Copyright

An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd

1 London Bridge Street

London SE1 9GF

First published in Great Britain by HQ in 2018

Copyright © Kelsey Miller 2018

Kelsey Miller asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins.

Ebook Edition © October 2018 ISBN: 9781474086158

Dedication

For my friends

CONTENTS

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Dedication

Introduction: The Sweet Spot

PART 1

1 The One That Almost Wasn’t

2 The One with Six Kids and a Fountain

PART 2

3 The One with Marcel and George Clooney

4 The One Where Two Women Got Married

5 The One Where We All Got the Haircut

6 The One After “The One After the Super Bowl”

7 The One Where They All Go to London (and Everywhere Else in the World)

PART 3

8 The One Where Everything Changed

9 The One Where Nobody Died

10 The One Where It Ended, Twice

11 The Comeback

Acknowledgments

Source Notes

Interviews

About the Publisher

INTRODUCTION

The Sweet Spot

A few months ago, I walked into the gym, hopped on my usual machine, and thumbed the worn-out little button on the monitor up to channel 46. It was very early evening—a kind of magic hour at the gym. The place was packed, but oddly quiet, save for the whirring of stationary bike wheels and rhythmic thumping of sneakers on the treadmill. Gyms in New York City have a reputation for being scene-y and intimidating, full of athletic wunderkinds and sweat-free medical marvels eyeing each other as they deadlift a thousand pounds and do pirouettes in the mirror. On the whole, this reputation is shockingly true. But not at 5:30 p.m. At that hour of the day, all is calm and no one is judging. And every TV seems to be tuned in to a basic cable channel, as New Yorkers unwind with some cardio and reruns. That day, I walked in and saw the usual array of familiar faces lined up above high-tech machines: some folks watched Grey’s Anatomy, others preferred Law & Order. Some even tuned in to Family Guy, right out in the open. Really, there’s no judgment at 5:30. Personally, I always went right to channel 46, where every afternoon TBS ran Friends.

I’d started this routine a few years prior, around the same time I started working out regularly. I was in my late twenties, and up until that point, exercise had been the kind of thing I did either obsessively or not at all. Like most young women (at least the ones I knew), I’d thought of working out as something you did to try to look better, or to “cancel out” the dollar-slice pizza you ate on the street with your friends after five glasses of revolting wine. Now, I’d entered a new phase of adulthood. I ordered the good pizza and ate it at home with my long-term boyfriend—and not too close to bedtime, or we’d both need a Zantac. I exercised for actual health reasons, like a grown-up. It was boring and consistent, and I actually liked it. There were other things I didn’t like about getting older (like always having to keep Zantac in the house), but the gym wasn’t one of them. Because there, every evening, I could turn on Friends and hop back in time for a moment.

Channel 46 became the nostalgic escape hatch at the end of my grown-up workday. I would pedal away on the Arc Trainer, watching the episode where Monica accidentally dated a teenager, or the one where Chandler got stuck in an ATM vestibule with Jill Goodacre. I didn’t even know who Jill Goodacre was, really. I just knew she was a Victoria’s Secret model in the ’90s, and rewatching the episode was like returning to an era when both she and Victoria’s Secret were hot pop-culture references.

I’d never counted myself among the die-hard Friends fans, though of course I’d watched it. I was ten years old when it debuted in 1994, and in college when it ended. During those years it was one of the biggest shows on television—one of the biggest cultural events, period—and its enormous impact was baked into my DNA like radiation. I’d gotten The Rachel in middle school, I’d watched the finale with a group of weepy girlfriends, and if pressed, I could probably remember all the words to “Smelly Cat.” But that was base-level Friends knowledge, which was, frankly, hard to avoid having. The show was always there, one way or another. I’d find it on hotel-room televisions in the middle of the night, or hear the theme song in a grocery store and get it stuck in my head for days. Friends became an easy reference point in conversations. (“You know, Adam Goldberg. Dazed and Confused? He was Chandler’s creepy roommate with the goldfish? Yeah, that guy.”) I’d never owned the DVDs, but they always seemed to be around, either left by old roommates or brought in by new ones. When the show came to Netflix, on New Year’s Day 2015 (after months of hype), I tuned in for a hungover rewatch. So had all of my colleagues, I found out at work the next day. The true devotees hadn’t even waited until morning. They’d started shortly after midnight and watched until sunrise. I enjoyed revisiting the episodes occasionally, but I assumed I was a Friends fan the way everyone kind of was.

At first, the gym reruns were just an entertaining little addition to my cardio. Part of the fun, though, was watching it the old way—on actual television. I liked the inconvenience of it, even the commercials. I liked not being able to choose which episode I watched. One day, “The One with the Cake” came on again, and I had a thought I hadn’t had in years: Oh, man, I just saw this one. Even the annoyance was a comforting throwback.

Soon enough, I found myself timing my workouts to line up with the reruns. I knew the TBS schedule by heart, the distance between work and the gym, and the exact time I had to leave the office in order to make it in time. A few years later, I was a full-time freelancer, working from home, and it became even easier. All I had to do was wake up earlier so I could wrap up work by 5:00 or so, and I would make it to the gym just in time for “The One with Ross’s Sandwich.” By now, I could admit the truth: 5:30 p.m. had become my new prime time, and Friends was once again Must-See TV.

Let’s be clear: I did other stuff, too. I had a life. I was a writer, living in New York City. I had my own nice apartment (not Monica nice, but no one had that). I got to live in it with my very nice boyfriend, who soon became my very nice fiancé. I had my hardships, like everyone does, but I had much more to be grateful for. You couldn’t have paid me to go back and relive my twenties—especially not those early years, eating drunk pizza on the street. So why, as I inched into my thirties, was I suddenly clinging to a twenty-year-old show about twenty-something people?

