Generation Friends

by Saul Austerlitz

  To interrogate a fictional television show for its proposed life choices is, by definition, ludicrous, and yet it is telling what Friends leaves out. It is Rachel who must squeeze herself into the show’s happy ending, must silently make her peace with what a lifetime with Ross will likely keep her from. It is a happy ending, but one that quietly skates past a lingering disappointment that the show chooses not to acknowledge or attend to.

  These concerns notwithstanding, we have, at long last, after 236 episodes of murkiness and disorder, arrived at a moment of clarity. David Crane had long thought about the relationship between television writers and their audiences. Each show had its own DNA and its own compact that it formed with its fans.

  Crane had thought a good deal about Seinfeld’s finale and believed that, whatever its imperfections, the pitch had probably felt emotionally and comedically perfect for a conclusion to so acidulous a series. Friends, Crane knew, was not that show. It would best serve its audience by giving them what they craved, but doing it in a fashion that managed to deliver its happy ending as an unexpected surprise. For Crane, the arrival of Rachel at Ross’s door—“I got off the plane”—was one of the finale’s crucial moments. He hoped that there had been enough obstacles to the couple’s happiness, enough ambiguity about what might happen, that the expected thing still felt like a stroke of good fortune.

  CHAPTER 24

  I’LL BE THERE FOR YOU

  Life After Friends

  Kevin Bright was pleased to have his next project lined up even before Friends was finished. Joey, which he was to produce, was practically destined to be the next Frasier. This was a spin-off that felt guaranteed to put together a lengthy run on NBC. Viewers would certainly be watching Matt LeBlanc on Thursday nights well into the 2010s. Bright was sure that Joey, which would debut in the fall of 2004, would fill the gaping hole left behind by Friends. Instead of pairing up with Kauffman and Crane, though, Bright was working with longtime Friends writers (and married couple) Shana Goldberg-Meehan and Scott Silveri, who would serve as the showrunners. It was an arranged marriage where the earlier union had been a love match.

  Bright, Kauffman, and Crane had dreamed about how to prolong the union they had fallen into on Dream On and wound up with Friends. Here, one of the show’s architects was being paired with longtime writers on Friends who had impressive track records writing for the show but whose comedic sensibilities did not align with Bright’s. Bright, Kauffman, and Crane had spent more than a decade working together and were long accustomed to listening respectfully to each other and to accommodating each other’s strongly held beliefs. The new triumvirate did not have that same record of compromise and collaboration.

  Bright believed that fans turned to Joey in the hopes that it would preserve and extend the pleasing aura of Friends. The pilot, with David Crane’s participation, was very good, Bright thought, but after that, the show set out on a wildly misplaced tack and could never recover from this initial stumble. From the very start, Bright felt that Goldberg-Meehan and Silveri had misunderstood the appeal of their protagonist and were warping Joey beyond all recognition, with Bright little able to rectify the situation.

  In moving Joey cross-country from New York to Los Angeles, the perpetual playboy was morphing into a family man. Bright was convinced that Joey was going to disappoint its natural audience. Who wanted to see Joey paired with his twenty-year-old rocket-scientist nephew and his sister (even if she was played by The Sopranos’ Drea de Matteo)? Who wanted to see Joey in a committed relationship? Bright was convinced that Joey had been neutered, and what was intended to be a clever Frasier-style reimagining was instead guaranteed to let down Friends fans.

  By streaming-era standards, Joey did very solid business. It was the thirty-fifth-highest-rated network show of the 2004–05 season, drawing an average of 10.7 million viewers. While this was less than half of the audience for the final season of Friends, it was still an impressive number, and one that could have been built on. The ratings were fine, if disappointing, but it was increasingly clear that the show had not found its voice, and was not likely to do so, either. Bright found it painful to work on Joey week after week, knowing that it was not Friends and that it was proving itself ill suited to ever become Friends.

  Like its predecessors Veronica’s Closet and Jesse, Joey was proof that the presence of Friends alumni was no guarantee. There had rarely been a show in television history as fast-tracked for success as Joey, but NBC wound up canceling it after less than two seasons. In the end, Friends would be the last of the big hits, the last sitcom to draw the kind of audience it did. Later successes like The Big Bang Theory would only manage half of Friends’ audience at its peak.

