The One Where Nobody Died
When people talk about September 11, they usually start with where they were. “I was driving to work, listening to the radio, when the song cut off and the news came on.” “I was in algebra class, and I remember that the girl in front of me was wearing a bright pink T-shirt.” It’s called a flashbulb memory. When we hear of or witness an event so stunning our brains take a mental snapshot of the moment: the smell of burned coffee, the pinch of your new shoes, the sudden silence in the empty sky above. Unlike other recollections, which tend to fade with time, flashbulb memories remain in vivid detail. People start with where they were when it happened, because it’s the last thing they remember before everything went hazy. One minute you were at school or work or the grocery store, and the next you were in front of the television, watching.
Lisa Kudrow had just woken up and was in the middle of her usual morning routine, wrangling her three-year-old son and getting ready to head to the studio. Tuesdays were rehearsal days, and this week they had another celebrity guest star. Sean Penn had been cast as an ex-boyfriend of Ursula’s who has a brief fling with Phoebe. On top of that, it was the Halloween episode, so there would be tricky, cumbersome costumes to deal with, as well as a big-shot movie star (who was known to be somewhat tricky and cumbersome himself). It was going to be a busy week and Kudrow was trying to get out the door when her phone rang. It was Carlos Piñero, the second AD.
“So, obviously, we’re not coming in,” he said.
“Obviously? What do you mean?”
“Well, New York’s being attacked. Or...we don’t even—I don’t know. The country’s being attacked? We don’t know.” Piñero told her to turn on her TV.
* * *
Shortly after American Airlines Flight 11 hit the North Tower, all the networks preempted their normal programming, and switched to uninterrupted news reporting. By the time the South Tower was hit, virtually every American television station was broadcasting live coverage of the attack. Untold millions around the world were watching when it fell.
For days after the attack, all commercials and regular programs were suspended, and viewers remained glued to the news. On that day alone, American adults watched an estimated eight hours of television. Children watched approximately three. On September 15, the New York Times reported that the attack had, among other things, set a TV record: it received more consecutive news coverage than any other event in US television history, surpassing the assassination of President John F. Kennedy. In the days and weeks that followed, the country stumbled back to work, then came home every night to watch and listen for any updates, any details or new information that might somehow make sense of this. The Times reported that between 30 and 50 million Americans were tuning in during prime time—to network news specifically.
It was noteworthy, the paper added, because traditional network news (like all network shows) had been on a steep decline. In recent years, more and more viewers preferred to get their news online, or from cable outlets like CNN. Old-school nightly programs, with anchors like Tom Brokaw, Dan Rather, and Peter Jennings, seemed increasingly stodgy and slow-paced compared with the high-speed, rapid-fire style of twenty-first century news. The Times piece continued: “But during an event of maximum national attention, accompanied by the most acute national distress, television viewers have returned to the place where they had always gone before in such times: their living rooms, to watch and listen to network anchors.” In the wake of such unprecedented terror, no one wanted new and flashy. They wanted the familiarity of Jennings and Brokaw, sitting behind the same desks, relaying the day’s updates in those same, steady voices. But it was more than that. As Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist Alex S. Jones explained to the Times: “It’s not just that they’re familiar. It’s also that they’re trusted.”
* * *
Weeks passed. The news sunk in. Slowly, Americans began to inch back into their normal routines, all the while knowing that normalcy as they knew it was gone for good. We were on the other side of something, treading on uncertain territory and flinching at every loud noise. We still consumed the news en masse, everyone watching like hawks for the next great horror to come crashing into frame. But eventually, everyone wanted—just for a minute—to watch something else.
But everything else was on hold. In Los Angeles, film and television studios had been shut down (as had much of the country’s theme parks, shopping hubs, tourist destinations—virtually any place that might draw a crowd). Late-night shows on both coasts stayed off the air for a week, no one knowing if or when it would be safe to return to work. And anyway, what business did they have doing comedy? Would it ever be appropriate or welcome again? David Letterman broke the silence, coming back on the air on September 17 with an emotional monologue and a crowd-pleasing lineup of guests (“Thank God Regis is here, so we have something to make fun of.”). Soon after, others followed suit, if only because there was nothing else to do. “They said to get back to work,” Jon Stewart said the night The Daily Show returned. “And there were no jobs available for a man in the fetal position under his desk crying, which I would have gladly taken. So, I came back here.”
It wasn’t easy for anyone. Back at Warner Bros., Kauffman, Bright, and Crane had an exceptional challenge on their hands: What do you do with a sitcom set in downtown Manhattan, when downtown Manhattan is now Ground Zero? Not just any sitcom, but one that deliberately avoided certain realities—specifically, death. “We didn’t do death well,” Crane later explained. It was something they realized early on, particularly after the Season Three storyline where Rachel’s boss, Joanna, offers her a promotion, but gets hit by a cab and killed before she can file the paperwork. They’d written it as a moment of dark comedy, but when Joanna’s death was revealed, the studio audience barely made a sound. “They could have done it on Seinfeld with George,” recalled Crane. “We couldn’t do it on Friends.”
