by Warren Littlefield, Former NBC President of Entertainment
David Schwimmer: I felt that it was something special immediately in the first rehearsals. Even the first read-through, I thought, “Oh.” You could feel it. The energy. There was something really special about the six different voices and the energy of the six of us. There are six pieces of a puzzle that happen to click just right because of casting and because of the particular energy of the six people. I think luck had a great amount to do with it.
The miracle is the casting. Having been on the other side of it now in terms of directing and producing, to find one magical actor who is just right for the role is difficult enough, but to find six and then to have them actually have chemistry with each other is just kind of a miracle. I think we were just lucky. I looked at the five of them, I watched their work, and I thought, “Everyone is just so talented and perfect for their character.” And they grew into their characters and enriched them and deepened them.
David Crane: We had absolutely no idea what this show was going to be. For us, it was just another pilot. We’d just had a series canceled. We were thinking we’d never work again, so we were scrambling. You pitch a bunch of stuff. We were doing this thing at Fox and at NBC. Friends was feeling good, but it was just another pilot. Or it was just another pilot until Jimmy Burrows wants to direct it. Excuse me, James Burrows. We thought, “That’s crazy.”
Marta Kauffman: I was most surprised by how good he was dramaturgically. He had such a good sense of structure and story.
David Crane: And he really embraced what we wanted to do. In the pilot, the structure is really loose. We started out doing a much more traditional story. It still had to do with Rachel leaving a guy at the altar, but we had an original version where her parents came, and the act break was her parents showing up. It wasn’t good.
We approached it again and made it much looser. The structure is loose and unconventional. There’s no event at the act break. Ross and Rachel are each looking out at the rain. In a pilot, that seems crazy. You couldn’t do it today, and I’m surprised we did that then.
Marta Kauffman: Jimmy had a way of making a moment with a small action. You realize very quickly that Ross has a terrible crush on Rachel, and there’s a scene at the end where he says, “Do you maybe want to go out maybe on a date sometime.” And Rachel says, “Maybe.” There was one Oreo cookie left. I will never forget Jimmy said to David, “Try the cookie in your mouth when you say that line.”
David Crane: Rachel says, “Maybe,” and David says, “Maybe I will,” and pops the cookie in his mouth.
Marta Kauffman: It was such a victory for him. It made the moment.
David Crane: The first four minutes of the pilot were just the group sitting in the coffeehouse talking about nothing. Chandler has had a dream. Ross comes in, and he’s mopey. It’s just talk. There’s no movement. There’s no story. When Jimmy read it in our first meeting, he said, “It’s great. It’s radio.” The fact that he got that and embraced it made all the difference.
Matt LeBlanc: I was this kid who got this gig, and here I am with the guy—Jimmy Burrows. I remember thinking, “Every episode of Cheers? I love that show! And almost every episode of Taxi? Wait a minute. I love that show!”
He had this air about him that I had never seen. At that point, I had worked with a handful of different directors, and I had never come across anyone who had such an ease to him. Like, “it ain’t the cure for cancer” kind of thing. I’m sure he understands the value and importance of it all, but he never let the actors worry about that. “That’s not your job to worry about that. All of that happens after we shoot it, so let’s not worry about that. It’s all about these little moments. We’re all in it together. And also, I want to be out by 2:00.”
Lisa Kudrow: I was terrified that first week. It was Jimmy … again. The great thing about Jimmy is that he wants to try different things, and the bad thing is that he wants to try different things. He was really open about what the potential problems were. He was collaborative and inclusive of the cast, not keeping us separate from all of the writers.
So Jimmy would say, “Why are they friends with her?” Meaning me. “We have to figure that out. She doesn’t fit.” And I was like, “Oh my God, here we go again. Well, if everyone just acts like they like me. If Monica acts like she likes me …” And at one point, he thought it would be funny if I deliver my monologue under the table. They’re all sitting around the table. Rachel is about to cut up her credit cards. Instead of being with them, I’m under the table, because I’m “quirky.”
I thought, “This is the run-through where Marta and David are going to say, ‘This character doesn’t work. We have to reconceive it. She’s just not part of the group.’ ” And I really thought that was gonna be what came out of that run-through. And thank God, they said, “Um, Lisa, not that it’s a bad choice, but I don’t think that’s a good spot for you, under the table.” I didn’t know how to answer. I would never put myself under the table. Jimmy said, “No, that was me. We were just trying it.” I was afraid they’d think, “Wow, this girl did a great audition, but she has the worst instincts about where to put herself.” I was really wondering if I was going to be fired. Again.
David Schwimmer: What I was most struck by was the spirit of collaboration. I expressed to them my fears of what I had just experienced, and they made it clear to me that it was going to be a collaborative effort and that I would have a voice. And I thought that that was worth the risk of being in a situation and signing your life away for five or six years, not knowing the other five actors.
Lisa Kudrow: Courteney Cox was the best known of all of us, and she had done a guest star on Seinfeld. She said, “Listen, I just did a Seinfeld, and they all help each other. They say, ‘Try this’ and ‘This would be funny.’ ” And she said, “You guys, feel free to tell me. If I could do anything funnier, I want to do it.”
