Generation Friends Read online

  ALSO BY SAUL AUSTERLITZ

  Just a Shot Away: Peace, Love, and Tragedy with the Rolling Stones at Altamont

  Sitcom: A History in 24 Episodes from I Love Lucy to Community

  Another Fine Mess: A History of American Film Comedy

  Money for Nothing: A History of the Music Video from the Beatles to the White Stripes

  DUTTON

  An imprint of Penguin Random House LLC

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  Copyright © 2019 by Saul Austerlitz

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  LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA

  Names: Austerlitz, Saul, author.

  Title: Generation Friends : an inside look at the show that defined a television era / Saul Austerlitz.

  Description: New York, NY : Dutton, an imprint of Penguin Random House [2019] | Includes bibliographical references.

  Identifiers: LCCN 2018058454 (print) | LCCN 2019013605 (ebook) | ISBN 9781524743376 (ebook) | ISBN 9781524743352 (hc)

  Subjects: LCSH: Friends (Television program)

  Classification: LCC PN1992.77.F76 (ebook) | LCC PN1992.77.F76 A97 2019 (print) | DDC 791.45/72—dc23

  LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018058454

  While the author has made every effort to provide accurate telephone numbers, internet addresses, and other contact information at the time of publication, neither the publisher nor the author assumes any responsibility for errors or for changes that occur after publication. Further, the publisher does not have any control over and does not assume any responsibility for author or third-party websites or their content.

  Version_1

  For Nate, my favorite new reader

  CONTENTS

  ALSO BY SAUL AUSTERLITZ

  TITLE PAGE

  COPYRIGHT

  DEDICATION

  Introduction

  PART I

  Can I Interest You In a Sarcastic Comment?: The Roots of a Phenomenon

  1. Insomnia Café: A TV Show Is Born

  2. Six of One: Casting the Show

  3. Grab a Spoon: Making the Pilot

  4. How You Doin’?: Preparing for the Premiere

  PART II

  Must-See TV (Seasons 1 through 3)

  5. Gum Would Be Perfection: The First Season Debuts

  6. The Biggest New Show on TV: Creating a Sensation in Season 1

  7. Lobsters: The Ballad of Ross and Rachel, Part 1

  8. Could I Be Wearing Any More Clothes?: Friends and Style

  9. We Were on a Break: The Ballad of Ross and Rachel, Part 2

  10. How Many Cameras Are Actually on You?: Contract Negotiations

  11. The Fifth Dentist: Long Days and Longer Nights Inside the Writers’ Room

  PART III

  It Is a Big Deal: The Show Hits Its Stride (Seasons 4 through 7)

  12. Lightning Round: A Look at the Making of an Exemplary Episode

  13. That One Didn’t Suck: Producing the Show

  14. It’s Not Over Until Someone Says I Do: The Ballad of Ross and Rachel, Part 3

  15. They Don’t Know That We Know They Know We Know: Bringing Chandler and Monica Together

  16. Pivot: The Ballad of Ross and Rachel, Part 4

  17. Not Actionable: Lyle v. Friends and the Long Tail of a Lawsuit

  PART IV

  Is That What a Dinosaur Would Do?: Seasons 8 through 10 (and Beyond)

  18. You’ve Been Bamboozled!: Raising the Question of Whether Friends Could Handle a Third Couple

  19. Never off the Table: How Friends Was Belatedly Invited to the Emmy Party

  20. The Door to the Past: The Ballad of Ross and Rachel, Part 5

  21. Billion-Dollar Sitcom: Further Contract Negotiations, Debating the Issue of Whether Anyone Could Afford More Seasons of Friends

  22. Lightning in a Bottle: Saying Good-bye to the Show

  23. Off the Plane: The Ballad of Ross and Rachel, Part 6

  24. I’ll Be There for You: Life After Friends

  25. Tasting the Trifle: Friends Discovers a New Audience

  PHOTOGRAPHS

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  SOURCE NOTES

  INDEX

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  INTRODUCTION

  They would gather, every few minutes, in clumps and packs. They were wielding smartphones, of course, and digital cameras, and disposable models you might pick up at a souvenir shop or pharmacy checkout counter. There were mothers posing with their daughters, European couples who looked as if they had only just stepped off the runway in Milan, and amateur photographers setting up shoots in the middle of the street.

  My friend Jennifer and I were having lunch, and we both found ourselves distracted by the onslaught of humanity in the street, although of course we were there for much the same reasons. We were at the Little Owl, a twenty-eight-seat restaurant in the West Village that describes itself as “a corner gem with a big porkchop and an even bigger heart.” We were there for the superb food, but more so for the location. Based on the establishing shot that displayed the building’s exterior, the Little Owl was in the spot where Central Perk would have been—you know, if it ever existed. We were on a brief tour to find the traces of Friends in the real New York of early 2018, and we were beginning our search with the polenta (for Jennifer) and the eggplant parmigiana (for me).

