11

The Comeback

On the evening of August 11, 2015, Comedy Central UK put out a vague but tantalizing message on its Twitter feed: “We’re throwing a Friends party!” The tweet linked to an announcement on the company’s website for something called FriendsFest: a five-day “experiential event” in east London, where fans could browse memorabilia and take photos on replica sets of Monica’s apartment and Central Perk. That same week, Comedy Central UK had renewed its license with Warner Bros. to broadcast reruns of the series through 2019. The licensing fee was not disclosed, though reports estimated it to be somewhere in the neighborhood of “colossal.” Comedy Central would only say the deal was a significant investment.

Maybe a little too significant, in fact. Friends had been on the air virtually nonstop for the last twenty years. And so much had changed in those last two decades. For starters, there was a whole hell of a lot more to watch on television, and much of it was of equal or higher quality than this throwback sitcom. Comedy hadn’t died at the hands of reality, after all. It had rebounded and diversified, taking on new forms: satires like The Daily Show and The Office; mockumentary-style series like Modern Family and Arrested Development; surrealistic, hyperspecific worlds like 30 Rock; barely fictionalized improvisational comedies like Curb Your Enthusiasm. Even the traditional multicamera sitcom returned with new creative fortitude, in shows like How I Met Your Mother and The Big Bang Theory—both of which were often touted Friends 2.0. In this new golden age of television, audiences expected shows to be smart rather than snappy. They wanted nuance and surprise, in addition to sparkling comedy.

Furthermore, fewer and fewer people were watching those shows on television itself, preferring to get their entertainment the same way they got everything else: via the internet. Comedy Central had just paid untold millions to air a show that everyone had already watched a hundred times, on a platform that was going out of style. If this rerun investment was going to pay off (or simply break even), then they had to do something to generate fan interest. An event like this might be a fun, fresh way to remind viewers of their old favorite show. They could take selfies on the orange couch and sip coffee from giant mugs, and then (fingers crossed) go home and watch a few episodes (knock wood) on their channel. At the very least, FriendsFest would be a good barometer to gauge how many people still cared about Friends. If enough were willing to buy a ticket and come to an event, then maybe they’d be up for turning on the television.

The next day, August 12, at noon, @ComedyCentralUK put out another tweet, announcing that tickets for FriendsFest were now on sale. Thirteen minutes later, they were sold out.

* * *

It’s hard to pinpoint the moment it started, but around ten years after Friends ended, it had its biggest resurgence yet. I remember the first time I noticed it, sitting at my desk at Refinery29, a popular women’s media site where I worked as a writer. It was 2014, and I was scrolling through a list of our most popular recent stories. Every other headline seemed to have the word Friends in it: fun Friends fashion stories, behind-the-scenes anecdotes, thoughtful opinion pieces about the dated, problematic characters. By the time Netflix announced its own acquisition of the show, the internet was bubbling over with breaking-news stories about Friends—a show that had been off the air for ten years. And, I realized, I had written plenty of those stories myself! Like everyone else, I was having some sort of relapse of Friends fever.

Strange, considering we all should have been inoculated by then. Comebacks happen all the time, but the curious thing about this one was that Friends had never really gone away. In the US, too, it had been running in ceaseless syndication on multiple channels. It was so omnipresent that it should have been mere background noise—the kind of show you only watch in dentists’ waiting rooms—but instead, it was the hottest thing on TV. Or on your phone.

Years later, the revival continues. Offline, too, devotion to the series has only grown. Friends was always a symbol of ’90s style, but over the years it evolved into its own distinct subgenre of fashion. Urban Outfitters began stocking little white T-shirts, like the ones they wore on Friends—as well as little white T-shirts with the Friends logo printed on them. Friends! The Musical Parody debuted off-Broadway in 2017, and was such a success that its eight-week run was extended by almost a year. Long before FriendsFest, Central Perk–esque cafés opened all over the world, in Beijing, Singapore, Dubai, Saint Petersburg, Egypt, and Bulgaria, to name a few.

The show has now reached viewers in more than one hundred and thirty countries (and that’s not including those who’ve gotten it online) in approximately forty languages. It’s become a popular tool for learning English. YouTube is now full of tutorials featuring clips from the show, but people have been using reruns to study the language since before YouTube even existed. During a recent US tour, members of the K-Pop group BTS talked about how their parents made them watch the DVDs growing up, crediting their ease with the language to the show. In 2017, the New York Times interviewed several Spanish-speaking Major League Baseball players who became bilingual thanks to Friends. Mets player Wilmer Flores, who is from Venezuela, pointed out that the show was far more helpful than traditional classes when it came to learning American English because it gave him a sense of how people really spoke. It did not, however, give him an accurate picture of the country, nor the city for which he played. “In photos, it all looks the same, but the traffic and driving around is way different,” he told the Times. Indeed, traffic is one of many real-life elements of New York that Friends omitted entirely—including, the Times noted, people who look like Flores.

