Friends may have been a worldwide smash hit that made megastars of its cast, but – according to one of its writers – the actors weren’t always trying their best to be funny.
Patty Lin, who worked on season seven of the sitcom about a bunch of twentysomething friends in New York, has claimed in a memoir that the cast stopped enjoying being part of the show. According to Lin, they deliberately ruined jokes so that they had to be rewritten.
“The actors seemed unhappy to be chained to a tired old show when they could be branching out, and I felt like they were constantly wondering how every given script would specifically serve them,” she wrote of the cast that featured Jennifer Aniston, Matt LeBlanc, Courteney Cox, Matthew Perry, David Schwimmer and Lisa Kudrow.
“They all knew how to get a laugh, but if they didn’t like a joke, they seemed to deliberately tank it, knowing we’d rewrite it.” In her autobiography, End Credits: How I Broke Up With Hollywood, Lin claimed that the novelty of landing a job on one of the world’s most successful shows “wore off fast”: “Dozens of good jokes would get thrown out just because one of them had mumbled the line through a mouthful of bacon.”
Lin wrote: “Seeing themselves as guardians of their characters, they often argued that they would never do or say such-and-such. That was occasionally helpful, but overall, these sessions had a dire, aggressive quality that lacked all the levity you’d expect from the making of a sitcom.”
Lin also claimed that it wasn’t only the actors who made life difficult. She said the programme’s established writers were “cliquey” and didn’t make new recruits feel welcome. “They reminded me of the preppy rich kids in my high school who shopped at Abercrombie & Fitch and drove brand-new convertibles,” she said.
In recent months, some of the sitcom’s stars have expressed concern about the show’s legacy. In March, Jennifer Aniston, who played Rachel, said: “There’s a whole generation of people, kids, who are now going back to episodes of Friends and find them offensive.
“There were things that were never intentional and others … well, we should have thought it through … but I don’t think there was a sensitivity like there is now.”
The show’s co-creator Marta Kauffman has said she regrets the series’ lack of diversity. In June 2022, she donated $4m (£3.2m) to create a university professorship programme focusing on the study of African culture and people.
“Admitting and accepting guilt is not easy,” she said. “It’s painful looking at yourself in the mirror. I’m embarrassed that I didn’t know better 25 years ago.”
Friends’ popularity shows no sign of waning. A Friends “experience” has been touring the world and is in the middle of a two-month run at the NEC in Birmingham. Fans pay up to £85 to take selfies in replica sets of the Central Perk coffee shop and Chandler and Monica’s apartment. It has proved so popular that an extra two weeks of tickets were added to the run.