  * * *

  —

  There was a latent desire to see the stars of Friends as we wanted them to be and not as they were. After Joey’s cancellation, Matt LeBlanc returned in 2011 as the star of the Showtime comedy series Episodes, created by Crane and his partner, Jeffrey Klarik. In the preceding years, neither Crane nor LeBlanc had struck gold with their Friends follow-ups. Joey had been canceled and Crane’s Friends successor The Class (2006), treated as another easy shoo-in for success, never made it out of the gate. It demonstrated once more Crane’s gift for casting, featuring future stars Lizzy Caplan, Lucy Punch, Jesse Tyler Ferguson, and Jason Ritter, but the high school–reunion comedy limped through a single season before being canceled by CBS.

  Episodes (Showtime, 2011–17) was less a return to Friends than a metafictional representation of its legacy and its hold on our memories. We might have been watching a comedy on premium cable now, not on NBC, but we were still wrestling with the specter of Joey Tribbiani. In the series, a husband-and-wife team of critically acclaimed television writers find their highbrow comedy about a witty university dean (“So you’re saying it’s The History Boys meets you saying it’s not The History Boys?”) is sideswiped by the network’s insistence that they retool the role so Matt LeBlanc can star on the show. “For the erudite, verbally dexterous headmaster of an elite boys’ academy,” cocreator Sean Lincoln (Stephen Mangan) complains, “he’s suggesting . . . Joey?”

  Matt is narcissistic, self-absorbed, and sexually insatiable. The show he comes to star in, now retitled Pucks and concerning a hockey coach, is insufferably bad, but Matt has a certain rough wisdom about the eternal verities of television. He provides his showrunners, only familiar with the brief seasons of British television, with a rapid-fire education in American TV after they present their plan for a tender not-quite-love story between their protagonist and a lesbian colleague: “That’s one season for us. Friends did two hundred thirty-six episodes. You gotta give yourself places for stories to go. How long do you think Ross and Rachel would’ve lasted if Rachel had been a lesbian? Or Sam and Diane on Cheers? Or Frasier and . . . I don’t know, I never watched that show.”

  Episodes was an opportunity for Crane and LeBlanc to luxuriate in all they had accomplished and to send up the grotesque, inside-out version of fame it had engendered. This was not, nor would it ever be, a documentary about the aftermath of Friends, nor was it about the real-life Matt LeBlanc. Instead, it was about our own fervid imaginings of what the “real” Joey might be like.

  It was about getting close to our memories of Friends and enjoying an extended fan-fiction interlude about what it might be like to have once been a part of television history. It was watching as Matt is prodded to say “Howyoudoin’” to the woman he is having sex with, or asked whether Jennifer Aniston would be likely to attend his funeral. It was recruiting his former castmates to do a guest appearance on his show, and winding up with Gunther.

  How did you carry on after the story was over? Episodes was an advanced course in television comedy, with Matt LeBlanc—or “Matt LeBlanc”—the professor and master of ceremonies. By contrast, Valerie Cherish, the has-been sitcom star embodied by Lisa Kudrow in HBO’s The Comeback (2005, with a second season in 2014), was
required to endure an unending slate of torments in her quixotic quest for fame. Each episode would begin in renewed hope before crashing down once more into chaos and humiliation. To hunger for stardom was sheer folly, and Valerie, the onetime “It Girl,” was willing to endure all manner of embarrassment in the hopes of returning to the blissful cocoon she had once inhabited. “This is my comeback!” she tells the unseen audience, but even as she revels in her much-hoped-for return to success, a director is already calling for a retake. Fame is an illusion.

  The echoes between Valerie and Kudrow (whose middle name is Valerie) were there to be mined. Both were faced with the question of what to do when the cameras swiveled away. Kudrow, of course, was substantially more famous (and wealthy) than Valerie, but there was a shared awareness of the psychic costs of fame. Once you had it, it was hard to let it go.