I didn’t figure it out until that day a few months ago, when I breezed into the gym, turned on Friends—and it wasn’t there. Something had happened. Channel 46 was no longer TBS, but some god-awful sports network. I frantically clicked through the channels, mentally drafting an email to gym management about the great wrong they had done in changing cable providers. I looked around at my fellow rerun-watchers, expecting a row of outraged faces, but found none. Maybe I’d been wrong about the 5:30 crowd and the slightly embarrassing bond I thought we shared. Was I the gym weirdo? A good ten minutes passed as I stood motionless on the machine, absently thumbing the buttons and staring, wide-eyed, into space. (Yes, for sure, I was the weirdo now.)

In that moment, I thought of all the other times I’d gone back to Friends reruns: sick days, sleepless nights in unfamiliar hotel rooms, the day I got rejected by [insert job and/or romantic prospect]. It was a soothing balm on a lousy day—that much I already knew. But I’d also returned to Friends during periods of deep sadness and anxiety: while mourning the death of a grandparent, or waiting to hear back on biopsy results. On days like that, Friends wasn’t numbing, but comforting and warm. I leaned on the familiar jokes and unabashed sincerity. And I was not the only one. In the weeks after my little mental meltdown on the Arc Trainer, I spoke to others who said the same. Usually, it would start with my shame-faced confession: “So, turns out I’m emotionally dependent on a sitcom! How’ve you been?”

Many of my peers responded with stories of their own Friends phases. Some recalled watching it after 9/11. A lot of people mentioned the 2016 election or the 2017 mass shooting in Las Vegas. Friends was what they turned on when they just couldn’t absorb any more news coverage. For those who grew up on the show, it was a reminder of that earlier, simpler time—not in the world necessarily, but in their own lives. Many watched the show during personal low points or times of high stress: breakups, unemployment, the sleep-deprived first months with a new baby. Why Friends? I’d ask. Was it because the show touched on all those topics, but in an optimistic way? Were they seeking out that emotional resonance? “Uh, no,” they told me. “It’s just a funny show.”

These people use the term comfort food when talking about Friends. They refer to its lightness, its detachment from reality. They watch it because they can’t relate. It’s ridiculous! Six adults with perfect hair who hang out in a coffeehouse in the middle of the day? Who’s paying for those giant lattes? Friends, for them, is pure escapism.

For others, it’s something else entirely. As I began to write this book, I spoke with more people, from all over the US and the world, about their relationship to Friends. And everyone seemed to have one, even if they’d never been a fan—even if they’d never seen a full episode. My friend Chrissy, who grew up as a dual citizen in both America and Switzerland, is one of the latter. Friends, she said, was equally huge in both countries, despite the cultural differences. “For Europeans who had never been to the US, Friends was America,” Chrissy told me. I thought she was referring to things like sweatpants and not being able to afford health care, and other parts of American life that they don’t really have in Europe. Again, I was corrected. “It was the friendliness,” she told me. “Americans smile the moment you meet them. They talk to you like you already know each other.” To the Swiss, she said, American tourists came across like suspiciously nice aliens. Friends, with its high-energy humor and chummy characters, helped make sense of that. Maybe Americans were just an overly friendly bunch. Or maybe just New Yorkers.

I spoke with style editor Elana Fishman, who was raised in South Florida and now lives in Manhattan. Fishman is a diehard Friends fan, and she, too, got her sense of New York life from the show. She spent her high-school years watching the DVDs with her sister every afternoon, and while she understood that Friends was a fantasy, there was something about it that felt true. “On some level, I thought, ‘Okay, this is not at all realistic—but what if it could be?’” she told me. Fishman dreamed of going to college in New York, then starting a journalism career there. Friends gave her excitement and hope; it wasn’t an escape from reality but a glimpse into the future. Her life wouldn’t be exactly like Friends, she knew. But maybe it would be close. “[I thought,] ‘Maybe I’ll move to New York, make a best friend who has a rent-controlled apartment in Greenwich Village, and we’ll live there! And it’ll be great! And we’ll have the guys across the hall who are our best friends.’” Those things could happen. It would be pretty fortuitous for all of them to happen all at once, but not impossible. And really, only one of them mattered. “I didn’t have a lot of friends in high school,” Fishman added quietly, trailing off into a chuckle. “So, watching Friends—it was like a double comfort. I was going to make it to New York, and find that group of friends.” She laughed again. “I know, it’s sad!”

I don’t think it’s sad. I think it’s right on the money. I think it’s the very reason Friends remains one of the most-watched shows on television, to this day. A reported 16 million Americans watch the reruns weekly. That’s as many or more viewers than some of the episodes got during Friends’ first run. And that’s just the people watching it on TV. Netflix has retained the streaming rights since 2015, and since its wildly popular US debut, the company has been rolling out the series to 118 million (and counting) subscribers worldwide. In those markets, too, the Friends fandom remains huge and steady, and in some, it’s actually growing. In 2016, ratings were up by 10% in the UK, where the reruns air on Comedy Central—a channel whose primary demographic is aged 16–34. Teenagers—who weren’t even born when Friends went off the air—lie around on the couch, watching it after school. Young adults come home to their cramped apartments late at night (perhaps still full of street pizza), bring their laptops into bed, and fall asleep to an episode. And not-so-young adults, like me, watch reruns on exercise machines.

