The One Where They All Go to London
(And Everywhere Else in the World)
It is a truth universally acknowledged that Americans don’t get British humor. It’s too dark and sophisticated for our sensitive palates, or something. Our humor, on the other hand, is deemed as sweet and uncomplicated as a Hershey bar. It’s unclear when this schism took place—at some point between the Reformation and the birth of Ricky Gervais—but it remains one of the greatest cultural divides between our wry forbearers and us goody-goodies here in the New World. As Gervais has put it, “America rewards up-front, on-your-sleeve niceness... We avoid sincerity until it’s absolutely necessary.”
There is, of course, one enormous counterpoint, and that is touchy-feely Friends. To this day, it remains appallingly popular in the UK. Reruns have aired almost around-the-clock since the series finale, and as of 2015, the rerun ratings were going up.
The Friends effect in Britain became apparent soon after the UK premiere, in the spring of 1995. By 1997, when Kauffman, Bright, and Crane were planning Season Four, it had reached a fever pitch. It seemed like the right place and time to try something new. That’s how, a year after Season Three’s low-key conclusion at the beach, Friends capped its fourth year with a true grand finale, in London.
The show had earned back the right to go big again. Following the slow-burn of Season Three, Season Four turned up the heat just so, delivering some of the series’ most beloved episodes (“The One with the Jellyfish”; “The One with the Fake Party”), dynamic storylines (Phoebe’s surrogacy; the Chandler-Joey-Kathy triangle), and just really, really good lines (“15 Yemen Road, Yemen.”). This is the season that gives us such iconic moments as Monica’s lesson on a woman’s erogenous zones, from one to seven (“seven, seven”), and Joey’s catchphrase, “How you doin’?” (before it became a catchphrase). All that before we even get to London, and the big surprise waiting for us there.
Best of all, Season Four includes “The One with the Embryos.” More widely known as the one with the trivia contest, it’s touted as either the all-time greatest episode of Friends, or a close runner-up. Either way, “The One with the Embryos” is a breathtaking high note in the history of television comedy, and a real Must-See TV moment.
The titular storyline began when Lisa Kudrow herself discovered she was pregnant, toward the end of the show’s summer hiatus. Though not far along, she told Kauffman and Crane right away, knowing they’d need time to strategize. “We didn’t want to do another TV show where you had a woman carrying packages in front of her for nine months, and in big coats,” Crane later explained. So, they came back to Kudrow with an idea: Phoebe would become the gestational surrogate for her brother, Frank (Giovanni Ribisi), and his wife, Alice (Debra Jo Rupp), who was older59 and struggling to conceive herself. Kudrow initially balked, telling them, “It’s really early on. I understand that this serves the story really well, but if, God forbid, something happens to my pregnancy, I’m still stuck playing a pregnant woman.” After talking it through with Kauffman, they went ahead with the idea, knowing that, if need be, they would have an out. Phoebe’s pregnancy storyline wouldn’t begin until halfway through the season, and for obvious reasons, she’d be doing IVF (a procedure that doesn’t always work). Thankfully, Kudrow’s own pregnancy went smoothly, and by Episode 11, Phoebe was off to the doctor to get implanted.
That’s when the contest began. This storyline, too, was drawn from reality. Jill Condon and Amy Toomin Straus, who wrote the episode together, were pitching ideas with the rest of the team when the idea of a who-knows-who-best competition came up. Coproducer Seth Kurland knew a group of writers who’d shared a house after college, and once hosted their own friend-group trivia night—complete with a Jeopardy!-style game board. The Friends writers ran with it, and started throwing out potential quiz questions, pitting Joey and Chandler against Rachel and Monica. They raised the stakes even further, by adding the ultimate wager: if the girls won the contest, the guys would be forced to get rid of the chick and the duck; if the guys won, they’d get Monica and Rachel’s apartment. With that in mind, the writers amplified the contest storyline, making it even bigger and more elaborate.
Bright, on the other hand, was always looking for ways to keep production simple. For one thing, they’d gone overbudget in the early days, thanks to setups that spread the cast out and required additional sets and actors. For another, they’d realized the audience preferred episodes where it was just the six main characters, in the coffeehouse or at home—like the previous season’s excellent bottle episode, “The One Where No One’s Ready.” This at-home contest concept was great. It wasn’t until they actually shot it that Bright and the others realized just how great.