  Matthew Perry had the splashiest return to television, coming back in 2006 as the star of Aaron Sorkin’s post–West Wing vehicle Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip. The series was to be loosely based on Saturday Night Live, with Perry and West Wing veteran Bradley Whitford as the yin-and-yang showrunners of a topical sketch-comedy show. In theory, the union of Perry and Sorkin was an ideal fit. Perry had always been the ablest comic jouster on Friends, and his motormouthed enthusiasm and improvisational skills would serve him well in working with Sorkin.

  Perry was quite good on Studio 60, and if it had been a better, more self-aware show, he would have been stellar. But Studio 60 never quite figured out what it was about, or whom it was for, and veered early on into another version of The West Wing instead of its own story. The show only lasted one season before it was canceled. Perry was a creature of television and made a number of attempts to return to a weekly network series without ever finding a vehicle worthy of his gifts. In Mr. Sunshine (2011), he was the manager of a basketball arena with a propensity for hosting unusual events; in Go On (2012), he was a radio host coping with the loss of his wife; in The Odd Couple (2015), he took on the slobbish Oscar Madison role in an updated version of the Neil Simon chestnut. A superlative performer, Perry has yet to find the vehicle that can even approach Friends. Where LeBlanc and Kudrow thrived by mocking their stardom, Perry sought to re-create it, and fell short.

  Throughout the negotiations for Friends, David Schwimmer had perpetually exhibited the least enthusiasm for television stardom, and his post-Friends arc demonstrated the veracity of his claims. Schwimmer only appeared intermittently on television after Friends ended, and only once as the star of a new show. His AMC series Feed the Beast (2016), about friends who open a restaurant together, came and went without much notice, but Schwimmer’s guest runs on other series were more memorable. He was superbly cranky as Larry David’s costar in the show-within-the-show production of The Producers on the fourth season of Curb Your Enthusiasm in 2004, playing off his demanding reputation; and was the surprising moral conscience of The People v. O.J. Simpson (2016), playing Simpson’s longtime friend and lawyer Robert Kardashian. (The YouTube supercuts of Schwimmer calling O.J. “Juice” were the best comic work Schwimmer had done in years.)

  To star on Friends was to simultaneously flourish and wither under the white-hot spotlight of the celebrity media, so it was a clever touch for Courteney Cox to make her next starring role as the editor of a gossip magazine. The gritty FX series Dirt (2007) never quite took off, and Cox returned to straightforward comedy with Cougar Town (2009), which began as a topical series about older women on the prowl for younger men and then gracefully transitioned into another hangout series about a group of friends who enjoyed aimless banter and romantic tension.

  In the intervening time, Marta Kauffman had executive-produced a drama on the WB network, Related, and had produced a number of documentary films, including Hava Nagila (The Movie) and Blessed Is the Match: The Life and Death of Hannah Senesh. Kauffman’s post-Friends comedy series Grace and Frankie (2015) imagined the lives of two women (played by Jane Fonda and Lily Tomlin) who are stunned to discover their respective forty-year marriages at an end when their husbands, longtime law partners, run off together. Grace and Frankie are forced out of their comfortable bourgeois lives and into unexpected new arrangements as roommates and matrons of their now-blended families. (Kauffman herself would divorce her husband of thirty-one years in 2015.) Friends had appealed to Kauffman and Crane for the variety of permutations its characters could undergo; as a twenty-first-century family show, Grace and Frankie could bring its ex-lovers and newly minted stepsiblings together in surprising ways. Tomlin and Fonda were like post-retirement-age versions of Rachel Green in the Friends pilot, newly single and forced to stumble their way forward in an unfamiliar world.

  * * *

  —

  When Friends, and then Joey, came to an end, Kevin Bright had proved beyond all doubt his remarkable skills at producing television. There was nothing left to prove, no mountain left to climb. Friends had generated enough income to likely ensure Bright and his family’s financial comfort for life. This was a remarkable achievement for a man who was not quite fifty years old, but it was also a surprising burden. Only a few people in rarefied enterprises, ranging from former presidents to Jerry Seinfeld, had to face the question of what to do for an encore after having already done the thing they would be remembered for. What came next?