Today’s television comedy paints a much more diverse image (though it still doesn’t come close to a realistic depiction of America’s population, let alone New York’s). In light of shows like Jane the Virgin, Grey’s Anatomy, Orange Is the New Black, and...well, pretty much everything, Friends’ flaws are all the more noticeable. They’ve added a complicated undertone to the current wave of Friends nostalgia, especially for the many young people who are only just discovering the series. Today’s city-dwelling twentysomethings have even less in common with the ones on Friends, and yet they are the show’s biggest fan base.

My cousin, Dizzy Dalton, is one of them. She was born in 1992 and first saw Friends as a six-year-old. Back then, she was too young to pick up on most of the cultural references or incongruities, and it didn’t matter. “It was a kind of humor I could understand,” she told me. She got hooked on the show the way little kids do, bugging her parents and three older siblings to come watch it with her. Soon, the whole family capitulated and became fans. Now, Friends quotes have become a kind of family shorthand, and the show is a nostalgic pastime. When they’re together over the holidays, unwinding on the sofa, it’s one of the few things everyone can agree on—though Dizzy remains the die-hard fan. She puts it on in the background when she’s cooking, so familiar with every episode that she doesn’t even need to look at the screen to watch it. “It’s like wrapping yourself up in a warm blanket,” she told me. But now, she does notice things about the show that shock her: the gay jokes, the overwhelming whiteness, etc. She still takes comfort in it, but at the same time, “it very much offends the sensibility.”

More than anything, she’s put off by its treatment of women. “There’s a fair amount of slut shaming in it, as well,” she pointed out, citing storylines like the one where Rachel tells Ross how many guys she’s slept with (and he flips out). “There’s a lot of shaming of the girls for sleeping with people, and then Joey can go out and sleep with everyone,” she says. To her, though, this highlights the progress that’s been made. Friends is an old show with old problems. Some are problems we’re still dealing with, sure, but many of these storylines would just never happen now. She lives in a world where terms like slut shaming exist. When Friends was created, it was just slut, full stop. “I mean, clearly things must have changed so much in the last twenty, twenty-five years.”

Some things, yes. But others had only begun to change in recent months. I had that conversation with Dizzy in October 2017. That same week, the New York Times and the New Yorker published in-depth reports exposing decades of alleged sex crimes perpetrated by film producer Harvey Weinstein. It was both a shocking exposé, and not all that surprising. It seemed like the reckoning that Hollywood had coming for a century. As more women in the industry came forward to share their stories of abuse, coercion, and assault, the experiences revealed a broad spectrum of behaviors afflicting women in the entertainment business. Some shared stunning assault allegations, like those leveled at Weinstein, while others had been harassed or threatened or pushed out of the industry. The open secrets about Hollywood were, at long last, being dragged into the spotlight. The #MeToo movement bloomed. Many people assumed that phrase began with Weinstein. But the Me Too campaign had been around for over a decade. It was originated by black civil rights activist Tarana Burke, in 2006. None of this was new. It was just that nobody paid much attention, until now.

* * *

That same year, in April 2006, Amaani Lyle lost her case. Lyle had been hired as a writers’ assistant on Friends in 1999, and was terminated four months later. She’d been interviewed for the job by Adam Chase and Gregory Malins, the writer/executive producers she’d later work under, in addition to Andrew Reich (another writer/supervising producer on the show). During the interview, they’d told her it was crucial she be able to type very fast, because her primary job was to sit in the room and record what the writers said while brainstorming. They’d also told her that “the humor could get a little lowbrow in the writers’ room.” This was a comedy show about young, sexually active adults, after all. It was just part of the process.

That much Lyle understood (it was early in her career, but she’d been in writers’ rooms before). What was never made clear, though, was what distinguished “the process” from just a bunch of guys sitting around telling blow-job stories. Was it part of the process to recount stories about women gagging and vomiting on your dick? Pretending to jerk off constantly, bringing in a pornographic coloring book, and make racist jokes about black women and tampons—that was brainstorming? Was it necessary to gossip about one of the cast members’ alleged fertility problems, and speculate about her “dried-up pussy”?

These are a few of the alleged comments and incidents that Lyle later detailed in court documents. According to her legal declarations, this kind of behavior was common and accepted (or even encouraged) in the writers’ room. But it was her supervisors—Chase, Malins, and Reich—who were the worst, she claimed. None of these alleged statements were directed at Lyle herself. But it was, quite literally, her job to listen to them.

During her tenure, Lyle said, “I was constantly being exposed to writers and producers making statements and comments that had nothing to do with the Friends television show, that were offensive because they were racist, sexist, and obscene.” Often, when recounting personal stories about their sex lives, she said her supervisors told her not to include them in her notes. So, it seemed there was a line somewhere, between the creative process and so-called locker-room talk. Though, even when talking about the characters, it wasn’t always clear what constituted work. Lyle claimed that one of the writers frequently fantasized about an episode where Joey would sneak up on Rachel in the shower, then rape her. As she explained in a 2018 interview, “It was very hard to distinguish, ‘Okay, is this something that they want to put in a script eventually? Or are they just bored, and it’s two o’clock in the morning, and they’re tired?’” Lyle did understand that she was not in a position to rock the boat. Apparently, this was how hit TV shows got made. “It’s something where [I] wouldn’t have questioned the process if I hadn’t been accused of not doing my job.”