On shoot night, the audience was hooked from the start, the studio filled with a crackling energy. Everyone was immediately invested in Phoebe’s story, eager to find out whether or not she’d get pregnant. It was a safe bet she would (this was Friends, after all), but surrogacy was such an unusual topic for a sitcom that it did seem possible she might not. The contest outcome, though, was anybody’s guess. The story started out slow, with Rachel coming home from grocery shopping, and Joey and Chandler trying to guess what she bought. From there, it quickly snowballed into a full-blown, high-stakes competition, and by the time the audience caught on, said Bright, “everybody was on the edge of their seats.”
And he took note of that. So did everyone on the stage. By now, this had become standard practice. More so than any other show, Friends was guided by its viewers, especially those watching it live. The writers crafted the material, but the crowd decided whether or not it was good enough. If a joke didn’t yield the expected laugh, the writers huddled up, rewriting on the spot. The actors tried multiple line readings, listening to hear which one landed best. If the audience seemed uncomfortable or put off by a line, they fixed it and tried the take again—and again, if necessary. This meant shoot nights were a marathon, often going until 1:00 or 2:00 a.m. (and sometimes required swapping out one sleepy audience for a fresh one halfway through). Sometimes producers would turn to the crowd between takes, asking for a show of hands to see how many got the joke. In part, Crane chalked it up to “our people-pleasing need to be liked.” But even more important was pleasing their people in surprising new ways. Kauffman pointed out that Friends fans had grown increasingly savvy. “They would sometimes laugh at setups to jokes, ’cause they knew the characters so well. They were ahead of us, more than not.” If Schwimmer walked in with a hangdog look, they giggled before he could even open his mouth and deliver that mopey, “Hi.”
The more popular the show became, the harder the writers had to work to meet viewers’ expectations, while not pandering. The audience was not only familiar with Friends, but emotionally attached to it, and therefore highly attuned to its rhythms and beats. Another Season Four episode had Rachel impulsively proposing to Joshua (a guy with whom she’d gone on four dates) in an effort to one-up Ross (who’d just gotten engaged to Emily). It was meant to be funny—Rachel at her most ridiculous. But in the script, the scene came directly after Ross announced his engagement, and it just seemed sad. The audience felt awful for Rachel and couldn’t bring themselves to laugh at her. The writers quickly realized they couldn’t tweak their way out of this one, and decided to simply shoot the scene as written, but move it into the next episode, giving Rachel and the viewers some recovery time.60 It was an extreme change to make, but that’s how much faith they put in their audience. Kauffman explained, “We had to trust their judgment about things that were working and not working.”
That’s why “The One with the Embryos” still works so well. Condon and Toomin Straus’s script condenses all the best elements of Friends, undiluted by anything else. There are no stunts, few guest performers, and nearly every scene takes place in Monica’s living room. The trivia game keeps most of the core cast together, just being friends—literally, trying to out-friend each other. As the competition gets more heated, the jokes come faster and funnier. (The finished product looks effortless but Crane recalled they shot numerous variations on the trivia questions and answers, pushing for the biggest laugh possible.) Before we know what’s happening, the girls have lost the game and—twist!—they’re really switching apartments. It wasn’t a bluff. This completely outlandish scenario is actually happening, and after everything else that’s happened in the last twenty minutes, it doesn’t read as ridiculous. The guys ride in on their big, white dog statue, and lo and behold, it’s still funny.
All this, in an episode that also discusses surrogate pregnancy, infertility, and IVF. What makes “The One with the Embryos” such an emblematic Friends episode is that it balances high-pitch humor with high-stakes emotional drama. In the midst of all the sitcom high jinks, real life is happening, too, and in the end it’s Phoebe’s story that takes precedence.61 The episode concludes with her coming out of the bathroom, interrupting the apartment-switching chaos and announcing she’s pregnant. In an instant, the contest is forgotten, the fighting ceases, and everyone encircles Phoebe in a spontaneous group hug. As ever, friendship comes first.
