Watching an episode of Friends, a.k.a. one of the best sitcoms ever, often garners only good vibes, giggles and chuckles, but it wasn’t always the same experience creating the show itself. According to Lisa Kudrow, the TV show’s writers room could get pretty nasty behind closed doors.
It’s not exactly new information that things were different off-camera, given Friends writers’ assistant Amaani Lyle claimed back in 1999 that she was subjected to sexual and racial harassment through offensive comments made by several producers and writers during meetings. Kudrow shared her own less than savory experiences with those comprising the Friends writers room, which she said amounted to around 12 to 15 people, predominantly men. In her words:
Don’t forget we were recording in front of a live audience of 400, and if you messed up one of these writers’ lines, or it didn’t get the perfect response, they could be like, ‘Can’t the b---h f--king read? She’s not even trying. She f--ked up my line.’ And we know that back in the room the guys would be up late discussing their sexual fantasies about Jennifer and Courteney. It was intense.
Now, Lyle’s case was dismissed in a California Supreme Court case that held that vulgarity can be a necessary part of a creative workplace environment when it comes to a sitcom like Friends. Even so, it sounds like Lisa Kudrow and the other leading women on the show were subject to commentary from the writers’ room they didn’t appreciate. As she added:
Oh, it could be brutal, but these guys — and it was mostly men in there — were sitting up until 3 a.m. trying to write the show so my attitude was, ‘Say what you like about me behind my back because then it doesn’t matter.’
Kudrow discusses this element of Friends with The Times amidst recently bringing back her own commentary about making TV shows in her and Michael Patrick King’s HBO series The Comeback. While the latest season is set around the hot-button topic of an AI-crafted sitcom for Valerie Cherish, she’d previously drawn directly from her time on Friends to call out toxic writers rooms she's experienced herself. Case in point, the Season 1 scene where Valerie brought baked cookies to the writers, only to find Paulie G. & Co. making sexualized jokes about her.
In the new interview, she confirms that The Comeback has provided her the “closest thing” to her experience in writers rooms which she describes as being filled with “male energy” and “the sophomoric madness that happens when people are trapped, trying to do a series”. Friends certainly had a grueling schedule for a decade, with each episode taking a week to film in an industry that didn’t typically take so long per episode.
While making Friends might not have always been the best workplace environment, Kudrow has said before that she’ll always talk about it because gave her “everything.” And, following the death of her cast mate Matthew Perry, Kudrow has recently been rewatching Friends and weighing in things like if Ross and Rachel were on a break and about the show’s lack of people of color.
While we might expect a show like Friends to be all fun and games, Kudrow's comment show that the show from the 1990s and 2000s had its workplace faults.