Chase and Malins terminated Lyle after four months, on the basis of poor job performance. They claimed her typing was too slow to keep up with the conversation. It came as a shock because, up until that point, Lyle thought she was doing fine. She had been urged to work on her speed, but she’d also been told not to worry about it. Indeed, according to court records, Chase had told her she was “doing a good job” the night before her termination. There was another writers’ assistant on staff, who (as two Friends producers later testified) often missed jokes, made errors when typing, and “spaced out” during meetings. He wasn’t fired. In fact, he was soon promoted.

He was also white and male, like most of people in the writers’ room. Lyle didn’t believe her typing was the problem. She thought it was more to do with the fact that she was a black woman working on a famously undiverse show—and that she had pointed it out. During her time on the job, Lyle testified, she protested Friends’ persistent lack of diversity on more than one occasion. She urged Chase and Malins to hire black actors (or extras, at least) and pitched stories involving black characters. Pitching and critiquing weren’t part of her job as an assistant—but neither were they firing offenses. She believed that Chase, Malins, and Reich just didn’t want her around.

Lyle immediately filed complaints with the Department of Fair Employment and Housing, alleging that she’d been fired out of retaliation and on the basis of gender and race discrimination, and that during her time on Friends, she was subject to both racial and sexual harassment. She was soon granted a right to sue. This began a six-year-long legal process that brought Lyle up against not only those three writers, but NBC, Warner Bros., and Bright/Kauffman/Crane Productions. Early on, the court ruled that Lyle had been an employee only of Warner Bros. (not NBC or Bright/Kauffman/Crane), but the creators were still forced to address Lyle’s allegations. They were the top of the creative food chain—the ones who (supposedly) had the most control over what got written, and therefore how it got written. Kauffman indicated as much in her own testimony: “There is a word that I find offensive. I don’t allow it in the room... It’s one of those words that people use for the female genital area, that is never used when I’m in the room.” Lyle herself said this was true. Chase, Malins, and Reich never said that word when Kauffman was around. But they used it regularly when she wasn’t. As Lyle further testified, one of them had called Kauffman herself a cunt.

Lyle’s case was initially dismissed in 2002, when an LA county judge ruled that she had not provided sufficient evidence. In 2004, an appeals court partially reinstated the case, excluding the claims about her termination. Apparently, there still wasn’t enough evidence to support Lyle’s allegation that she’d been fired for reasons other than poor performance. But, the court ruled, the harassment claim seemed potentially valid. For that, Lyle was entitled to a trial. Warner Bros., in turn, appealed that decision, and soon the case was headed for the California Supreme Court.

Lyle’s case was reinstated on April 21, 2004, two weeks before the series finale of Friends. The press remained remarkably quiet on the matter, and the few reports that did appear were brief, with all the dirty details scrubbed as clean as could be: “Lyle says she was offended by off-color banter among the writers,” reported Entertainment Weekly, in one of the three sentences it devoted to the case. The finale was coming, and that was supposed to be the big news. Ross and Rachel united at last, Monica and Chandler’s baby, millions of Americans tuning in for a bittersweet farewell. No one wanted to spoil Friends now.

They succeeded. The general public heard little about Lyle v. Warner Bros., even when it made it to the state’s Supreme Court. It was growing into a landmark case: freedom of speech v. sexual harassment law. Stories like Lyle’s were, of course, incredibly common. Writers’ rooms were notoriously raucous and raunchy (to put it politely), and typically hostile to women—if there even were any in the room. The Writers Guild of America reported that, in 1999, more than 75% of television employees were male, and almost 93% of them were white (“and there is little evidence to suggest that this pattern is changing”). Depending on the show, the environment in those rooms fell somewhere between Lord of the Flies and Porky’s. Harassment claims were nothing new in Hollywood. Allegations like Lyle’s were so commonplace that they usually never even made it out of the building, let alone all the way to court. What made Lyle’s case so unusual was that she pursued it at all.

But the biggest surprise was the defense. In their own testimonies, the defendants corroborated many of Lyle’s claims about their behavior. But, they argued, it was all part of the writing process. The blow-job stories, the demeaning language and masturbation simulations—things that might be considered harassment in other contexts were fine in the writers’ room. In fact, the defense argued, they were job requirements: “Because ‘Friends deals with sexual matters, intimate body parts and risqué humor, the writers of the show are required to have frank sexual discussions and tell colorful jokes and stories (and even make expressive gestures)...’” What Lyle called “harassment” they argued was “creative necessity.”

This was a first. The “creative necessity” defense was (as the appellate court had noted) “unique in the annals of sexual harassment litigation.” But hundreds of leaders in the entertainment industry—as well as publishing, advertising, education, and journalism—stepped in to support it. Numerous amicus briefs were submitted to the court, insisting that if Lyle succeeded, it would be an unconscionable assault on freedom of speech. It would destroy creative expression and lead to censorship on a massive scale. Journalists would stop reporting on sensitive subjects, and the entire news industry would come under threat. Teachers would be compelled to censor themselves and unable to properly educate. Activist and advocacy groups joined in to support Warner Bros., too, including Feminists for Free Expression and the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE). Greg Lukianoff, a director at FIRE, said that this case could “destroy the free and open exchange of ideas...it would transform ‘harassment’ into the exception that swallowed the First Amendment.”