  There was something ludicrous and obsessive about our expedition. Friends had not only been filmed on a soundstage on the Warner Bros. lot in Los Angeles, it had contained only the faintest traces of New York, regardless of its claims to residency. We were equipped with a blog post listing some of the purported locations of the characters’ apartments and a handful of other West Village destinations that the show explicitly mentioned or featured as an exterior. The list, which included Ross’s apartment, Phoebe’s apartment, and the Lucille Lortel Theatre, where Joey had performed in a show, was short.

  Friends lacked even the New York credibility of Sex and the City or Seinfeld, two other comedy series of the era that had used the city as a backdrop. They had at least made New York a kind of permanent supporting character on their shows, whereas Friends, after a few brief forays onto the subway or into Bloomingdale’s, had retreated into its preferred interior spaces, including the faux neighborhood spot whose spiritual footprint we were now occupying.

  Throughout our lunch, we anticipated the arrival of fellow Friends fanatics, there to commune with the setting of their favorite show. But no one even approached the restaurant. They were mostly standing catty-corner to the restaurant, on the northwest side of the street. The collective agreement to stand only on that corner was baffling. Why not get a bit closer?

  Once Jennifer and I concluded our meal and stepped outside ourselves, the riddle answered itself almost instantaneously. Standing on the northwest corner, of course, placed the façade of the familiar building at 90 Bedford Street directly in the backdrop of fans’ selfies, looking just as it had on television. After all, 90 Bedford had only ever been glimpsed in brief establishing shots on Friends, and only ever from a single angle. To photograph it from any other pers
pective would be to render it entirely unrecognizable. This was the perspective they wanted to see, and share, and post.

  To be a Friends fan touring the West Village in search of relics from the show was to grasp at any and all straws. Ross’s apartment was supposed to be across the street, but while we had the address, the building did not look much like it had on the show—or perhaps we were remembering it wrong. And the same went for 90 Bedford. Seeing the building—even eating lunch inside it—the mind balked at the notion that Rachel and Monica and Chandler and Joey were supposed to have lived right here. Real and imaginary geography did not line up, and it was next to impossible to picture this twenty-first-century bistro superimposed atop that orange couch, and Gunther hunched behind the counter.

  There was so little to see on our Friends walking tour that after checking in on Ross, we walked five minutes to 5 Morton Street, where Phoebe was supposed to live, and wound up our corkscrew-shaped tour at the Lucille Lortel Theatre, where Joey had once performed. While I suppose we could have stopped in at Bloomingdale’s, where Rachel had worked, or the Plaza, where Monica and Chandler had celebrated their engagement, how much would it have added to our understanding of Friends’ place in New York?

  The tour felt like a letdown, even though I had known there was practically nothing to see, but I kept thinking about those tourists who had ventured to the corner of Grove and Bedford to pay homage to the show they loved. There was essentially nothing to do other than snap a selfie, but they kept coming, from New Jersey and from Europe and from everywhere else Friends pilgrims originated. The lack of anything worth seeing was not a marker of their being hoodwinked; it demonstrated the ferocity of their devotion that they were there nonetheless, present in the West Village to see nothing much at all simply because it had been granted the mark of Friends.

  In coming to visit Friends places, it was hard not to ponder the remarkable life and afterlife of this show, which seemingly reached new heights of the impossibly mundane upon its premiere in 1994 and yet still captivates new audiences a quarter of a century later. There was so little to look at, at first glance, and yet it was impossible to look away. Friends had emerged in an era when comedies were finding new ways to amuse their audiences by being about as little as possible. At the same time, Friends’ comic minimalism was conjoined to a soap-operatic maximalism. It was a show that compelled us to stay glued to our screens by the promise of emotional revelation. Its characters, often so devoid of ambition or drive, were rendered whole by the force of their yearning: for romance, for sex, for understanding. There were teenagers around the United States—around the world, for that matter—who discovered Friends and believed it to be their own. As someone who had been a teenager himself when the show premiered, I was fascinated by that desire to claim the show as theirs. Television was almost inevitably a cultural product with an expiration date attached. How often did viewers go back and watch series that had premiered decades prior, unless out of nostalgic drift?

  I wanted to tell the story of a show that had been created in an entirely different media universe—before streaming, before #MeToo, before the War on Terror, before Trump—and understand the roots of its success. By delving into the particulars of the making of the show, I hoped to understand how Friends had achieved its remarkable success, and how it had sustained that appeal across decades, and generations of viewers.

  Friends’ perceived weaknesses had become its strengths. Its lack of realism (Chandler and Joey living in the West Village?) had been transformed, through the passage of time, into an evergreen fantasy of youth. It was a show about young people that would be discovered, year after year, by new cohorts of young people aching to know what adulthood would be like. The show may not have had much of anything to do with New York, but people continued to come to New York to see what they could of the show they loved so fiercely. They were here to say thank you.

  PART I

  • • •

  CAN I INTEREST YOU IN A SARCASTIC COMMENT?