* * *
Group hugs and babies? It doesn’t get more sincere than that. Nevertheless, Friends surged in Britain, which, like the US, was beginning to recognize a shift in its young-adult population. “There was this sense that this is the way things are going. The family dynamic has broken up, and now it’s all about friends,” Toby Bruce told me. Now a television writer and development executive himself, Bruce was a teenager growing up in London when Friends hit. While the US television industry was desperately chasing Generation X, the UK’s hadn’t fully embraced this new cultural moment (nor was TV as massive a medium as it was in the States). The only comparable show on the air at the time was Men Behaving Badly, “which was sort of a very British version of Friends,” explained Bruce. Men Behaving Badly also followed a small group of twentysomethings living in neighboring apartments, but as the title implies, it was much more beer-soaked and crass. Men Behaving Badly reflected the wave of “lad culture” that swept through Britain in the ’90s. It was popular, but its success was somewhat predicated on a very specific trend, era, and audience—whereas Friends was on-trend and timeless. “There was a universality to [Friends],” said Bruce. “It made you feel special, but also made you feel a part of something bigger.” Plus, he added, “it was the cool thing from America.”
In March 1998, most of the cast and crew flew to London to shoot “The One with Ross’s Wedding.” The Season Four finale was the culmination of Ross’s whirlwind romance with his long-distance English girlfriend, Emily (Helen Baxendale). This storyline was also adjusted due a real-life pregnancy. The same week she was cast on Friends, Baxendale and her husband found out they were expecting their first child. Emily was never going to be a regular character, but her original arc was much longer. The pregnancy meant speeding things up significantly—which was fine by Baxendale.62 She was already a recognizable actress in the UK (best known for the series Cold Feet), but Friends brought with it a kind of hysteria that she was not prepared for. “You couldn’t walk down the street to buy a pint of milk,” she reflected, years later. “In fact, you couldn’t go anywhere. It was impossible to mix with the crowd, and do what ordinary people do.” Baxendale quickly realized she wasn’t cut out for Friends fame, nor Hollywood, especially now that she was expecting. “You have to be thin out in America,” she said. You also had to have a relentless ambition that Baxendale realized she just didn’t. Back home, she could be a working actress but not necessarily a celebrity. She’d never make Friends money, but she’d be able to run out for milk without getting mobbed. Eventually, that is.
In 1998, when the Friends team arrived in London, the mobs came out in full force. Fans flooded into the city, some coming from hundreds of miles away. Kudrow’s scenes had already been shot back in LA (she was in her third trimester by then, and unable to fly) but the rest were filmed at the Fountain Studios in London, or on location in the city. Some were shot at tourist hotspots and others on inauspicious side streets, but no matter where the production went, the crowds found it. (It turned out that local radio stations were getting tips and broadcasting the crew’s location as they moved.) “We felt like the Beatles in reverse,” said Bright. While filming a scene with Schwimmer, Cox, and Baxendale, “a thousand people showed up. And they were screaming, of course, while we were shooting.” A police officer pulled Bright aside and told him if he just took a quick break and let the fans get one photo, they’d all go away. He asked the actors to turn to the crowd and pose, and to his astonishment, it worked. The screaming stopped, the fans snapped photos, and then politely packed up and let them get back to work. “That’s all they wanted was a good shot!” said Bright. Things really were different in London.
But Friends was still Friends, and up to some of its old tricks again. The London episode was chock-full of guest stars, some of whom were best known to UK audiences (Absolutely Fabulous’s Jennifer Saunders, a pre-House Hugh Laurie), and others who were eye-rollingly famous: Virgin founder Richard Branson, and Sarah Ferguson, Duchess of York. Mercifully, both cameos were brief. The stunt casting played well, and even the duchess (who’d been coaxed into the appearance by her daughters) noticed a boost in her own popularity. In the wake of her divorce from Prince Andrew, she was a frequent tabloid target, but audiences shrieked with delight at seeing her goofing around with Joey and his giant Union Jack hat. “At a time when Fergie-bashing had become a national pastime, Friends was a welcome relief,” she said.
But the episode’s biggest reveal involved no guest stars. It got the loudest, longest audience reaction in the history of the show, Crane recalled: “We revealed Monica and Chandler in bed, and the place went nuts for about two minutes—of screaming. Just screaming.”