Friends has managed to transcend age, nationality, cultural barriers, and even its own dated, unrelatable flaws. Because, underneath all that, it is a show about something truly universal: friendship. It’s a show about the transitional period of early adulthood, when you and your peers are untethered from family, unattached to partners, and equal parts excited and uncertain about the future. The only sure thing you have is each other.

Cultural critic Martha Bayles calls it “the sweet spot”—a fleeting period of enormous freedom and encroaching responsibility, where friends band together in families of their own making. “In most countries, young people have neither the resources nor the adult approval to experience the sweet spot,” she writes in her book, Through a Screen Darkly. Yet Friends is just as popular with them. It is, she writes, “a chance to live vicariously in the sweet spot.” Indeed, even for those of us who had it, the sweet spot was never as sweet as it was on Friends. Our problems were never solved so tidily, our hair was never that good, and again, nobody had that apartment. The truth is, not even our friendships were that perfect. Some of us were lonely in those years, and some of our friend-families were dysfunctional. For others, the real sweetness came later. But what we all can recognize—what is absolutely spot-on about Friends—is the unmistakable, life-changing love that can only exist between friends. It is the net that catches you when family disappoints or falls apart. It is the ballast you can wrap your arms around when romance falters. Friends are the people who walk steadfast, hand in yours, through the rough patches. And then it happens—your grip loosens, the path widens between you, and one day, you look around and find you’re walking on your own, out of the sweet spot and into the rest of your life.

That’s what I realized, that day at the gym. I was thirty-three, engaged—not all that certain about the future, but no longer totally lost. That phase of my own life had been ending for a while. Over that last few years, close friends had moved away for work or gotten married. People had children and mortgages and career ladders to climb. I had a gym membership, for God’s sake, that I actually used. None of these were bad things. This next stage was exciting in a whole new way. But entering it meant leaving another, as well as the relationships I’d had there. Not the people—I would always have them. But it would be different. We couldn’t go back to being twentysomething friends any more than we could go back to summer camp or high school (and yeesh, would we really want to?). Life happens, friendships change—and change is the worst. So, no wonder I’d gone back to something familiar. Friends was a way to revisit the time in my life that was fading, slowly but steadily, into memory.

True, it was just an old sitcom. Yes, in most respects, it bore no resemblance to my own experience. But in the only way that mattered, it did. It was a show about friendship. And like old friends, it never really went away.

PART 1

1

The One That Almost Wasn’t

On September 22, 1994, NBC aired the pilot episode of a half-hour comedy now titled Friends. It began as plainly as the title implied, with five twentysomethings lounging at a coffeehouse, talking about nothing much. For the first three minutes they didn’t even have names. Then Rachel Green burst into Central Perk, hoisting up her sopping wet wedding gown, her hair utterly unremarkable. She introduced herself to the gang, and the gang to all of us. The story had begun.

It was a fairly inauspicious beginning. As with many television pilots, this episode was nowhere near as good as those that came later. “The One Where Monica Gets a Roommate” is pretty much just that: Rachel shows up in the city, having run out on her wedding, to find her long-lost high-school friend, Monica—for some reason. Why? Whatever, don’t worry about it. Monica lets her move in, seeing as she has an enormous apartment, smack-dab in the middle of Manhattan, with an empty second bedroom. Don’t worry about those things, either. On paper, the Friends pilot asks you to overlook a lot of absurdities and holes—as did most sitcoms of its time. On-screen, it’s only slightly less clunky. The performances are uneven, and the laughter so much louder and uproarious than the punch lines deserve. Watching it now, one can see the seedlings of the bright and crackling comedy to come. But one can also see, quite clearly, how it could have fizzled into nothing.

“They’re 20-something; they hang together; they’re wild and crazy and even occasionally funny,” the New York Times reported in its first tepid write-up of the show. “But would you hang with them? As with all gang shows, it depends on how the individuals develop. In any case,” the four-sentence blurb concluded, “this is mainly a show about demographics.”

Ouch. It wasn’t the friendliest welcome to the fall lineup, but it wasn’t entirely wrong, either. The show was about demographics—one in particular. Friends was centered around six Generation X Manhattanites, not exactly a group in which the majority of Americans could see themselves reflected. This was just one of many reasons the show should have, and so easily could have, failed. Today, it’s impossible to envision a television landscape in which Friends did not succeed, so far-reaching was its influence. But so much had to happen to get that single, just-fine pilot on the air. So much had to go right, and so many other things had to go wrong. It took a fortuitous blend of timing and luck and snap decisions—and a good deal of behind-the-scenes finagling between the power players, not just at NBC, but Fox and CBS, as well. And after that, it would take even longer for the show to prove itself as something more than a bubbly, blond Seinfeld.

In the end, the New York Times was right about Friends, but for the wrong reasons. It wasn’t a show about the tribulations of these specific few. It was the opposite. It had a theme so broad and loose that it pushed the boundaries of low-concept and was hardly concept at all. As the creators themselves put it, Friends was about “that time of your life when your friends are your family.” Or, at least, it would be.

On a rainy Wednesday afternoon in 1985, Marta Kauffman was standing at a bus stop in lower Manhattan. She was wet and miserable, and she had a decision to make. “I kept thinking, ‘I need a sign, ’cause I don’t know what to do,’” she would recount, decades later. Twenty minutes passed, and the bus never arrived. Typical. Then a taxi pulled up right in front of her—not at all typical on a rainy New York day. She didn’t think twice, just grabbed it, gave the driver directions, and leaned back in her seat. Suddenly, it occurred to her: a sign. She sat up, and there it was, right in front of her face. She knew exactly what to do.

