Friends and the Golden Age of the Sitcom - Excerpt
And Pre-order Details!
Hello!
I’m aware I’ve been very quiet for the last couple of months. I found myself having to move house, and everything got a bit chaotic and bubble-wrapped from there. However! I’m settled into a lovely new place, and it’s almost time for my debut book to venture out into the world!
Friends and the Golden Age of the Sitcom is available to pre-order here, signed copies are available from my website and, of course, you’ll be able to find it wherever good books are sold. (Including that one place. You know the one. I won’t link to it though.)
In case all of these pre-order details weren’t exciting enough, I thought I’d share a little excerpt from Chapter One, all about the casting process. Enjoy, and buy the book! (Please.)
That opening episode began with a perfect introduction to the ensemble of characters. Each one of the friend’s key personality traits were established through a set of short, coffee shop vignettes. The first scene opened with Monica Geller, played by Courtney Cox (arguably the biggest name attached to the series at that point), interrogated by a few of the group about an upcoming date. Before Friends, Cox was most famous for her appearance in Bruce Springsteen’s ‘Dancing in the Dark’ music video, pulled up on stage to dance by the Boss himself. Shortly before Friends, Cox appeared in both Ace Ventura: Pet Detective and a single episode of Seinfeld, in which she played one of the many women Jerry Seinfeld miraculously managed to date. It was Cox’s time on Seinfeld that helped set the tone among the six stars of Friends. She noticed that the Seinfeld actors often suggested little things their co-stars could do to improve their performances and make the show funnier. According to Lisa Kudrow in Warren Littlefield’s book Top of the Rock, Cox told her fellow actors ‘feel free to tell me. If I could do anything funnier, I want to do it.’ It wasn’t usually the done thing for actors to give each other notes, but Cox’s permission bonded the group, giving them a real reason to be open and honest with each other.
Courtney Cox was originally offered the role of Rachel Green, but preferred the character of Monica. In Top of the Rock, Marta Kauffman mentions that the original Monica was imagined as ‘darker, edgier and snarkier’. Crane and Kauffman originally had Janeane Garafolo, a well known stand up and part of The Larry Sanders Show’s cast, in their minds. Garafolo went on to play another of Seinfeld’s out-of-his-league girlfriends, but never made it on to Friends. Instead, Courtney Cox as Monica brought a softer side to the role. Early episodes regulated her character’s personality to be mostly maternal. Also, a chef. Six episodes in, she also got the character trait of ‘tidy’. Who says women can’t have it all? There was some debate among NBC executives over whether her character would also be considered ‘slutty’. In a run-through of the pilot episode for the network, Don Ohlmeyer gave the note that Monica got what she deserved after sleeping with ‘Paul the Wine Guy’ on the first date. Ohlmeyer insisted on a questionnaire being handed out to the audience asking if Monica falling for a lie and sleeping with a man made her a slut, a whore or a trollop. Thankfully, the old-fashioned ideals seemed to be Ohlmeyer’s alone; the rest of the audience were unbothered. Television had come a long way from those married couples and their separate beds.
As the pilot moves on to its second vignette, Chandler Bing – the sarcastic one, played by Matthew Perry – describes a nightmare of being back in high school with a phone in place of his genitals (a mental image we could all live without). Perry was one of the first names on the list for Chandler, but almost didn’t join the Friends cast due to already being attached to another pilot – LAX2194. The landscape of nineties sitcoms could have been very different if this show – about baggage handlers in the year 2194 and starring Ryan Stiles of Whose Line Is It Anyway – had made it to series. Unfortunately, or fortunately, all that remains of LAX2194 now is a few minutes of footage on YouTube. Imagine Red Dwarf with a smaller budget and Ryan Stiles with a truly incomprehensible accent, and you’ll get the idea.
