of Friends writer Shana Goldberg-Meehan. She thought it was strange to be invited to a party with the same people who had dismissed her from her job but attended regardless with her sister. At the party, she was approached by Chase and Malins, who offered their apologies. They were sorry for how things had played out and wanted to wish her the best. Lyle was flabbergasted. She still did not understand why she had been let go in the first place, and they had provided no further clarity.
Lyle’s lawsuit was rapidly dismissed, and jobs in the entertainment industry were hard to come by. (Lyle’s former Nickelodeon colleague Imani Walker was having trouble getting jobs, too, and she suspected it was because employers were confusing her with Lyle.) Lyle realized that her ambitions—to travel the world, to write—could be fulfilled elsewhere. She wanted to complete her education, and she wanted to become physically fit. She joined the military and spent the last months of 2001 at basic training in Texas.
Some months afterward, she was in a small town in Germany called Spangdahlem, about two hours west of Frankfurt. Lyle was now an editor for a military publication called The Eifel Times, traveling to cover military operations and training exercises in Germany and elsewhere. The subject of the Friends lawsuit never came up with her colleagues.
In April 2004, Lyle was just back from a trip to the Netherlands, where she had observed a military operation, when she received an email from her friend Alex Saltikoff, who was in Air Force public affairs with her, congratulating her on the great article on CNN. Lyle was confused. Why was CNN picking up her story on American military maneuvers in Holland?
Lyle’s four-year-old lawsuit had unexpectedly been resuscitated by an appeals-court judge, who brought back the charges of sexual harassment but not the accusations of racial and gender discrimination. Publications from Elle to ABC News wanted to tell her story. Peter Jennings traveled to Spangdahlem to meet with Lyle. She refused to be interviewed onscreen, though, so the best Jennings could do was to get some B-roll footage of his walking with Lyle. Howard Stern devoted time on his show to her, referring to her as a prude for expressing her discomfort.
The court’s decision limited the lawsuit to the sexual-harassment aspect of her complaint, despite the fact that Lyle was more troubled about her dismissal than about the humor in the writers’ room. There was seemingly no interest in the industry in hiring her, and she thought it highly unlikely that she would be able to get back into television now. It was incumbent on Friends, she thought, to reimburse her for the forced change to her career trajectory.
Warner Bros. dug up an old typing test Lyle had taken for a temp job that showed she only typed fourteen words per min
ute to back up their case about her being a slow typist. Lyle said she had been sick that day and cajoled to take the test merely as a formality before being assigned a temp gig.
Other accusations were more troubling. In discovery, testimony was given about Lyle’s visiting anti-Semitic websites on her work computer while in the writers’ room, which she disputed.
Years later, writers would make reference to Lyle’s nonexistent gang affiliations and to her being involved in selling drugs. These accusations were troubling because they felt as if they were not meant to apply to Amaani Lyle, graduate of the Oakwood School, emerging television writer, and Friends alumna; they were meant to describe some other, imaginary African-American woman.
Trolls tracked down Lyle’s address and telephone number in Germany, and she began to receive hate mail. People took the time to address and mail international letters calling Amaani Lyle a “dumb humorless bitch,” a “humorless cunt,” “dyke,” or just “nigger.”
On the one hand, the defense argued that Lyle’s claims were not grounded in any fact. On the other hand, television writing required a free space where frank discussion was allowed and encouraged, and any encroachment on such freedom would irredeemably cripple the artistic creativity that flourished in Hollywood.
But which was it? Had the events detailed by Lyle taken place and been a necessary part of the job, or had they not taken place? The counterclaims acknowledged the sexual speech in the room but denied the specific details of the stories alleged by Lyle. Some of the writers wanted to put forward a simpler argument: that working on a comedy series didn’t always look like working. Often, a crude or sexual story would be introduced before being refined and filtered into something that could serve for Friends. None of this, they would argue, constituted a hostile work environment.
To help make their case, the defendants called on some of the most prominent names in television to come out in their defense. An amicus curiae brief arguing that crude talk was a part of the creative work being done in writers’ rooms made its way around Hollywood. Lyle was stunned to realize that many of her idols now knew who she was—but had come out against her. No budding writer wanted to be known by the likes of All in the Family’s Norman Lear or The West Wing’s Aaron Sorkin—both signatories to the brief—as a killjoy intent on damaging the art of television.
Lyle’s case was ultimately dismissed for a second time, with the California supreme court ruling that she had not been subjected to sexual harassment. “There is no dispute that sexually coarse and vulgar language was used regularly in the Friends writers’ room,” the court observed in its ruling. “But the use of sexually coarse and vulgar language in the workplace is not actionable per se.”
The defense mounted by Friends was successful but also transformed an argument into a matter of intellectual principle. The amicus brief was right to defend the freedom of the writers’ room, but in explicitly making a case for the necessity of brutish humor, it opened a loophole a mile wide in future efforts to police the behavior of men in positions of power in Hollywood.
It is important to remember that no one was targeted by any of the conversation in the Friends writers’ room. Women were not singled out for abuse or made the subject of unwanted advances. It was undoubtedly a reasonable expectation that writers for Friends be comfortable discussing human sexuality. This was a show, after all, whose broadcast episodes included references to premature ejaculation and impotence, and whose second episode considered the importance of foreplay to sex. The question remained, though, of whether there were lines that should not be crossed or topics that had best not be raised in the room. How was good comedy made? Did it require a fearless willingness to say anything? Or could limitations be placed without affecting the final product?