The WGA, DGA, and SAG also filed a brief on the defense’s behalf, signed by more than a hundred film and television writers, including Norman Lear, Larry David, James L. Brooks, and David Milch. “Group writing requires an atmosphere of complete trust,” the brief stated. “Writers must feel not only that it’s all right to fail, but also that they can share their most private and darkest thoughts without concern for ridicule or embarrassment or legal accountability.”

Far fewer spoke up on Lyle’s side, but she did have a handful of vocal supporters. UCLA law professor Russell K. Robinson wrote a brief on her behalf, signed by several other legal scholars and professionals. They called bullshit: “There is ample record evidence of gender-denigrating sexual talk and conduct with no discernable connection to the writing process,” the brief stated. The facts of the case made it obvious (to them) that the defendants were manipulating the concept of creative freedom to justify plain old sexual harassment, “which should enjoy no protection from the First Amendment.” If the court sided with Warner Bros., it wouldn’t protect free speech as much as it would strip protection from people who were already at a massive disadvantage in this environment. “This repeated sexual conduct not only failed to advance the creative process,” Robinson wrote. “It also perpetuated an exclusionary culture that marginalizes female writers and writers’ assistants in an industry where women are substantially underrepresented. This Court must reject Respondents’ sweeping First Amendment argument because it would eviscerate antidiscrimination law in all ‘creative industries’ and leave women, as well as people of color and others, without legal protection.”

In the end, though, the defendants won. On April 20, 2006, the California Supreme Court ruled unanimously in their favor and dismissed Lyle’s case, declaring that what she experienced was not harassment, nor a hostile work environment. Most of the “sexual antics” and comments she alleged were “nondirected” and did not prove “sufficiently severe or pervasive,” according to the court. But the primary factor here was context. The ruling stated that “the Friends production was a creative workplace focused on generating scripts for an adult-oriented comedy show featuring sexual themes.” The creative necessity defense had worked.

One of the judges, Justice Ming Chin, wrote an additional opinion, underscoring his support for this ruling. “The writers here did go at times to extremes in the creative process. Some of what they did might be incomprehensible to people unfamiliar with the creative process. But that is what creative people sometimes have to do,” he wrote. It was critically important to protect free expression in the writing process—and the importance of protecting employees from what might happen in that process was “in comparison, minimal.” Justice Chin added that no one was forced to join a creative team, and those who choose to “should not be allowed to complain that some of the creativity was offensive.”

The entertainment industry cheered en masse. To them, this was a resounding victory for freedom of expression—for freedom itself. The threat of censorship was lifted, and now writers could once again feel safe to do their jobs. Lyle v. Warner Bros. had given them even greater liberty than they’d had before. Now, there was a legal precedent; the California Supreme Court had made it absolutely clear that they could say and do pretty much anything in the name of creativity, without fear of consequences.

They argued that this was a win for all Americans, really. “Audiences want something fresh. They want something surprising and they want something that rings true. None of that was going to happen if writers had to start pulling punches,” WGA representative Marshall Goldberg told the Los Angeles Times. This ruling “tells [writers] they can continue to create as freely as they want, and I think that is huge.”

Lyle herself did not comment. She’d already left television, joined the air force, and was living in Germany at the time. But once again, the small minority on her side spoke up in dissent. From their perspective, the court had squandered an opportunity to give this business a necessary wake-up call—to make it a more inclusive, sophisticated industry that would invite so many more artists to join in that creative process. Instead, it had just made Hollywood an even safer haven for the people already in power to do with it what they would—be it a TV writer drawing pornographic doodles, or a legendary film producer setting up auditions in hotel rooms. Employment lawyer Jeffrey Winikow was also quoted in the paper. The ruling, he said, “will continue to create this atmosphere where a woman really has to desensitize herself to all forms of misogyny to succeed in that business.” Lyle’s own lawyer, Mark Weidmann, made only one comment: “This sets way back the rights of women to be free from sexual harassment.”

* * *

Ten years passed. The Friends revival began, riding high on a wave of ’90s nostalgia. Lyle v. Warner Bros. did not resurface with it—but like the show, it had never really gone away. It did indeed become a landmark ruling, which set a legal precedent for all Americans. Lyle’s case quietly lived on in HR materials all over the country, as a reminder to employees of what does not constitute harassment or hostility, and what they may not complain about.

Then one more year passed. In 2017, Hollywood’s reckoning finally began. Now everyone could see just how “minimally” the industry protected its own. Women (and a number of men) spoke up about the abuses they had suffered, be it an incident of sexual violence or a persistent barrage of grotesque verbal harassment. Scores of other alleged predators were outed after Weinstein, many of whom openly admitted their behavior. A few even outed themselves before someone else could do it, so clear was the writing on the wall: time was up. It started in Hollywood, and now women all over the world were saying it. It was the end of another era—hopefully.

Only then did Lyle’s name reemerge. TV writers and journalists began to wonder aloud, on social media, how the Friends harassment case might have played out if it had happened now. Another question hovered over the discussion: If the court had found in her favor back then, would change have come much sooner?