The creators of Friends were certain that Chandler would be the easiest part to cast – it was the character with the best jokes. Instead, casting Chandler turned out to be an unexpected challenge. With Perry unavailable, the casting process dragged on, with the writers growing more and more concerned that the character that they’d created just didn’t work. For a large city, Hollywood was a small town and many of the actors in the running for Chandler were close friends of Matthew Perry. Perry had formed something of a gang with David Pressman, Craig Bierko and Hank Azaria, describing them in his autobiography Friends, Lovers and the Big Terrible Thing, as a ‘mini-Rat Pack’. When the pilot script for Friends Like Us was going around, Perry was certain that Chandler would be the perfect for him, if only he was available for the job. Hank Azaria auditioned for Friends twice, both times for the part of Joey. He didn’t make the core cast, but later won an Emmy for his performance as David, Phoebe’s love interest. Perry, meanwhile, was coaching friend after friend on how best to play Chandler, but no actor seemed quite right. The writers were even worried that the character just didn’t work and had to be rewritten. Eventually, the producers settled on Craig Bierko, and offered him the role. In his book, Perry recalled a lunch with Bierko and Azaria. Bierko had to make the choice between Friends and the lead role in a show called Best Friends. Against his friend’s advice, Bierko took the latter role, wanting to be a solo star rather than part of the group. The role of Chandler Bing remained up for grabs.
After a long and frustrating casting process Jamie Tarses, one of the producers developing Friends Like Us at NBC, asked her then-husband Dan McDermott – a producer at Fox, the network producing LAX2194 – if the futuristic baggage-handlers show had any chance of being picked up. It did not, probably because it was about futuristic baggage handlers. Matthew Perry was – if not officially, then technically – available, and went in the following week to read for David Crane and Marta Kauffman. It turned out that the character of Chandler Bing worked just fine, provided Matthew Perry was the one delivering the lines.
Instead of Hank Azaria or any of the myriad others who auditioned for the role in what was rumoured to be the season’s hottest pilot, Matt LeBlanc was cast as Joey. In those early pilot scenes, there wasn’t much for Joey to do beyond being handsome and not too bright. LeBlanc was previously best known for a recurring role in the Fox sitcom Married … With Children and its various short-lived spin-offs. Before being cast on Friends, he was down to his last eleven dollars. The night before his audition, he took the advice of a fellow actor who suggested going out and getting drunk to get used to the mindset of hanging out with friends. While drinking, LeBlanc took a tumble, and had to apologetically arrive at his audition with a large and obvious scab on his face. The story behind the injury got the creators laughing, set the tone in the room and helped him land the role.
LeBlanc brought a shift to the character originally conceived as the ladies’ man of the group. Early on, he began to worry that a character who had little to do beyond hitting on the women around him didn’t have much staying power, and he asked if Joey couldn’t act as more of a big brother to the three central women. This, combined with a comment during the pilot that he was great at playing the idiot, cemented him deeply into the role of well-meaning dolt, and gave the character its longevity.
In the pilot, after another soft bass sting, Ross – played by David Schwimmer – enters and immediately establishes his character as ‘the sad one’. Schwimmer was one of the first actors to be invited to join the Friends cast, and one of the last to sign on to the show. About a year before the casting process began, Schwimmer had auditioned for Couples, a show written by David Crane and Marta Kauffman. While he didn’t get the role, and Couples itself went nowhere, he’d lingered in their heads until Friends came along. Crane and Kauffman took inspiration from Schwimmer’s acting style and wrote Ross with him fully in mind. When the time came to cast the Friends pilot, Schwimmer was offered the part with no audition required. There was an obstacle in the way, however, and that was the actor himself. After a disastrous, cutshort run on Monty, a Henry Winkler vehicle that lasted just six episodes on the air, Schwimmer had decided to stay away from television. He’d spent many years working hard in the theatre industry and couldn’t conflate the collaborative, ensemble process of stage work with the TV industry – where he was expected to say his lines and do as he was told. He insisted to his agent, Leslie Siebert, that he had no interest in television and that he didn’t want to see a single script. Siebert sensibly ignored him, insisting he take a look at the Friends pilot. Even James Burrows contacted Schwimmer directly, encouraging him to take the role. Eventually, he conceded.
At the time he was cast on Friends Schwimmer wasn’t well-known for his stage acting – or even at all. In Entertainment Weekly’s review of the first few episodes, he was referred to as ‘best known as the doomed “4B” on last season’s NYPD Blue’. That same reviewer was confused by Ross’s role in the group, saying ‘it took me two weeks to figure out that he was Monica’s brother and not her lover’. The creators of Friends might have had clear personalities for each character in mind, but some details weren’t so obvious to the audience straight away.