Amaani Lyle forced Hollywood to consider these questions, and the industry very much did not want to do anything of the sort. It wanted to carry on as it always had and firmly resented anyone who pushed it to see matters from another angle. Women in Hollywood would have to be the ones to adjust to the status quo—not vice versa.
It was impossible to know if Amaani Lyle would have become another Norman Lear or Shonda Rhimes. The odds were against her, as they were against everyone in Hollywood not named Norman Lear or Shonda Rhimes. But what was incontrovertible was that after Amaani Lyle saw fit to complain about the nature of her employment, practically all of Hollywood disputed her claim. To Lyle, it felt as if the industry were rising up on its hind legs and roaring in her direction.
Over a decade passed, and the worm turned in the entertainment industry, with notable consequences. The argument that had been made against Amaani Lyle had, as she saw it, turned into a noose that entrapped all of Hollywood. There was a new sensitivity to the travails of women in the workforce. And Amaani Lyle, forty-four-year-old military lifer, master sergeant in the Air Force reserves, began to dream, ever so tentatively, of picking up the shattered pieces of her career. She would not be a writers’ assistant again, or even a writer, but wouldn’t it be nice to create her own show? But Lyle suspected that even now, even with all the gallons of ink and floods of tears spilled over the victims of Hollywood, she was still blackballed. She was not one of them now, and perhaps never had been.
* * *
—
The long tail of the Lyle decision would have unexpected repercussions for the industry. Lyle was stunned to hear from friends in law school that her case was being studied in class, presented as a crucial ruling defending the freedom of creative thinkers to express themselves in untraditional fashion. The Lyle case had freed Hollywood from apprehension over the kinds of mundane concerns its male employees might have faced had they been working in a corporate office park.
In the fall of 2017, when lingering horror over the election of serial sexual harasser Donald Trump to the presidency began encouraging women in Hollywood to speak up about the abuse they faced in their careers, it rapidly became clear that dozens of abusers in positions of power had depended on a culture of silence to escape detection, such as NCIS: New Orleans showrunner Brad Kern, who had referred to a working mother on his writing staff who needed to pump breast milk at the office as a “cow in the field.” The freedoms of creativity had been abused, with consequences ranging from brutish or demeaning talk to sexual harassment to sexual assault. Almost a year into the #MeToo movement, a scathing article in The New Yorker detailed unwanted sexual advances by none other than Leslie Moonves, the head of CBS and onetime Warner Bros. president who had championed Friends from the outset. Moonves was eventually forced to step down from CBS after numerous women came forward with allegations of sexual assault.
By shoving Lyle away, Hollywood had unwittingly opened space for abusers, who felt newly empowered to misbehave. “Creative necessity” was a new catchall concept, introduced to writers as a potential get-out-of-jail-free card that rendered all manner of misconduct crucial to the creative process.
The Writers Guild would go on to inform its members, in the wake of Weinstein and his fellow predators, that “the decision does not permit such talk to be aimed at an individual in the room. Indeed, it acknowledges that objectionable talk may, in some circumstances, be enough to create a hostile work environment.” The law may have been in accordance with the Writers Guild’s read of the Friends decision, but the popular understanding of the decision was something else entirely and may have prompted, or allowed for, some of the very behavior it barred.
The news concentrated on the boldface male names toppled from their positions of power. But the more compelling, and far sadder, story was about women. How many women might have been living different lives, pursuing different dreams, if only they had been treated differently?
PART IV
• • •
IS THAT WHAT A DINOSAUR WOULD DO?
Seasons 8 through 10 (and Beyond)
CHAPTER 18
YOU’VE BEEN BAMBOOZLED!
&n
bsp; Raising the Question of Whether Friends Could Handle a Third Couple
Keeping a sitcom going was childishly easy and mind-numbingly difficult, all at once. Once the characters and settings had been fitted into place, it was possible for a roomful of comedy writers to come up with an infinite array of jokes, propelling even the most mediocre sitcom forward indefinitely. And yet, the very structure that provided the roof over the sitcom’s head could also serve as its prison. It would be exceedingly hard to shift characters off the tracks that had been laid out for them. To refresh was to run the risk of betraying an audience that had come to expect a particular kind of treat and was in the mood for nothing else.
Ross had already been paired off before with Rachel, and Chandler and Monica were now a couple. The show’s lifetime cap on serious relationships between characters was seemingly close. But audiences were ill inclined to invest in romantic relationships with new characters, who had little of the history they had already accrued with their familiar friends. Ross and Rachel and Phoebe and even Joey had their share of notable romances after Chandler and Monica got together, but those relationships always felt somewhat flimsy, comedic contrivances rather than the start of something serious.
Audiences wanted the characters to grow but also wanted them to do it in the company of their friends, which made for a tricky dance. Part of maturity—at least part of the maturity that shows like Friends envisioned—was settling down, but if audiences didn’t want to see the show’s beloved characters wind up with strangers, how to square this particular circle?
Generation Friends Page 25