Eventually, Lyle herself came forward to address the case for the first time in many years. She’d spent much of the last two decades as a journalist covering military topics, and was now working as a communications strategist for the Pentagon. Speaking with WNYC host Jami Floyd in January 2018, she said, “I’d pretty much tried to put [the case] behind me and go on with my life. I didn’t want to be defined as the woman who lost a case against one of the biggest shows in the history of television. I knew there was a lot more to me, and my journey, than that.” Lyle said the renewed interest in her story was heartening, though it did force her to relive the whole experience. Still, she added, she had no regrets about the past and was resolutely (if cautiously) optimistic about the future: “The dialogue has to be sustained, and it has to continue. And it has to equate into action, instead of just legal briefs and sound bites. It has to be a very deliberate process to be inclusive to everyone, and make people feel like they belong there.”

Otherwise, it would be all too easy for everyone to fall back into the same old routines and everything to resume, shitty business as usual. Lyle herself said that if she hadn’t been fired, if she’d had chance to become a fully fledged Friends writer, then she probably would have kept her head down and gone with the flow. In another 2018 interview, with the New Yorker’s Dana Goodyear, Lyle explained: “Looking back, if I had kept on with that trajectory in my career and they didn’t criticize my work, I wouldn’t have scrutinized the process... I wouldn’t have cared how the sausage was made.”

* * *

If we’re honest, most of us would probably say the same, especially when it comes to Friends. This series has come to represent everything beloved from the good old days—all kinds of good old days: the heady 1990s, the world before 9/11, the years before smartphones took over our lives. To some, it is a reminder of their youth, and their own friendship-families. To younger generations watching it now, it is a throwback to a simpler time, and all that that implies.

Friends is not the only old-school show to experience both a comeback and controversy in its later years. Seinfeld has weathered similar criticisms on diversity and sexism in the series, as well as major off-screen drama. In recent years, Jerry Seinfeld has made insensitive or offensive comments on so many hot-button topics (Bill Cosby, Black Lives Matter, autism) that it almost seems like he’s trying to become less popular. In 2006, a few months after the Lyle case was dismissed, Michael Richards (who played Kramer) was captured on video at a comedy club in the midst of a stunning racist tirade, screaming about lynching and hurling slurs at people in the crowd. Unlike Lyle v. Warner Bros., this incident got enormous press attention. Richards was booted out of the business for years (though not forever), and the infamous rant became an indelible part of his legacy—as it should’ve been. In terms of Seinfeld, though, it didn’t leave much of a mark. Fans seemed capable of denouncing Richards while still enjoying Kramer, just as they were able to recognize the problematic elements of Seinfeld and still laugh at the jokes. For the most part, it didn’t stop them from loving the show, and it sure as hell didn’t stop them from begging for a reunion.

Friends is different. Like Seinfeld, it, too, has become a period piece, but all its dated flaws have been covered in thick layers of buttercream nostalgia. The problems are in there somewhere, but if you’re not looking you could easily miss them. Even stories like Lyle’s have been buried deep beneath the overwhelming adoration. In part, I think it is because the show holds up so well in other ways. The comedy still works. The magic between the actors is still palpable. Even with fewer phones and more gay jokes, it still feels absolutely relevant and relatable. That time in your life when your friends are your family still exists. Some things don’t change. Friends is a reminder of that, and that’s why so many of us reach for it in times of grief or fear, when catastrophe strikes or when life seems suddenly unrecognizable. Even more than a relic of the past, it is a symbol of what is constant—the things and the people who will always be there for you.

Some things do change, though. Some things change for the better. Friends is a reminder of that, too. After all, this is a show that began with a woman running out on a loveless marriage, abandoning tradition, and starting a new life on her own terms. Today, would Rachel even have a wedding to run out on? Or would she already be living in the city, juggling a fashion internship while waiting tables to make rent? Would Ross and Carol be getting divorced, or would they have split in college and become friends after she came out freshman year? Would Chandler be taking his dad’s phone calls?

There are no definitive yeses or nos to these hypothetical questions about fictional people. The point is that now there are many more possible answers than there were when Friends premiered in 1994. Or even when it ended in 2004. Even since its comeback circa 2014, some things have changed dramatically. We like to think of the past as simple, but simple isn’t always better.

The fact that people are even revisiting Amaani Lyle’s case now, after a decade of silence on the matter, is evidence of progress. Were the case tried today, it’s possible the court would rule in the exact same way. But it’s difficult to imagine that quite so many people would see that as a victory. The way the public responded to her story back then is very different from the way it treated the avalanche of stories that came later. Had Lyle stood up and made her case today, she would not have been standing alone. That’s all we know for sure. It’s cold comfort, but as Lyle said herself, it’s a good reason to be optimistic.

* * *

In one way, Friends is just like Seinfeld: ever since it ended, people have been calling for a comeback. Rumors began even as they were shooting the finale. “A reunion?” Jennifer Aniston replied to an AP reporter who was visiting the set during rehearsal. Was it true there was a reunion movie in the works? Flummoxed, Aniston answered: “We haven’t even left yet.”

