Friends Is Worse Than You Think: 236 Episodes, Six Millionaires and a $4 Million Apology
The comfort show of three generations is a perfectly good machine. It's also a decade of fat jokes that took its creator 18 years to pay for.
By the Heckle Desk · · 2 min read
I don't dislike Friends, and I want that on the record, mostly because the people who love this show know where you live, on account of they've been at home for 30 years. It ran on NBC from September 1994 to May 2004, 236 episodes, and about 52.5 million Americans watched it end. The Los Angeles Times called it the best new comedy of its season. The Houston Chronicle called it a Seinfeld wannabe, and the Chronicle is the only paper in this story that has ever been right about anything and got no money for it.
The craft is real, so let's give it its due and move along, the way you do at a wake. Those were six skilled performers working with very good joke writers in front of a live audience, and the rhythm of the thing is close to perfect. It's also close to a metronome. Every line comes up, gets its laugh and steps aside for the next one, and after 236 episodes you begin to notice you've been laughing at the rhythm itself, the way a dog gets excited about the sound of a can opener, whether or not it's his can.
Then there's what the jokes were about. Monica used to be fat, and the show found that hilarious for ten years, returning to it the way a man goes back to a buffet. Chandler's parent comes out and he spends the rest of the series flinching. One storyline is built on the premise that a male nanny is the funniest thing a person could hire. Critics were writing all this up by 2015, when Netflix let a new generation see the show cold, and those kids reacted the way you would if you found your grandfather's diary and it was mostly about his neighbors.
As for who was allowed in, these six people lived in New York, the most crowded and mixed city on earth, and they managed it for years the way a Victorian lady crosses a puddle. Aisha Tyler finally arrived in a recurring role in 2003 and lasted nine episodes. David Schwimmer has said he campaigned for years to have Ross date women of color, which makes him the only person who ever wanted Ross to meet more people. In 2022 co-creator Marta Kauffman pledged $4 million to African and African American studies at Brandeis and said, "I'm embarrassed that I didn't know better 25 years ago."
That's a decent thing to do, and I'd point out only the arithmetic. The stars went from $22,500 an episode to $1 million an episode by the end. Netflix reportedly paid as much as $100 million just to keep the show through 2019, and WarnerMedia then paid a reported $425 million for five years. So the apology came to about two weeks of Netflix.
None of which stops it working. You'll put it on tonight, and it'll be warm and quick, and you'll laugh on schedule. It's a fine place to spend an evening, like a hotel, and for about the same reason: nobody who lives there seems to have a job they go to, and somebody else cleans up what you've left behind.
It's a hard thing to apologize for something that's still paying you, which is why it's mostly done by people who've already been paid.