As the opening scenes of the pilot continue, Lisa Kudrow as Phoebe Buffay makes short work of establishing her role as ‘the kooky hippy one’ – a manic pixie dream girl eleven years before the term was first coined – taking it upon herself to clean up poor, sad Ross’s aura. Kudrow had been cast the previous year as Roz Doyle in the pilot of Frasier, a job which lasted just four days before she was replaced with Peri Gilpin. Thankfully, she landed on her feet with a recurring role as snarky waitress Ursula on Mad About You. David Crane’s partner, Jeffrey Klarik, was a writer on Mad About You and the one to draw Crane’s attention to Kudrow, which led to her invitation to read for the role of Phoebe. After auditioning for Crane and Kauffman, Kudrow found herself in the terrifying position of having to audition specifically for James Burrows, the man who had fired her the year before. While Kudrow hadn’t worked out as Roz, she was perfect for Phoebe and Burrows had no notes.
The only concern in casting Kudrow was that she wanted to keep her recurring role on Mad About You. It was physically possible for her to do both jobs, but did it make sense considering the two shows were both set in the same city, and aired one after the other on the same network? Crane approached Danny Jacobson, co-creator of Mad About You, and asked if Phoebe and Ursula could be twin sisters. Eventually, this led to a two-part Friends episode that played with the shared universe, with Chandler and Joey visiting ‘Riff’s’ – Ursula’s workplace from the Helen Hunt/Paul Reiser sitcom – and meeting Ursula. Hunt and her co-star Leila Kenzle made an appearance in the episode in a brief scene that got plenty of cheers from the live studio audience. The use of crossovers might feel old-hat in the age of sprawling IPs and the Marvel Cinematic Universe, but for its time it was a fresh and exciting way to use this New York based programming block, beyond the realm of sitcom spin-offs.
Finally, the pilot arrives at one of the most iconic character introductions of all time: enter Rachel Green. A rain-soaked Jennifer Aniston sweeps into the coffee shop in a wedding dress so nineties it might as well have been double denim. Timed, of course, just as Ross announces that he ‘just wants to be married again’.
It’s impossible to imagine Rachel with, say, Courtney Cox in the role, now that Aniston has made it so thoroughly hers. Her casting, however, was almost too much of a gamble for the network. Like Matthew Perry, Aniston was already signed on to another show. Unlike Perry, her show Muddling Through, on CBS, had made it past the pilot stage and actually shot a handful of episodes. Aniston had worked with NBC before, having appeared in the dismal Ferris Bueller series based loosely on the classic John Hughes film. While that show had been a failure, the network had continued casting Aniston in pilots, trying to find something that would stick. Before Friends, there was even an offer floating around for Aniston to join the Saturday Night Live cast, alongside Adam Sandler. According to Warren Littlefield, during those dire years of failed pilots he ran into Aniston at a petrol station, and she point-blank asked him if it was ever going to happen for her.
The answer, of course, was yes. She just had to get past CBS first. It was clear that Muddling Through was going nowhere, but there was still a contract, and that made casting Aniston as Rachel a massive risk. CBS had kept Muddling Through on a shelf for months, but if they decided to pick the show up and order more episodes, Friends would have to be reshot with a brand-new Rachel. Aniston begged to be let out of her contract with CBS, and when Muddling Through eventually made it to air NBC countered by airing Danielle Steele movies – a guaranteed audience draw – in the same time slot. CBS had no choice but to cancel the show, and the final episode aired just two weeks before Friends, complete with Jennifer Aniston, premiered on NBC.
Before the pilot even aired, plenty of people were certain that Friends was a hit in the making. One of the most trustworthy opinions was that of James Burrows, who was absolutely sure that this new comedy was going to be a success. So much so that he borrowed the NBC private jet for a weekend and took the six Friends not-yet-stars to Las Vegas. He encouraged them to eat, drink and be merry, and enjoy their time in these crowded public spaces. Late in the trip, Burrows explained his motives to the actors. He knew that Friends was going to be a hit, that they were about to be catapulted to stardom, and that this might be their last chance to enjoy anonymity. Less than a year later, all six of them were on the cover of Rolling Stone.
Just received my copy and I'm really enjoying it. A great read!