It was the last time she’d ever be surprised by that question. She and the others had spent ten years sitting on talk-show couches, getting grilled by Leno about whether or not Friends would be renewed. Now, they’d spend the rest of their professional lives fielding a similar query: Would they ever consider rebooting the show? How about an anniversary special? Congrats on the wedding/the baby/the Broadway play you’re starring in! So, any news on that Friends reunion?

All of the cast members went on to have successful careers, objectively speaking. There was no talk of a Seinfeld curse, dooming the actors to a future of failed shows.84 Courteney Cox built on her TV career, both on and off camera. In 2009, she had another hit with Cougar Town, a single-camera comedy that ran for six seasons on ABC. The show was coproduced by Coquette Productions—the company she’d formed with then-husband David Arquette in 2003. (The couple separated in 2010, but remained producing partners.) Cox was both the lead actress and an EP on Cougar Town, and soon began directing, as well. Aniston and Lisa Kudrow both appeared in guest roles, as did Matthew Perry, who played a love interest for Cox’s character. Not quite a reunion, but close.

Cox later returned the favor, doing a guest role on Perry’s show Go On. And this time it was almost certainly a favor. Go On was one of a handful of Perry’s post-Friends series that didn’t stick: Mr. Sunshine, Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip. Perry himself was always praised for his performance and capability as a lead. But none of the series made it past two seasons. Still, Perry continued to pop up on television with relative frequency, doing guest spots or recurring roles on shows like The Good Wife and Children’s Hospital. After 17 Again, Perry drifted out of the film world, despite having had more success there than some of his old costars. He’d had his share of big-screen disasters, as well, some of which had coincided with the lowest points in his addiction (Perry got sober in 2001). Having grappled with it so publicly, Perry became an advocate for recovery services. He lobbied for judicial reform to better serve nonviolent drug addicts caught up in the system, and he opened a sober living home in 2013. Addiction became a theme in Perry’s first play, The End of Longing, which he wrote and eventually starred in, both off-Broadway and in London’s West End. The character was an alcoholic—a highly exaggerated version of himself during his darkest days. In other words, it was the kind of role no one would ever offer him. “People still see me as Chandler, the goofy, sarcastic guy, and this is not that,” he told Variety. “I don’t think that anybody’s out there thinking, ‘I’ll write this for Perry,’ other than me. So, I did that, and I think probably the next thing I do will be written by me, too.”

Schwimmer, too, returned to theater, just as he’d intended to do. His original plan—to spend a year in Hollywood and make some quick cash for Lookingglass—had taken a little longer than expected, but at least the cash part had worked out pretty well. Schwimmer threw himself into directing, onstage as well as for television and film. He’d spent years honing his skills under the exceptional guidance of Friends’ directors, and during his time on the show he directed ten episodes himself. After Friends, directing became a refuge. Schwimmer was a gifted actor but an uneasy celebrity, and he hadn’t adapted to fame as well as the others. “It was pretty jarring and it messed with my relationship to other people in a way that took years, I think, for me to adjust to and become comfortable with,” he told the Hollywood Reporter in 2016. “As an actor, the way I was trained, my job was to observe life and to observe other people. So, I used to walk around with my head up, really engaged and watching people. The effect of celebrity was the absolute opposite. It made me want to hide under a baseball cap and not be seen.” After Friends, he said, “I was trying to figure out: How do I be an actor in this new world, in this new situation? How do I do my job?”

Schwimmer eventually found his footing and began doing more on-camera work, including his popular performance as Robert Kardashian in The People v. O.J. Simpson. Mostly, though, he remained behind the scenes. In early 2017, he produced a series of short films, written and directed by Sigal Avin, each depicting a typical instance of sexual harassment (all based on real-life accounts). They released the #ThatsHarassment series in April 2017, hoping to revive the dormant conversation around sexual misconduct in the workplace. The films were riveting and well crafted, and full of famous faces (Cynthia Nixon, Emmy Rossum, Schwimmer himself). Still, the series didn’t get much attention when it debuted in the spring. That fall, it was a different story. After Weinstein, #ThatsHarassment returned as a massive PSA campaign backed by RAINN, the Ad Council, and the National Women’s Law Center. Schwimmer jumped back into the press, promoting not only #ThatsHarassment but #MeToo, #TimesUp, and #AskMoreOfHim—a campaign he cocreated with David Arquette, urging men in the entertainment industry to become more active allies in these movements. Outspoken as he is on these issues, Schwimmer has never commented publicly on Amaani Lyle’s case. He did, however, make some telling remarks about one of the #ThatsHarassment films—in which a model gets verbally harassed by a photographer during a photo shoot (on a set full of people, who say nothing). “That scene is something all of us in the entertainment industry can somehow relate to...all the witnesses in the room and how complicit everyone is,” he said in an interview with Cosmopolitan. “And by the way, the young woman is not the only person being harassed in that scene. Any person in that room that was made to feel uncomfortable, or as if they had no choice but to be subjected to what was happening in that room, was harassed.”