Marta Kauffman and David Crane met in 1975, at Brandeis University. In 2010, Kauffman and Crane were interviewed by the Television Academy Foundation, where their story would be preserved for future generations of creatives and cultural historians. By then, the creators of Friends had long since ended their landmark show as well as their professional relationship. But their legendary rapport and synchronicity was undiminished. This was a duo that, from their early days in Hollywood, were known for their preternatural chemistry, finishing each other’s sentences and pitching network executives with uncanny energy and ease. In that 2010 interview, when asked to tell the story of how they first met, they replied in tandem, without skipping a beat: “He was a street urchin,” Kauffman began. On cue, Crane concluded: “And Marta was a whore.”

Onstage, that is. They were both acting students at the time, and had been cast in a production of the Tennessee Williams play Camino Real. It would be nice to view this first meeting through the lens of destiny, imagining a young Kauffman and Crane instantly recognizing themselves as kindred from the start. The truth, though, has a lot less fairy dust. The truth sounds a lot more like everyone else’s college theater stories: they met, did the play, and then never really hung out after that.

Two years passed. Kauffman went abroad for her junior year, and by the time she returned to school, she’d decided to try working behind the scenes. She enrolled in a directing course, which Crane was taking, too, having recently come to the realization that, as an actor, he was “really not good.” Kauffman didn’t yet know this, so when she was assigned to direct a production of Godspell, she asked her old castmate to be in it. “And he said, ‘No. But I’ll direct it with you?’”

Two directors on one show can often become a too-many-cooks situation, particularly when the cooks are two young, ambitious theater students. Dueling egos and clashing creative visions can spoil the production and make mortal enemies out of the competing codirectors. But, at least in their recollection, Kauffman and Crane’s first collaboration was precisely the opposite. It was easy and it was a blast. Having been relative strangers before, they now fell into an instant and easy rapport. Already, they were completing one another’s sentences, working in sync like seasoned producing partners. “It was one of those relationships where you very quickly realize, This is fun,” says Kauffman.

They had fun codirecting Godspell and so decided to do another play, and then another. There was no formal agreement, but Kauffman and Crane now realized they both enjoyed creating theater, maybe more than performing—and they enjoyed it even more when creating it together.

“I don’t even know which of us said it,” Crane recalled. But, on a whim, one of them suggested they write something. The way he tells it, the decision to become writing partners went something like: “Yeah, let’s write something! It’ll be a musical! Sure!” Kauffman shrugged and nodded. “We have a barn.”

Neither had ever written a play, let alone a musical. So they did what one is supposed to do in college: experimented. They booked a theater space and commissioned classmates Seth Friedman and Billy Dreskin¹ to help out.

This play would become the first Kauffman-Crane production, titled Waiting for the Feeling. (It was exactly what it sounds like, according to Kauffman: “An angst-driven, collegiate, ‘comedy’” about how hard it is to be a college student.) Still, the experience confirmed what they’d first come to realize while directing Godspell. They clicked. They were good (if still juvenile) writers. They understood each other, but also complemented one another. Crane was analytical, his focus homed in on the words on the page. Kauffman was better with emotion, and enjoyed the creative work of taking a story from script to stage and, later, to screen. Down the line, during the production of Friends, Crane preferred to stay in the writers’ room, tweaking jokes and refining stories, while Kauffman did much of the creative producing on set, checking wardrobe, watching camera blocking, and hashing scenes out with the actors.

What made Kauffman and Crane such a strong team was the fact that they could put their heads together and create something, and then step apart to execute their vision in slightly separate roles. They had talent and dynamism and extraordinary work ethic, but they also had trust. On this foundation, the pair would go on to forge a lifelong friendship, and a twenty-seven-year creative partnership, which would forever alter the trajectory of both network and cable television programming. It was a natural, comfortable interdependence. Together, they just worked.

When people wonder about that ineffable magic that made Friends such a hit, much credit (if not all credit) is given to the cast. But Kauffman and Crane were the primary ingredient, no question. It was not only the fortitude of their professional relationship, but the intimacy and trust within their personal one. They were the original friends.

Kauffman and Crane moved to New York after college, pursuing the musical-theater career they’d begun at Brandeis. They wrote their next show, Personals, along with former classmate Seth Friedman. It was a musical revue about the people behind newspaper personal ads, featuring music and lyrics by none other than Alan Menken and Stephen Schwartz—already musical-theater stars, and on the verge of becoming musical-theater legends, as well as the musicians behind virtually every Disney animated feature of the 1990s. Personals made the rounds on college festival circuits, and even a USO tour, before landing off-Broadway in 1985, where it starred a twenty-six-year-old Jason Alexander. The production was bursting at the seams with talent, and yet reviews were almost comically mixed. “Entertaining and ingenious,” declared the New York Post. “Unfailingly mirthless,” countered the Times.

Still, Kauffman and Crane had laid solid groundwork for what they planned as a lifelong career in the theater. Only in their late twenties, they’d already written and mounted a handful of off-Broadway plays and musicals—some with Kauffman’s new husband, composer Michael Skolff—many of which were well received. If they weren’t yet an established hit, they were on their way, with no plans to change course.

Then television agent Nancy Josephson came to see Personals. She, too, was a relative newbie, on the cusp of titanic success—much of which would arise from her decision to contact Kauffman and Crane, and eventually sign them as clients. That night, after seeing the show, she reached out to the playwrights. Had they ever considered writing for TV? Not really. Did they want to give it a shot? Why not.