Bringing Monica and Chandler together was a bold move. Any coupling within the main characters meant a change in the group’s well-balanced chemistry. And, unlike Ross and Rachel, there was no romantic history between these two, no secret crushes, no buildup whatsoever. Except that’s not quite true.
Looking back at the first few seasons, it’s clear the writers were considering this pairing early on. They took their time, throwing out tiny, occasional hints, and then quickly burying them in a story, a punch line, or a much more prominent romantic entanglement. With the nonstop drama of Ross and Rachel, it’s easy to miss them, but the seeds of Monica and Chandler (who I refuse to call Mondler) are planted as early as Season One. Monica pines for a baby in “The One with the Birth” and Chandler replies, “I’ll tell you what. When we’re forty, if neither of us are married, what do you say you and I get together and have one?” During Season Three, he flat out offers to be her boyfriend, and—without even holding a beat to let us wonder if he’s for real—Monica laughs him off. She then spends so much time explaining why they will never be together (the number-one reason being that they’re such good friends), that we’re convinced, too. Or, at least, we’re supposed to be. Until this point, Friends was never ambiguous about romance. Sometimes the characters were clueless, but we, the audience, were always well aware. The archetypes were obvious: you had your Bad Boys (Paolo), your Ones That Got Away (Richard), your Janices and your Lobsters. In any scenario, the outcome was obvious; we knew Ross and Rachel were meant to be, even for the many years that they weren’t. No one was sitting around waiting to see when Monica and Chandler would finally consummate the tension between them, because it wasn’t there.
The one exception is Season Three’s “The One with the Flashback,” when a friendly hug between them lasts just a little too long. For a minute, it seems that something might happen, but then, as ever, Chandler dumps cold water on the moment with a joke. Friends lore has it that this episode was written specifically to gauge audience reactions to various couplings: Monica-Joey, Ross-Phoebe, Chandler-Rachel. The Chandler-Monica moment at the end is so small and grounded in comparison to the hilarity that comes before it (i.e., Ross and Phoebe ripping their clothes off on a pool table) that it’s totally forgettable. In retrospect, it seems like a big, old wink at the audience. But in the context of the episode, it plays like a gotcha.
That’s why the reveal in London is a surprise—but a welcome one. Chandler and Monica were not an obvious couple from the start, but the writers had laid just enough groundwork that the pairing didn’t seem wrong.63 It was a perfectly executed twist.
* * *
The finale aired two months after the shoot, and thankfully, it seemed the London gambit had worked. Both UK and US audiences tuned in en masse, and critics didn’t seem bothered by the guest stars and royal cameos—if only because the episode’s cliffhangers were bigger than its stunts. (Chandler and Monica?! Ross said Rachel’s name!) Some English reviewers were justifiably irked by the depiction of Brits as a bunch of stuffy, humorless “would-be-speaking-German-if-it-wasn’t-for-us” snobs. But even that low blow couldn’t dampen the show’s popularity abroad. Nothing could—not the sentimental storylines nor Fergie nor even the mention of World War II. Even when it behaved like a loudmouth tourist, Friends was still the cool show from America.
Its reach was growing, too. By then, the show was on the air in more than twenty countries, including Brazil, Australia, Bulgaria, Sweden, and most of western Europe. It would eventually expand to one hundred and thirty-five. Many countries soon produced their own Friends-esque programs, to varying degrees of success. India’s Hello Friends lasted for less than two years, while Spain’s 7 Vidas became one of the country’s longest-running comedies.
As in the States, the Friends effect emerged off-screen, as well. Coffee-bar chains began popping up in tandem with the show’s expansion (years before Starbucks took over the world), even in traditionally tea-drinking markets. Sahar Hashemi, cofounder of London’s Coffee Republic, said when they first opened, “People didn’t know what it was.” This was a country that hung out at the pub, not the café. The first location opened in 1995, the same year Friends arrived, and soon patrons began to catch on. “We were just known as a ‘Friends-type’ coffee bar,” Hashemi said. In India, Café Coffee Day launched in 1996 and quickly expanded to over a thousand locations. Until then, coffee was only common in certain southern regions, and tea had been the country’s staple beverage since the days of British rule. Now, another great force from the West was coming in through India’s television screens.