* * *

Kudrow, too, developed an off-camera career, while consistently working as an actress. She launched the comedy Web Therapy in 2008, as the star and cowriter. It began as a low-budget web series, and was adapted by Showtime in 2011. Schwimmer, Perry, Cox, and Matt LeBlanc all made several guest appearances (as did Meryl Streep, Billy Crystal, Julia Louis-Dreyfus, and dozens of other people you would never imagine appearing in a low-budget web series). Kudrow’s 2005 cult hit The Comeback returned for a spectacular follow-up season in 2014. The story had evolved from a spot-on, brutally funny satire, to a gut-wrenching commentary on Hollywood’s ageism, sexism, and the hollow promise of fame—that was still, somehow, brutally funny. Both the show and Kudrow’s performance were distinct and powerful enough that audiences forgot all about Phoebe. Or they would have, had more viewers actually tuned in. In the grand tradition of cult phenomenons, The Comeback never got the audience it deserved.

Still, Kudrow has long been touted as one of (if not the) most successful of the Friends cast. She’s consistently worked in both television and film (including big box-office comedies like Analyze This and Easy A, dark indies like Wonderland, Pixar films, thrillers—you name it). She hasn’t become a movie star, nor has she truly shaken off the legacy of Friends. But all her professional choices indicate that—like LeBlanc—she’s not really worried about those things. Those are losing battles, and why fight them when you’ve already won so big? Back when she started auditioning, Kudrow’s dream was to become a regular on a sitcom. She got her big pie-in-the-sky wish, and then some. And then some more.

Now, Kudrow remains a supporting star, but one who almost always steals the show. She’s doesn’t sweat the Friends questions, and she doesn’t waste time trying to convince people she’s not Phoebe. She’s an improv comic, after all. She just keeps the scene going with a “yes, and.”

LeBlanc, like Kudrow, appears utterly unbothered by the goofy specter of Joey. Unlike her, he didn’t try to carve out a new path after Friends (and Joey). He just seemed to stop trying, period. And it worked. Episodes earned him a Golden Globe, and for the first time in his career, people realized that Matt LeBlanc was good. “A lot of times people will speak slowly to me because of Joey,” he often told the press. With Episodes, they played on those assumptions, turning the fictional Matt LeBlanc into a manipulator who let people think he was dumb in order to get what he wanted.

But, after Episodes, LeBlanc went back to just going with the flow, taking gigs he liked. He signed a deal to host Top Gear (which let him talk cars for a living), and he produces and stars in the CBS comedy Man with a Plan. It isn’t Friends by any stretch of the imagination, but it is a sitcom—familiar territory. LeBlanc has never tried to replicate the success of his first big hit. And, as he’s always quick to point out, he doesn’t have to. Financially speaking, none of them do, after making what he calls “fuck-you money” (a lot of other people probably say that, too, but not to his face). In fact, it was an even bigger fuck-you than we thought. “Let me just go on the record as saying: a million dollars a week was wrong. It was 1.3,” he corrected an Entertainment Weekly reporter in 2012. “We clear? I mean, $300,000 a week is not something to shake a stick at.”

Aniston remains the show’s most visible star. She plays lead roles in big movies (The Break-Up, Marley & Me, Horrible Bosses), lands enormous endorsement deals (everything from skin-care products to “smart” water to prescription eye drops), and hardly an hour passes without her name or her face appearing in the media. She has become the kind of celebrity who will always be famous and always work, if she wants to. But no matter what she does—on-screen or off—she does it hand in hand with Rachel Green. It’s not that Aniston herself is incapable of playing other kinds of roles. It’s simply that there is no other character, film, or tabloid story big enough to overshadow Rachel. Every day, millions of people in hundreds of countries are going back to watch reruns and laugh at her putting beef in the trifle.

“But she’s not a victim,” David Wild told me. “I think she’s had an amazing life. She’s had an amazing career. I don’t feel bad for her.” Despite her many undeniable successes, victimhood has become an even larger part of Aniston’s image in the years since both Friends and her first marriage ended: the wife who got jilted; the woman who was robbed of motherhood; the poor little TV rich girl who just can’t win on the big screen. “All of this stuff about her persona—I don’t know how much it has to do with her at all,” said Wild. “I don’t think she’s fucked up. I think we’re fucked up, in how we think about people like her.” Wild often writes and produces award shows, and he still sees Aniston from time to time. It’s always a pleasant encounter—like bumping into an old colleague at a work event. But it’s also like bumping into Jennifer Aniston at the Emmy Awards. Even Wild struggles to see past the layers of her celebrity and remember the struggling actress he first interviewed at a coffee shop on Beverly Boulevard. “I did it myself! A couple years ago, I did some show where she was speaking, and I had to write a speech for her.” The two of them were chatting, and Wild said, “Oh, let’s get a picture.” Aniston said sure, they should take a photo together. Reunion! Oh, no, Wild corrected. Aniston had misunderstood. “I didn’t want to take the picture with her.” He was the writer and she the celebrity; the writer doesn’t get in the shot. She was thinking two old work friends, but he was thinking Jennifer Aniston. “I had a moment of realizing she’s not the strange one,” Wild recalled. “We’re the strange ones, in how we’ve projected so much onto these people.”