Josephson tasked Kauffman and Crane to come up with ten television concepts to shop around. Crane is the first to acknowledge that some of the show ideas were, in a word, “crazy.” Others were just bad. But Kauffman and Crane were undaunted, perhaps because, being so far removed from Hollywood, they had no real sense of the competition they were up against. At that point, television would be at best a side gig, with both of them still committed to the theater. They flew out to Los Angeles for meetings occasionally, but remained firmly rooted in New York. And then, out of the blue, someone bought one of their scripts.

“Talk about your first work not being your best work,” Crane said, shaking his head. “It was called Just a Guy. And it was really just about a guy… I don’t know, it was really lame.” But it was a milestone—a massive turning point in their career. “We sat in the rental car, screaming,” Kauffman recalled. Just a Guy was never produced, but now they could say that they’d sold something. “And then we were able to sell a few more scripts that didn’t get produced,” said Crane. On the one hand, they’d spent years doing unpaid work on unproduced scripts, flying back and forth across the country, and this was the big payoff: five minutes of screaming in a rental car, and a fee that, after commission, probably wouldn’t cover rent on either of their apartments, let alone both. On the other hand, they were TV writers now, officially. In selling one lousy script, they’d shot past the thousands of other writers out there trying to do just that.

It was the third of three key events in their early professional partnership—the one that made them pack up and leave their lives in New York, to try this TV thing, for real. The first was simply meeting Josephson, and agreeing to her suggestion that they give TV a shot. (When later asked about her role in their career, Josephson took no more or less credit than she was due: “I saw the play and thought they should work in TV. I guess I was right about that.”)

The second moment happened after Josephson told them it was time to formalize their writing team. By then, Kauffman and Crane were doing some work as a pair, and some as a trio, with their friend Seth Friedman, who had cowritten Personals. Then Josephson brought them a potential gig working on a screenplay. It would turn out to be just another script that never got produced, but the nameless project became a turning point, nonetheless. As Josephson was finalizing the deal, she told Kauffman and Crane they had to decide whether or not they would do this job with Friedman, or work together as a pair. If this was a partnership, it was time to make it official, once and for all. They had twenty-four hours to make the call.

That evening, Kauffman found herself in a taxicab, inching her way home through the driving rain. A sign, she thought. “And I sit up, and I look at the license of the cabdriver. And his name was David Yu.” That was it, as far as she was concerned. From then on, it was David and Marta. They were partners. And soon they were off to LA together, for good.

“The meeting that you think is not going to yield anything is the one that’s going to change your life.” When asked for his advice to aspiring TV writers, this was David Crane’s reply. “If success should happen, you have no idea how it’s going to happen.” He and Kauffman were brought into the television world because of their exceptional creative and story-crafting abilities. They then spent years ideating, pitching, maybe selling but never producing, and heading back to the drawing board, hoping the next one would be a hit. In other words, they were following the traditional path toward (fingers crossed) success. But in the end, success turned up in an unexpected detour from that path. It wasn’t one of those myriad pitch meetings that got Kauffman and Crane their big break. It was simply the fact Universal Studios had a bunch of old black-and-white TV shows lying around, and was looking for a way to make money off them.

The way the story goes, in the late 1980s, director/producer John Landis had a bungalow on the Universal lot. He hadn’t had a hit in a couple years, and so studio chief Sid Scheinberg charged him with the task of coming up with a show using Universal’s enormous anthology of midcentury television footage. As Kauffman recalled, they’d brought in “thousands” of writers to invent series ideas around this archival material. Game shows, Mystery Science Theater–style shows, and none of it had worked. By the time they reached out to Kauffman and Crane, she said, “they were scraping the bottom of the barrel, talking to two musical-theater writers.” They were in Los Angeles, about to fly home to New York after wrapping up yet another fruitless pitch meeting, when Josephson called and asked if they could squeeze in one more before going to the airport. As Crane recalled, “We went in, and they showed us six minutes of black-and-white clips and said, ‘What would you do?’ And we said, ‘We have absolutely no idea.’” Another flop, but, oh, well. Every other writer in town had flopped, too, and anyway, this meeting was little more than a pit stop on the way to the airport. They got on the plane, took off, and that’s when something occurred to them. “By the time we got off the plane, we had an idea,” said Crane. It wasn’t even a pitch, but just a vague concept about a guy who’d grown up watching old TV shows, which popped into his head like funny little thought bubbles. Or something like that. They got home, dropped their bags, and called the studio. “And they said, ‘Come back.’”

Kauffman and Crane’s airplane pitch would become Dream On, a cult HBO comedy series about a divorced father who, like so many of his generation, had been raised in front of the television. In each episode, his fantasies and thoughts appeared, literally, on-screen, via clips from his favorite childhood TV shows. Airing from 1990 to 1996, Dream On was a quirky mix of nostalgia and humor. Most importantly, it was, as the critics put it, “adult.”

Dream On was one of HBO’s first forays into scripted series, debuting at a time when premium cable was stuck in a dangerous rut. The draw of these channels was the luxury of being able to watch feature films at home, without commercial interruption. Since launching in 1972, HBO had been on a steady, exponential rise. “But then the bubble burst,” the Los Angeles Times reported. VCRs, pay-per-view, and new basic-cable movie channels like TNT and AMC were now incentivizing viewers to ditch pricey premium subscriptions. In 1990, HBO’s customer base grew by only 1.8%, with 4.5% of existing subscribers canceling every month. In creating original programming, HBO couldn’t just deliver a show that was good. If they wanted to survive, they had to give people something they couldn’t get on network television. Two things, really: sex and swearing. Kauffman and Crane turned in their first draft to Executive Producer John Landis, who sent it back with two notes: “It needs to be funnier, [and] it needs to be dirtier.”