  Bright had put his life on hold for over a decade while he produced Friends and Joey. It was an incredible, once-in-a-lifetime opportunity, one that anyone in television would gladly sacrifice anything to grab hold of, but it was one thing to conceive of such sacrifices in the abstract and another to grapple with their reality.

  Bright and his wife, Claudia, had young children when Friends premiered, and producing a juggernaut like Friends had meant ten years of late nights, ten years of missing dinners and parent-teacher conferences and games and performances. It meant not being available to have dinner with his wife on a weeknight, or sit around with his sons and watch a baseball game or read a book before bedtime.

  When Joey ended, and the adrenaline necessary to produce new episodes of a hit series, week after week, for more than ten years finally subsided, Bright took stock of his life and realized that he had missed a significant chunk of his children’s childhood. While he had shored up NBC’s Thursday nights, his children had grown from small boys to young men.

  There was no flexible-hours version of television, no home-for-dinner model. Making a successful television show was a sixty-to-eighty-hour-per-week job. (For that matter, so was making an unsuccessful television show.) You had to invest all of yourself into your work, and when the weekend came around, you were too tired to do much of anything other than recuperate for Monday morning.

  Joey had been a terribly unpleasant experience for Bright, and when it was over, his life fell apart. He separated from his wife and left Los Angeles, taking a position at his alma mater, Emerson College, teaching students about television. Bright chose Emerson to be close to his sons, both of whom were in college on the East Coast, and he felt good about being the parent nearest to them during their college years.

  Friends’ success, and Joey’s failure, allowed Bright to understand that his heart was no longer in television. There were people in the industry who were defined by their work, who could not carry on without its assurance of their place in the world. There were also, Bright acknowledged, many people who had to keep working in television to provide for their families. But Bright no longer had to do those things, and the idea of striving to create another hit television show—to find another opportunity that would keep him apart from his family—was wildly unappealing.

  After four years, Bright reconciled with his wife and returned to Los Angeles. He was tremendously proud of all he had accomplished in television but also knew that he likely wouldn’t be doing it anymore. He made a film about a student of his at the Perkins School for the Blind in Massachusetts, and another about the last months of his father’s life. It was reward
ing to tell different stories and to work at a less punishing pace. There was life after Friends, but there would be no more television for him.

  * * *

  —

  There was a cost to Friends. In the popular imagination, stardom was the dream that propelled you, or the fantasy that kept you going. It was the ultimate transformation, overhauling what had once been the dreary weight of ordinariness into something airy and imbued with magic. The six erstwhile ordinary citizens who had been turned into representatives of Generation X ascendant had been forced to wrestle with the unexpected costs of overnight success.

  Matt LeBlanc would speak to the media, in the years after Friends, about the toll that the show’s success had taken on them. “We could never leave that stage, metaphorically speaking,” LeBlanc told Warren Littlefield. “Still can’t. Still on that stage. That will follow us around forever.” It was only too easy to dismiss his comments as the sour grapes of the privileged, but LeBlanc’s testimony spoke to something profound they had experienced. Some of it was undoubtedly the complexity of wrestling with being not yet forty years old and already aware of how the first line of their obituaries would read. More than that, though, it was also reflective of a hollowness born of fame. Fame’s tentacles kept stars from experiencing life as they had remembered it from before its embrace, and after fame began to recede, stars no longer knew how to comport themselves without its presence.

  Jennifer Aniston was easily the cast member whose significance to American popular culture receded the least. Long after Friends went off the air, Aniston was still an omnipresent figure, in films, in advertisements for Smartwater and Aveeno, and in wall-to-wall tabloid coverage of her personal life. Aniston was a star, but she was single, lonely, and barren—or so the tabloids had us believe. There was something punitive and cruel about Aniston’s treatment in the press in the years after Friends, as if she had collectively let us all down by not doing the expected thing. After her split from then-husband Brad Pitt, Yahoo! quoted an anonymous friend of Aniston’s who told them, “He wanted kids—like, yesterday. But she’s so eager for a post-‘Friends’ film career, she can’t stop to hear her biological clock ticking.”