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.”
The One with Six Kids and a Fountain
On a summer night in 1994, six young actors boarded a private jet in Los Angeles and flew to Las Vegas for dinner. It was director James Burrows’s idea. The pilot episode of Friends had been shot and delivered, but not yet aired. NBC was so enthused about the first script that they’d already ordered a full season of episodes. Poor testing aside, Burrows had the unshakable feeling that they had a hit on their hands. On top of that, they had six overexcited pilot stars knocking around the Warner Bros. lot, unsure if their show would go anywhere, but nevertheless riding high on all the hype. Burrows called Les Moonves: “Give me the plane. I’d like to take the kids to Vegas.”11
On the hour-long flight, Burrows showed the cast their episode, for the very first time. When they landed, he took them all to dinner at Spago, Wolfgang Puck’s flagship restaurant and legendary ’90s celebrity hotspot. (“It was so fancy,” Jennifer Aniston recalled nearly twenty years later, grinning at the giddy memory.) The whole group was overwhelmed and dazzled, itching to go out and do whatever it was that hot young television actors were supposed to do when they flew into Vegas on private jets. Then, in the middle of dinner, Burrows held up his hands and said what he’d brought them here to say: “This is your last shot at anonymity.”
Burrows had agreed to stay on for a few more episodes, and would eventually direct the majority of Season One. But he’d already seen firsthand the audience response. “They loved these characters. They laughed at these characters. They were six young people who were handsome and pretty and funny.” This dinner, he told the cast, would be their last night out as ordinary people, their “last fling” with normality, before the swarming fans descended. Burrows looked around the table at six blank faces, and hit the point again, perhaps a little too hard: “From now on, your lives are over.”
They didn’t buy it. “Everyone was like, ‘Wow, oh, my God,’” remembered Lisa Kudrow. “I sat there going, ‘Well, we’ll see.’” Matt LeBlanc was incredulous, but then he remembered who he was talking to.
All due respect to Burrows, it was a fairly ridiculous prediction—optimistic, to say the least. Most new shows didn’t (still don’t) survive, and even the hits didn’t hit that hard. Complicating things further, his cast was in a tenuous position, with some of them committed to other series. If one of them had to drop out, they would lose that preternatural chemistry that