  The Roots of a Phenomenon

  CHAPTER 1

  INSOMNIA CAFÉ

  A TV Show Is Born

  One day in late 1993, a young television writer named Marta Kauffman was driving along Beverly Boulevard when she passed a funky coffee shop called Insomnia Café, located across the street from an Orthodox synagogue. Full of lumpy couches and garish chairs, strings of Christmas lights, and towering bookshelves piled high with mismatched books, the place was a beacon calling to the artists and slackers of the Fairfax–La Brea area. Kauffman, who lived nearby in Hancock Park, was trawling for ideas that could be transformed into stories for the upcoming pilot season.

  Along with her writing partner David Crane, Kauffman had created the groundbreaking HBO series Dream On and, after leaving the show, had been fruitlessly seeking network success. Last pilot season had been disappointing, and it was important to the two writers that 1994 be a better year for them than 1993 had been. Something about Insomnia Café grabbed her attention, and she began to mull over an intriguing idea. Could a comedy series set in a coffee shop appeal to viewers? Kauffman and Crane had only recently moved to California from New York, and found that they missed their old crew of friends from Manhattan terribly. They had spent all their spare time together, done everything together, served as a kind of surrogate family. What if they put together a show about that?

  * * *

  —

  Sometime in the mid-1980s, Warren Littlefield discovered something new about television. The NBC executive, protégé to network president Brandon Tartikoff, was attending an advertising meeting, and the research department displayed a gridded chart showing the relative audience shares for two shows: CBS’s Murder, She Wrote and NBC’s own St. Elsewhere. At the bottom left, Murder, She Wrote, featuring Angela Lansbury as a crime-solving mystery novelist, a fixture in the Nielsen top ten, and at the top right, NBC’s quirky hospital drama, beloved by critics but lagging noticeably in the ratings. The message was clear: NBC’s niche effort was having its clock cleaned. What came next changed Littlefield’s entire career.

  If you think Murder, She Wrote is kicking St. Elsewhere’s ass, the researcher continued, you’re right—when it comes to total audience. Now a new graph replaced the initial chart. This one showed the fees networks charged advertisers for their shows. Quirky, niche, never-gonna-be-a-hit St. Elsewhere made NBC more money than the far more successful Murder, She Wrote made for CBS. NBC was able to charge more for its thirty-second spots than CBS charged for theirs.

  And why? The answer lay in a steady shift in advertisers’ interests. Advertisers increasingly preferred younger eyeballs. Reaching a mass audience was too diffuse and too unpredictable. Advertisers preferred a targeted approach, pushing their sports cars and light beers to youthful viewers, whom they believed to be more likely to purchase them. The ratings were no less important today than they had been yesterday, but the youth market—broadly speaking, viewers between the ages of eighteen and forty-nine—was becoming the only market that really mattered. (Older people, the thinking went, could be safely ignored, being unlikely to buy the razors and sports cars and beer advertisers hoped to sell.) Littlefield understood that the ground was shifting in network television.

  Littlefield had been studying government at American University in Washington, DC, during the final years of Richard Nixon’s presidency, imagining himself rescuing American democracy from unconstitutional knavery. When Nixon resigned, the urgency of Littlefield’s cause dissipated, and he switched to studying psychology. Before beginning a graduate program, he wanted to accrue some work experience and was offered a job by a hometown friend as a gofer at a production company.

  After stints as a location scout and an assistant editor, Littlefield was acquiring properties of his own for production. He was feeding original movies to the gaping maw of the networks, which had approximately three hundred such slots to fill on their yearly calendars. One such effort
, an East Africa–set adventure called The Last Giraffe, was selected by The Hollywood Reporter as one of the ten best TV movies of 1979, and Littlefield decided it was time to relocate to Los Angeles. He soon took up a job at NBC in comedy development and began his meteoric rise at the network.

  Just a few years after the St. Elsewhere epiphany, Littlefield was named the president of entertainment at NBC, replacing Tartikoff. Littlefield was inheriting a network that was simultaneously flourishing and endangered. Under the tutelage of the highly esteemed Tartikoff, NBC had dominated the 1980s with series like Cheers, The Cosby Show, and L.A. Law. Tartikoff had been skeptical about a new series from two comedians named Jerry Seinfeld and Larry David (“too New York and too Jewish,” said the New York Jew) but developed the acerbic, high-concept, defiantly unlikable Seinfeld anyway.

  Now Littlefield had succeeded Tartikoff and was watching as the network’s most beloved series were leaving the air. The Cosby Show had ended, Cheers was ending, and NBC’s historic run of dominance on Thursday nights was running the risk of coming to an end. NBC needed to develop some new shows, and Littlefield’s newfound fixation on younger audiences found him constructing a mental graph of his own. The x-axis was the mass market; the y-axis was the youth audience. Littlefield was aiming to simultaneously maximize both, creating shows that were appealing to younger viewers without turning away older audiences.

  As Littlefield was pondering his future audience, Bill Clinton was close to wrapping up his first year as president and soon to face a wipeout in the 1994 midterms, in which Republicans would gain fifty-four seats and make Newt Gingrich Speaker of the House. The Soviet Union had collapsed two years prior, leaving the United States as the sole world superpower. Democracy had seemingly won its titanic struggle with world communism without firing a shot. The American way of life was ascendant.