Other than that, Kauffman and Crane could pretty much call the shots. They had zero experience and total creative authority. They were thrilled, but panicked, and rightfully so. Shortly before beginning production, recalled Crane: “We were actually talking to a couple writer friends, going, ‘Okay, so you hire writers…and then you sit around talking about what the episodes could be? And then does someone go off and write it? Or do you write it as a group?’” The general feedback from their fellow writer friends was something along the lines of “I hate you.”

So they winged it. They had a staff of three writers and a warehouse in North Hollywood, where they whipped up a show that they thought was funny, and hoped everyone else would, too. In the end, they didn’t win over everyone, but more than enough. Dream On was HBO’s first definitive hit, as well as Kauffman and Crane’s, though today its legacy has been largely lost in the shuffle. Watching it now, it feels very much like a relic of its time: one part a standard story of a divorced dad muddling through middle age, and the other part a naughty cable show, where everyone swears like a sailor and walks around with their nipples out. But look beyond the titillation and it’s a quiet triumph.

Dream On was often mixed with the critics; the most typical complaint was that the language and sexuality seemed a little too deliberate, which, of course, it was. But it was a solid success, and signaled a sea change for premium cable, and for HBO in particular. Dream On was quickly followed by shows that further cracked the mold of traditional television formats, allowing for both sophisticated and oddball comedy, nuanced and polarizing drama, and the kind of stories that simply didn’t sell before, because no one knew if an audience would buy them. It proved that television didn’t have to cast the widest net possible in order to be successful. A show could be smart and specific and sellable, all at the same time.

Dream On is not often mentioned alongside those other early series—The Larry Sanders Show, Oz, The Sopranos, Sex and the City—which would come to define HBO as a leader in innovative, high-quality entertainment. Indeed, it doesn’t belong on the same list as those series. But there is no doubt that Dream On was the launch pad for them all. In the wake of all the behemoth successes that came after it, Dream On has faded into relative obscurity—an artifact from an era when it was still risqué to drop an F-bomb or display two whole butt cheeks in the same frame. But without it, there would be no Sex and the City, and almost certainly no Friends.

With Dream On, Kauffman and Crane had a hit under their belt, an Emmy nomination,² as well as the experience of running a show. Most importantly, they now had Kevin S. Bright. “When we first started, technically speaking, we weren’t partners. I was their boss,” Bright later explained during his own interview with the Television Academy Foundation. Along with John Landis, Bright was an executive producer on Dream On. But it became clear very quickly that Bright was a natural—and necessary—collaborator in the Kauffman-Crane partnership. “He’s really good at a lot of stuff that a) we’re not great at, and b) we really don’t care about,” Crane explained. Bright knew how to pull together a great crew, manage all the nuts and bolts of producing, and usher a show through postproduction. “[Dream On] was a show that lived and died in the editing room,” explained Crane, and that was entirely Bright’s domain. Plus, they just clicked. “We had shorthand with each other,” Bright explained with a shrug. “We were three ex–New Yorkers.”

Two years into Dream On, the three of them formed Bright/Kauffman/Crane Productions, the company that would produce not only Friends, but Veronica’s Closet, Jesse, and, finally, Joey. Shortly thereafter, their deal with Universal was up for renewal, and while Dream On was riding high on its surprise success, the studio didn’t seem all that eager to make them an offer, or even meet with them. “It was one of those things that happens in television, where the company you’re working for feels you owe them,” said Bright. “Rather than they owe you for creating success for them.” Every other studio was very much interested, though, and after meeting with Les Moonves (then president of Lorimar Television, which soon combined operations with Warner Bros.), they signed a development deal, and left Dream On.

The team had only two real deal breakers in mind when it came to future projects: first, no single-star shows. Dream On’s premise had required lead actor Brian Benben to appear in nearly every scene of every episode, an exhausting demand that often made shooting difficult for him and therefore everyone else on the production team. That was a relatively easy ask given that few network shows relied so heavily on a single character. The second ask was trickier. “We said to [Moonves], ‘The only thing we don’t want to do is a family in a living room with four cameras.’” It was 1992, the golden age of families in living rooms: Blossom, Roseanne, Full House, Home Improvement, Family Matters, and The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air. Networks were minting money with these multicamera comedies, and not much else. If you weren’t a family in a living room, then you’d better be football.

Thus came Bright/Kauffman/Crane’s next show, and first major flop: Family Album. It was one of two series they developed during their first year with Warner Bros., the other being Couples—a single-camera comedy about three couples living in the same apartment in New York City. That show, they said, was the obvious winner. It flowed right out of them, Crane recalled: “We wrote it in, like, a week! We love it… It’s smart, it’s single-camera, it’s got everything we want.” Family Album, on the other hand, was multicamera, family-focused, and in terms of writing, “[like] pulling teeth.” No one wanted a show like Couples, no matter how good it was. They wanted, as one network executive told them, “a white-collar Roseanne.”

Backed into the living-room corner, they did their best. “We did everything right. We drew on our own lives. It was about this family from Philadelphia. We had characters based on our parents…and yet, for some reason, the DNA was wrong, and it was incredibly hard to write.” Still, Couples was passed over,³ while Family Album was picked up and ran on CBS. For six weeks.

Family Album was no one’s dream project, but its cancellation was still a blow. “Around that point we were feeling not so much like the cable wunderkinds anymore,” recalled Bright. “We were more like the cable disappointment.” Dream On had been a hit, but one hit (and a surprise niche hit at that) is a meager track record. “It was interesting to us how fast the hype about you can change. ‘Golden children, eh. You’re golden children with tarnish now.’”

