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.
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