Some saw Friends as a breath of fresh air. Journalist Shoaib Daniyal later argued the show helped India shake its “colonial hangover.” It was another invasion of sorts, he wrote in 2014, but it was also a massive hit with younger viewers. “Everyone in school seemed to watch Friends,” he recalled. Growing up, he and his peers embraced the show’s American lingo, as well as its openness about dating and sexuality. “In fact,” he wrote, “Friends is probably the single biggest reason for the change in India’s attitude to sex.”
Daniyal clearly saw this as a positive shift, though that was demonstrably not true for everyone in India—a country with its own complex, historic values around marriage and sexuality. Filmmaker Paroma Soni, who also grew up watching Friends in India, voiced concern about its influence. In a 2018 video piece, she pointed out that Friends is rife with sexism and problematic relationship models. “I fear that shows like Friends legitimize negative stereotypes, giving them an American stamp of approval,” said Soni.
In other countries, too, the show was met with an unsettled mix of excitement and worry over its distinctly American depiction of young-adult life. Indeed, the more populations Friends reached, the more pressing the question became: Was the Friends effect a good thing? If so, for whom exactly? One thing was sure: it was powerful. One had to look no further than the hoards of teenagers, like Daniyal, lining up at Café Coffee Day. “That Friends could dislodge chai,” he wrote, “is another telling marker of its deep influence.”
To be clear, plenty of Indians still drink chai (and at least some Americans don’t drink coffee). It would take a fairly large leap to say that Friends alone incited the rise of contemporary coffee culture. Truly, there are few trends (aside from The Rachel) that Friends actually created. But there are countless trends that Friends picked up and amplified, then spread across the globe.
Fashion is perhaps the clearest example of the show’s impact. “Friends is a good example of things that were trendy but not necessarily on the cover of Vogue,” fashion historian Dr. Kimberly Chrisman-Campbell told me. “It’s a good record of real fashion.” There were far more style-conscious shows (like 90210) and films (like Clueless), which dressed their characters in slightly toned-down versions of designer looks. Friends, on the other hand, presented a punched-up version of “real” clothing. It skipped over the most extreme and specific trends of the era (like grunge or goth) and always kept it casual: cropped T-shirts, khaki pants, strappy black dresses, endless combos of jeans and sneakers. At the same time, there were six characters with six slightly different looks, said Dr. Chrisman-Campbell. “You could identify with one of them, even if you couldn’t identify with all of them.” But you couldn’t picture any of them on the cover of Vogue. Maybe in a GAP ad.
In 1999, however, a version of them appeared in French fashion magazine Madame Figaro. The editorial spread, titled “Let’s Be Friends,” featured a group of six models (three men and three women) who bore a striking resemblance to the cast. The setups, too, were inspired by the show: in one shot, the models stood around a foosball table; in another, they sat piled in front of the TV, eating popcorn; several shots featured them playing American football (on what is clearly a European football field). Though it had the look of a high-end fashion shoot, the models were dressed...well, like the Friends, in T-shirts, flip-flops, even a classic Chandler sweater vest.
Nancy Deihl, the director of Costume Studies at New York University, referenced this photoshoot in her book, The History of Modern Fashion, as an example of Friends’ global impact on the industry. “There was this gradual casualization that started to happen,” she told me. As the show spread to new countries, suddenly the whole Western world began to dress like twentysomething semiemployed Americans hanging out in a coffeehouse. In part, Deihl said, it was that charismatic cast that sold the look: “Fashion is so much more than clothes. It’s ways of wearing things, and it’s gesture, and it’s the way people behave.”
But there was something else that Friends was selling, along with all those cropped T-shirts and mochaccinos. It was the idea of America—and of New York, specifically. “New York never really goes out of style,” said Deihl. “But Friends, Seinfeld, and Sex and the City—they really did a lot for the fashionability of New York for younger people. In a way, they counteracted the idea of New York as this place that was unreachable, or too elite, or too expensive. And, as we know, it can be all of those things. But the way it was portrayed in those shows, it was like the promised land.”