That same year, The Powers That Be, a show that Kauffman and Crane had created (but hadn’t run) for Norman Lear was canceled, too. While they’d hardly written a word of it beyond the pilot episode, they were still credited creators, and thus now had another failure with their name on it.

Back to the drawing board, again. Sitting in their office at Warner Bros., the three ex–New Yorkers started thinking back to the days before they came out to Hollywood, when they were just out of college and a little lost—but not alone. Kauffman and Crane thought about their old friends from the theater days, and how they’d banded together as a makeshift family, in those years before they’d made their own families, before careers had taken shape, and adult life was still amorphous. “We were looking at that time when the future was more of a question mark. Maybe ’cause that’s what we were feeling in that moment,” said Kauffman. Maybe there was something there. After all, she thought, “everybody knows that feeling.”

Weeks later, it was done. Kauffman and Crane delivered a seven-page pitch for a show they titled Insomnia Café.⁴

“This show is about six people in their twenties who hang out at this coffeehouse,” they wrote. “It’s about sex, love, relationships, careers…a time in your life when everything is possible, which is really exciting and really scary.”

The following pages went on to describe potential storylines and character sketches—all drawn from friends in their social circle back in New York, with a little bit of their twentysomething selves thrown in. But ultimately, it was that single and incredibly simple concept that sold the show: “It’s about friendship, because when you’re young and single in the city, your friends are your family.” It was straightforward and endearing, and in 1994, it was exactly what NBC was looking for.

“We wanted to reach that young, urban audience, those kids starting out on their own,” remembered Warren Littlefield, former president of NBC Entertainment, in his 2012 book, Top of the Rock: Inside the Rise and Fall of Must See TV. He’d been studying the ratings one morning, reviewing numbers in the major markets—New York, Dallas, Los Angeles, Saint Louis. “I found myself thinking about the people in those cities, particularly the twentysomethings just beginning to make their way… It was very expensive to live in those places as well as a tough emotional journey. It would be a lot easier if you did it with a friend.” He’d been hunting for a Friends-esque concept ever since, “but none of the contenders had ever lived up to our hopes.” Then Kauffman and Crane showed up.

In the historic pilot season of 1994, their pitch remains legendary. “The pitch was like two old friends telling you a story. The jokes were already there,” added Karey Burke, who was an NBC executive at the time. “It was theater.”

It’s a testament to just how good the pair was at pitching that it was such an easy sell. Because, beyond that famous log line and the six character sketches, they really didn’t have much else—including a plot or even a solid premise, according to Crane. “I remember pitching it and we were saying, ‘Yeah, and basically we’re just in their lives. And here are the six characters, and they’re specific. But yeah, we’re in and out of their apartments and they go about doing stuff. That’s your show.’”

NBC bought it—not only a script, but a pilot, as well. At the very least, this would not be another idea sold, bought, and left unproduced. The show’s title was changed from Insomnia Café to Friends Like Us,⁵ and Kauffman and Crane sat down to write. In three days flat, the script was done. As with Couples, the writing came easily and it came out good. But Couples had also been a great pilot that went bust, so they wrote this first script with the understanding that it most likely would be the last. “At the point where you’re doing pilots,” said Crane, “you don’t think you’re going to spend the next ten years of your life doing this.” No one was all that worried about answering questions like: If Monica is a chef, then why is she home for dinner every night? Why doesn’t anyone lock their doors in this downtown Manhattan apartment building (except when someone is locked out for storyline purposes)? How the hell did a recently homeless, evolution denialist, aura-cleansing weirdo like Phoebe wind up hanging out with these bourgeois squares? As Crane pointed out, at this stage of the process, it just doesn’t matter much because, in all likelihood, your show won’t survive long enough to answer these questions. “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… [It] 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.”

If you’ve watched any network television programming since 1975, then James Burrows is a name you’ve likely seen thousands of times, but never noticed. He is a director and producer, who has worked on shows including but not limited to: Taxi, Cheers, Wings, Will & Grace, Frasier, Dharma & Greg, 3rd Rock from the Sun, and NewsRadio. As Littlefield describes him in Top of the Rock, Burrows is “the most successful director in television comedy—ever.” After reading Kauffman and Crane’s pilot script, Littlefield called him up. “I literally had no time,” Burrows later told the New York Times. “But I read it, and I said, ‘I can’t let anyone else do this.’” He agreed to direct the pilot, but nothing more.

With Burrows signed on, things got more serious. He embraced the loose, low-concept structure of the show, and later, when directing the pilot, would offer several crucial tweaks that made the show stand out. But even with a knockout script and the best television comedy director on board, some NBC executives still had serious “concerns” about the show.

First of all, everyone was too young. What about adding an older character? Someone who could pop in every now and again to give some sage advice to these young folks. Maybe it could be the guy who owned the coffeehouse—or a cop! “You know the children’s book Pat the Bunny? We had Pat the Cop,” said Kauffman. They would eventually write a script incorporating the character, and hated it so much that they called the network and begged them to can the idea, promising to incorporate the parents more or bump up older guest-star appearances. The network agreed. Then there was the issue of the coffeehouse. “You gotta remember what time it was,” said Kevin Bright. “Starbucks hadn’t really taken hold yet.” Neither had the mid-’90s trend of coffeehouse culture, complete with enormous mugs and acoustic guitar music, which Friends would soon launch into mainstream popularity (well, Friends and Jewel).⁶ The network suggested the coffee shop be swapped out for a diner—much like another NBC sitcom. “They came to us and said, ‘Why don’t you have a diner, like Seinfeld. Everyone knows what the diner is.’” It wouldn’t be the last time they’d have to fight against being pressed into Seinfeld’s mold, but Kauffman, Bright, and Crane pushed back on this, too, believing that audiences would somehow figure out what a coffeehouse was. The network relented, with the caveat that they change the color of the couch.⁷ Sure.