Still, Wild has remained a trusted journalist to Aniston and her castmates, and he’s interviewed them individually over the years, as they promoted their new shows and movies. So, it’s often been his job to bring up the F-word. Normally, they’re fine with a little Friends talk, up to a point. In 2012, Wild interviewed Aniston for $ellebrity, a documentary about paparazzi and the celebrity photo industry. “She’s never been anything but really, really nice to deal with, in my experience,” he said. “But I remember asking one too many Friends questions of her.” Aniston didn’t protest, but her demeanor changed, just so. “I could just tell, she had moved on. She didn’t want the third Friends question.”

So, can you do a reunion already? That one’s unavoidable. Over the years, the cast have obliged somewhat, appearing in twos and threes in sketches on Ellen and Jimmy Kimmel Live. Five out of six showed up for a group interview for NBC’s tribute to James Burrows (Matthew Perry was in London, doing The End of Longing). They’ve done numerous cameos on one another’s post-Friends shows, but never have all six of them appeared together on-screen since the finale. Thanks to the internet, we have a steady stream of rumors that they’re planning a grand revival. Every time two or more of them are photographed out together in LA, it stirs up gossip that they’re shooting something. Usually, it’s Kudrow, Aniston, and Cox (who have remained close), and more often than not, they’re just walking to their cars after dinner. In January 2018, a video titled “Friends (2018) Movie Teaser Trailer #1” was uploaded to YouTube. It was obviously fake—a very well-edited compilation of clips of the actors in other roles (which anyone who has been to the movies, watched television, or browsed the internet in the last fifteen years would pick up on immediately). Still, it went instantly viral, getting almost 13 million views as of this publication.

If anything, the buzz has only grown in recent years, as other sitcoms from the ’80s and ’90s have gotten revivals: Roseanne, Will & Grace, One Day at a Time, Fuller House. Shortly after the fake trailer popped up, Kudrow appeared on Conan, and the inevitable question arose. “I mean, something should be done. I don’t know what,” she said. “They’re rebooting everything. How does that work with Friends, though? That was about people in their twenties, thirties. The show isn’t about people in their forties, fifties. And if we have the same problems, that’s just sad.”

Some shows reboot well. Will & Grace returned in 2017, virtually unchanged in style and tone, with the same punny humor and total disregard for political correctness. But Will & Grace always had an inherent social commentary woven into its premise. When it first debuted, it was a show about women and gay people in the ’90s—the DOMA and don’t-ask-don’t-tell years. When it came back, it was a show about women and gay people in the Trump era. Roseanne, too, had a place in contemporary culture. Polarizing as it was, Roseanne’s themes—class, economic insecurity, politically divided families—were just as relevant (and just as inflammatory) in 2018 as they’d been in 1988.85

Friends has no such hook. As a story, it’s timeless, but not as a show. It isn’t pegged to historical themes, but to the personal histories of these six characters. It’s about them then. From a storytelling perspective, it would be close to impossible to reunite these characters—for the exact same reasons it’s so hard to reunite the actors. They have new jobs and families and they live in different cities. It would take some big life event to bring the characters back together, and now that the weddings and babies have been had, all that’s left are funerals—and no one wants to see that. “I just don’t know if I want to see all of us with crutches [and] walkers,” Schwimmer said in 2018. As everyone knows, the cast members have no financial incentive to reboot the series, and a reunion movie seems implausible for other reasons. When Sex and the City went to the big screen, Cox said, “I wish we could do that with Friends. The thing is, the characters from Sex and the City hopped all over Manhattan. On Friends, we were always stuck in the apartment and that coffeehouse... I don’t think it’s going to happen.” If it were, she said, Kauffman and Crane would have to be involved. “Would [they] want to write it?”

For more than a decade, the answer has been a consistent and firm no. “Someone asks me every day,” Kauffman said in 2015. “I don’t get upset. I understand that people want to relive that. But you can’t relive that. We can’t go back to that time in our lives.” Furthermore, she added: “Let’s be honest, reunions generally suck.” As Crane explained it, “We ended right. It felt right... I think all the people who say, ‘Oh, I want to see them again!’ You really don’t. And I think they would turn on us on a dime.” Crane’s advice: the story has been told, from beginning to end. If you want to revisit, it’s all right there for you, in reruns. “Watch those! We did it!”

You never know. “Anything is a possibility,” Aniston said in 2018. “I mean, George Clooney got married.” Logistics and money, all that could be sorted out. As long as everyone is still on good terms, there’s always a chance. But with each passing year, the reunion concept seems better off as a daydream. “That show was about a finite period in people’s lives,” LeBlanc said in 2017. “And once that time’s over, that time’s over.” Trying to recapture it only sours the memory. “I went through that period in my own life. And when I revisit people from that time, it’s not the same. It’s just not. You can never go back, you can only move forward.”

Some things belong to the past. Friends is a story from a bygone era. It endures in the universal truths it tells about kinship and love and growing up. It lives on in our collective memory, along with our old roommates and first boyfriends, the inside jokes we used to make, and the cheesy songs we sang in the car, volume up and windows down. There’s a tempting bittersweetness in reflecting on those days—laughing at old photos, cringing at our haircuts. But as LeBlanc said, there is no going back to those places and people. They have changed and so have we, and that is as it should be. Best to leave them right where they belong: in that time. Then we’ll never lose them. We’ll always know where they are.

* * * * *