There’s a code with actors. Actors don’t give each other notes under any circumstances. So she was giving us permission to give her notes, and we all agreed that that would be great. Why not? And she also said, “Listen, you know, we all need to make this thing great.” She just set the stage with “I know I’m the one who’s been on TV, but this is all of us.” She was the one who set that tone and made it a real group that way. And I thought that was a real turning point.
David Crane: We were the last pilot to deliver, and we got one note from Don Ohlmeyer: “The opening is too slow.” The word came down that Don said if we didn’t trim it, we weren’t on the air. We fucking loved the beginning. It’s right. We don’t want to change it. We cut a ninety-second opening title sequence to REM’s “Shiny Happy People.” We didn’t cut anything, but it started with energy. Don said, “Now it’s right.”
Warren: It may seem hard to believe today, but in 1994 we were playing in core conceptual territory that hadn’t been explored that much on network TV—young adult relationships. We wanted these characters to feel real, and we knew they had to be likable. We thought Marta and David were navigating that well, and of course we had Jimmy, TV’s best barometer. Don didn’t see it that way.
Marta Kauffman: We were doing the network run-through with an audience, and Don said that when Monica slept with Paul the wine guy, she got what she deserved—that’s how he rationalized it—fire began to come out of my nose.
They handed out a questionnaire to the audience: Do you think Monica sleeping with wine guy makes her (a) a slut, (b) a whore, (c) a trollop. And even with the deck stacked that way, the audience didn’t care.
Jamie Tarses: The questionnaire for the audience after the run-through—that was completely Don. He didn’t like the casual sex. It was just one guy worrying about this.
David Crane: Overall, the network notes were almost nonexistent. Don objected to a Maxi Pad joke. Ross couldn’t throw out his ex-wife’s Maxi Pads. He was using them as arch supports. Okay, Don was uncomfortable with Maxi Pads.
Jim Burrows: Based on the audience for the Friends pilot, I knew how popular that show w
ould be. The kids were all pretty and funny, so beautiful. I said to Les Moonves, who was head of Warner Bros., “Give me the plane. I’ll pay for dinner.” I took the cast to Vegas.
Matt LeBlanc: Who goes to Vegas on a private jet? And Jimmy gave me five hundred bucks to gamble.
Lisa Kudrow: On the plane he showed us the first episode of Friends. None of it had aired yet.
Jimmy took us to dinner, and he gave us each a little money to gamble with. He said, “I want you to be aware that this is the last time that you all can be out and not be swarmed, because that’s what’s going to happen.” And everyone was like, “Really?” I thought, “Well, we’ll see. Maybe. Who knows? We don’t know how the show’s going to do. Why is he so certain?”
Jim Burrows: I told them they had a special show and this was their last shot at anonymity. They wanted to gamble, and I was the only one with money. They wrote me checks. Schwimmer gave me a check for $200, and Jen did. I should have saved them.
Matt LeBlanc: We went to Caesars for dinner. We sat at the big round table in the middle of the room. Jimmy said, “Look around.” Nobody knew us. People kind of knew Courteney from that “Dancing in the Dark” video.
He said, “Your life is going to change. The six of you will never be able to do this again.” It was almost like Don Corleone talking. He’s not going to be wrong. He’s Jimmy Burrows.
Jamie Tarses: I remember sweating the ratings of Friends the first few weeks. It was falling off more than anybody wanted it to. Outside of development, there was a lot of doubt about Friends.
Warren: Mad About You had successfully slugged it out with The Simpsons, and Fox had moved that show to Sunday at 8:00. Now we were leading off Thursday night in first place, so a big falloff with Friends was not going to be acceptable.
Preston Beckman: The Friends pilot didn’t test great.
Warren: True—a “high weak”—but we loved it! Even though we still only had Jennifer Aniston in second position—CBS had yet to cancel Muddling Through—I decided to take another multimillion-dollar bet and shoot episodes with Jennifer in them.
Karey Burke: Six of One was the name of the show during the pilot. Then Kauffman and Crane came back with Friends, which we thought was such a snore. Some people thought the show was too Gen X, way too narrow. There was much more buzz about Fox’s version of the same concept, a show called Wild Oats with Paul Rudd.
Matt LeBlanc: I remember seeing the test audience results for the pilot. It didn’t test well, I don’t think.
Karey Burke: Between Friends and NewsRadio, I couldn’t have told you which one would be a hit. The Friends cast came to the pilot taping of NewsRadio. Jimmy Burrows was directing it, and the Friends cast was jealous.
Jamie Tarses: The first couple of scripts after the pilot, we were struggling with scripts and struggling with story. Then it was a soap opera, and it was hilarious. The Ross and Rachel thing set the tone for that, and you got thrust into a sort of soapy storytelling.
Warren: For me, we were about six scripts in, and each time I’d read one, I saw tremendous emotional resonance. I thought, “This is a Shakespearean soap opera. It’s a drama that’s really, really funny, and with a complex architecture.” Unlike Seinfeld, which lived to be funny but not to feel.