One last adjustment was made, changing the title from Friends Like Us to Six of One,⁸ and finally, they were cleared to start shooting the pilot. And then came the infamous slut survey.

The pilot episode featured a storyline in which Monica goes on a date with Paul (Paul the Wine Guy, of course), a man she’s had a crush on for ages. During their dinner, he tells her he hasn’t been able to have sex with a woman ever since his wife left him. Monica winds up sleeping with him, and the next day finds out that the whole story was a lie he uses to try to get women into bed—leaving her crushed. After a run-through for network executives, West Coast President Don Ohlmeyer spoke up. “At first, he didn’t like the storyline, because one of our main characters is sleeping with a guy on the first date,” recalled Crane. “[He said,] ‘Well, what does that say about her? Doesn’t that say she’s a whore?’”

At which point, said Kauffman, “fire came out of my nose.” She immediately excused herself from the room, incensed, and left Crane to handle the situation. After talking through it, Ohlmeyer came around—but only because Monica winds up feeling hurt and humiliated after the encounter. Her so-called transgression was allowable, only because she was punished for it. As Ohlmeyer put it (according to Kauffman and Crane), “She got what she deserved.”

Nevertheless, at Ohlmeyer’s insistence, they handed out a survey to one of the test audiences, after another run-through. In the politest of terms the survey asked: What did they think of Monica having unmarried, filthy, and scandalous sex with a man on the first date?

I’m paraphrasing—but just barely, according to Kauffman. Presented as it was, she recalled, the survey might as well have said, “For sleeping with a guy on the first date, do you think Monica is a) a whore, b) a slut, c) too easy.” It was clear that Ohlmeyer wanted this storyline cut, and believed the audience would back him up (the other executives apparently didn’t agree, but neither did they get in his way).⁹ In the end, though, his survey backfired. The audience responded to the scandalous storyline with a resounding so what? They didn’t care. Monica was a hit.

On May 4, 1994, “The One Where Monica Gets a Roommate”¹⁰ was shot on Stage 5 of Warner Bros. Studios. After wrapping with eight hours’ worth of material (two hours of footage from each of the four cameras), it was rushed to an editing studio, where Bright began cutting it into a twenty-two-minute episode. “Kevin worked with the editor, like, forty-eight hours straight,” said Crane. It was one of the very last episodes shot that pilot season, and there would be no time for additional notes. Bright sent off the finished pilot, got in his car, and started driving home to get some sleep. His car phone rang.

Don Ohlmeyer had one more note: “Pace it up.” The beginning was too slow. That opening sequence of conversation clips in Central Perk was plodding and not grabby enough. Ohlmeyer had called Kauffman and Crane, who desperately explained that the opening conversations were just that—just talking. It had always been written that way, and at this point it was already shot; there was no way to “pace up” plain-old back-and-forth talking without literally speeding up the soundtrack. Ohlmeyer replied with an ultimatum: “If you don’t somehow pace up the beginning, this show is not going on the air.” In a panic, they called Bright, who turned his car around and went back to the editing suite.

That’s how Friends got its first title sequence—not the one in the fountain with its famously catchy theme song. That came later. “The opening sequence was something that almost never was,” said Bright. Initially, it was set to air without one at all. Friends was on the air at the time, using only a brief, animated title card. Networks thought of long openings and theme songs as an opportunity for viewers to change the channel, thus Kauffman, Bright, and Crane had been told in no uncertain terms that their show couldn’t have one. But now it needed one.

Bright asked if he could have an hour to turn something around. He called the music editor and asked her to cut together a forty-five-second version of REM’s “Shiny Happy People,” using only the chorus. “And then I said to the editor, ‘I want you to scan through the show, and I’m just gonna say stop. Whatever image we stop on, pull that image.’” One hour later, they sent back the pilot with this cobbled-together compilation of screen grabs and REM. They didn’t cut a single moment of the actual show, but forty-five seconds of pop music was good enough for Ohlmeyer.

After several rounds of testing the pilot with audiences, NBC’s attitude about the show was one of hesitant glee. It didn’t test well, but testing is a notoriously unreliable diagnostic—and, internally, everyone could see there was something good and exciting here. So the network decided to take a gamble. They called the cocreators and told them they were giving the show the 8:30 slot on Thursday nights, placed right in between Mad About You and Seinfeld. In 1994, there was literally no more prime spot in prime-time television. There was just one final note: the network wanted to change the title again, and simply call it Friends. Bright’s response: “If you put us on Thursday nights, you can call us Kevorkian for all I care.”

Everything that came next is, without a doubt, a success story—if not a straightforward one. It took a fortuitous blend of talent, left turns, and elbow grease just to get the show up to this, its starting point. All that is thanks, almost entirely, to the wisdom and relentless work of Marta Kauffman, David Crane, and Kevin Bright—with the support (and occasional roadblocks) of numerous collaborators and one incredibly powerful television network. But if there was a magic formula to Friends that launched the show from a promising but tepid pilot into a stratospheric hit, then the final key ingredient was the cast. On its own, the show is good—exceptionally so. But, as David Schwimmer realized the first day he came to work and met his five new counterparts, “the miracle is the casting.”

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