David Crane: That’s why we were always surprised when people compared us to Seinfeld.
Matt LeBlanc: In between all the jokes, there was this emotional thread. You cared about these people. You were invested in these relationships. You can’t get enough of these people. Why? No one could describe their passion for it. An emotional soap opera is a great way to describe it. That emotional through-line threaded the whole season.
Marta Kauffman: One of the surprising things to us was when Monica and Chandler revealed themselves under the sheets in London. We had to stop. For minutes, the audience was screaming. It was so surprising to us how invested the audience was in these characters, how desperately they wanted them to be happy, how putting them together made some kind of weird sense.
David Crane: The fear was that we’d jump the shark. We only had six characters. When we brought Monica and Chandler together, I don’t think we thought it would last. They’d just sleep together.
Marta Kauffman: One crazy lesson from the show was that everything was better with the six of them. Sometimes it was better to hear them talk about something that happened rather than see it dramatically. What the audience wanted, we had to learn, was the six of them in the room.
David Crane: Apparently, what they really wanted was two of them in the bed.
Jim Burrows: Ross and Rachel were the guts of that show. Everybody was good-looking on that show, so the critics didn’t realize how funny they were.
David Crane: We sort of let rules go away in terms of how to tell stories and traditional television structure. They don’t have to live together. We don’t have to put it all in one set. We can spread it out.
Marta Kauffman: I think it was Warren who said, “Can you at least put them across the hall from each other?” Good idea.
David Crane: Warren also suggested we call it Across the Hall, which we did not do. One for two. Once we got into making the show, I don’t think we’d realized how important having them across the hall would be. We just hadn’t done that much four-camera television.
Marta Kauffman: There was an NBC note after the pilot that maybe we needed an older character, a guy who owned the coffeehouse.
David Crane: We tried a pass at this character, but it was like as you’re writing, you’re going, “Hate myself, hate myself, hate myself.” We ended up bringing the parents in instead.
Warren: It was a really smart move on the producers’ part. The core of the show remained the same, but the show became more relevant to a larger broadcast audience when those young characters had stories that involved their parents and not just other young adults. It became generational comedy that invited the older audience in, and once they got there, they never left. Eventually, almost 25 percent of the audience was over fifty. Advertisers didn’t necessarily pay us for them, but it became a broad-based hit. We learned from that audience that they didn’t have to still be twentysomething but they once were that age and Friends was a wonderful reminder of that time in their lives.
Jamie Tarses: The way we did everything was so different from the way networks do things now. It’s astounding what executives think their jobs are today compared with what we thought then. I can’t imagine micromanaging creators you supposedly respect and admire. I don’t know why they don’t produce the shows themselves.
We used to get on the phone, Marta and David would tell us the area, and then we’d get a script.
Marta Kauffman: The cast was very astute, very smart, and when things didn’t work for them, they didn’t work for a reason.
Lisa Kudrow: I can’t say enough about David Crane and Marta Kauffman. And just Marta on the floor when we would do camera blocking, we would say, “Did that seem like it worked?” And she would say, “I think we can play with that … Okay.” And then she had it, and it was something that made the scene better, drove home the point with a joke. She was unbelievable on her feet with the actors.
David Schwimmer: I would give so much credit to David and Marta and the other writers, because they really invited our ideas. They created an atmosphere in which we could play and fail and pitch stuff, and because of that it wasn’t about any individual, it was about all of us trying to come up with the funniest and the best and the most emotional material we could.
I had never experienced it outside my theater company in Chicago with people I’d known, like brothers and sisters, for twenty years. I had never experienced it, and not to that level. It even exceeded that because of the caliber of the writing and the ideas from the writers and the direction from Jimmy and others. It was thrilling to be part of, and it was hands down the best creative experience I’ve had professionally as an actor. That kind of collaboration with your director, with those writers, and
with the other actors—it’s a huge high, and it spoils you for life. It does.
Matt LeBlanc: There was a conversation I had early on, when the show was just starting to take shape, and I remember standing back and being as objective as I could about Joey and thinking, “This thing could go a long time. Does my character fit if it goes a long time?” Because in the beginning, I was hitting on the girls all the time.
Strictly out of self-preservation, I went to Marta and David and said, “Can I ask you guys something? I have an idea.”
They said, “Yeah, sure.”
I said, “What if Joey hits on every girl in New York but these three? What if I’m like a big brother to these three?” Of course, I didn’t say, “Because I’m afraid that you’re going to run out of stories for me. I’m gonna have to move out from across the hall.”
We went in that direction, and then my guy fit in more. He became this sort of big brother to the group.
Lisa Kudrow: When we started shooting that first season, Jimmy said, “Use my dressing room to hang out.” Because it was bigger. We would all hang out playing poker and bonding because I think we all understood that the point of the show was that we were family and best friends. We needed to hang out, get to know each other, and bond as quickly as possible, because that’s the only way that the show was going to work.
Matt LeBlanc: It wasn’t like we were in college together. We were on a giant fucking television show together. Everybody worked really hard. Lisa Kudrow said it best. She said that she worked harder on these relationships than she did on her marriage.