In September 2001, nobody wanted black comedy, and least of all from Friends. It remained unclear if sitcoms even had a place in this new reality. Would these unscathed characters with their tidy, twenty-two-minute problems come off like a great insult to this injured nation? Shutting down indefinitely was not a solution. But how could they return to a fictionalized Manhattan and just pretend that nothing had happened?
The obvious option was to do a Very Special Episode. Some sort of departure from the canon where they addressed the attacks openly and—no, no, never mind, terrible idea. As a rule, the creators had consciously avoided Very Special Episodes from the beginning, knowing that drama just wasn’t their strong suit. “The dramatic moments that we dealt with mostly had to do with babies or weddings,” explained Bright. “No woman ever lost a baby on Friends.” Some other shows would choose the Very Special Episode route, with middling success. The West Wing’s post-9/11 episode “Isaac and Ishmael” played like an educational special, trying to address the topics of both international terrorism and American bigotry, but without getting too political about it. It was neither offensive nor very effective. It came off as weird more than anything, but it would have been much weirder if a show like The West Wing (taking place in the White House) had ignored the attack entirely. On Friends, though, it just wouldn’t work. No one wanted to see “The One with the Terrorist Attack.”
After talking it through, the producers came to an agreement. Yes, they decided, 9/11 did happen in the world of Friends, but it would only be acknowledged in visual cues. American flags went up in Central Perk and in Joey’s apartment. The actors would occasionally wear shirts reading “United We Stand” or “FDNY” (as many people did in the months after the attack). They wouldn’t show the characters watching Tom Brokaw, but they would leave newspapers out on the coffee table, as if to indicate that yes, they, too, were glued to the news. The Magna Doodle on the back of Joey’s door became the most direct signal to the audience, incorporating symbolic phrases or images (like flag doodles, or the Statue of Liberty) throughout Season Eight. The first one appeared in “The One with the Videotape,” with an old familiar emblem that was turning up on posters and T-shirts and bumper stickers across the country: I ♥ NY.
These visual gestures seemed the most respectful option. They were a consistent reminder that no one had forgotten what had happened—what was still happening—but they were subtle enough to sustain the show’s light tone. That way, hopefully, Friends could still be an escape from a dreadful new reality.
The studios reopened and production resumed on “The One with the Halloween Party,” though audiences wouldn’t be allowed back in for several weeks. Instead, Warner Bros. employees came in to fill as many seats as possible. Now Kudrow and her castmates were relieved to be in their Halloween getups (she was Supergirl, and Chandler was dressed in a giant pink bunny suit). “Thank God [it was] the silliest it could possibly be,” she remembered. It was a strange shoot but a good one. Everyone cracked up during the scene where Chandler and Ross arm wrestle, and Monica notices that Chandler (again, in a bunny costume) is “making his sex face.” After sitting at home all week, watching the relentless stream of agony and fear on the news, the cast felt relieved to laugh again.
Kudrow began to realize that was their job—providing relief. She remembered going home one night and turning on the TV herself. Will & Grace was on, and her first thought was: I wonder who they knew, in the towers. Then she remembered that no, this episode would have been shot before the attack. Oh, good, I’m in a world where it hasn’t happened yet. Finally, it dawned on her: Oh, wait. This is a world where it’s not ever going to happen. “And I almost started crying, from just relief. Okay, oh, my God, thank God. I can be in a world where there’s no such thing as 9/11. That’s great. That’s where I wanna be. That’s exactly where I wanna be,” she recalled. “And the penny dropped.”
She thought of all those fans over the years—before the attack—who would stop her on the street and gush about what a fun little escape it was. Only now did she understand the magnitude of that. In the months after it happened, Kudrow would find herself sitting at a red light in her car, look out the window, and notice someone in the next lane, looking back at her. Not gawking or waving, just making eye contact. No one said anything but “Thank you.”
Throughout her years on Friends, Kudrow had always tried not to take it all too seriously: “We’re not curing cancer. It’s not a big deal. But you know what? It is a big deal when you can offer people a break from such a devastating reality.” Aniston later echoed Kudrow’s sentiments, saying, “It was hard to come back to work and do a sitcom when the world was falling apart. I remember feeling very helpless and not knowing what our place was anymore.” But when the audience returned, it became immediately clear. Far from subdued, the energy was through the roof. Laughter burst from the crowd, louder than ever. It was tension release, Aniston realized. This was one place in the world where it was still okay to laugh. “We looked at each other and we went, ‘Okay, I guess this is what we’re doing.’”
* * *
There was one more thing they had to do, and fast. The first five episodes had already been shot before the attack, including “The One Where Rachel Tells Ross.” This episode included a story where Monica and Chandler leave for their honeymoon and get stuck at the airport. In the original version, Chandler sees a sign while going through security: “Hey, look at that. ‘Federal law prohibits any joking regarding aircraft hijacking or bombing.’” He turns to the TSA agent and says exactly what you’d expect Chandler to say: “You don’t have to worry about me, ma’am. I take my bombs very seriously.” He and Monica wind up in a detention room getting interrogated by federal agents—a scene in which Chandler says the word bomb again, about two hundred times. “Look, this is ridiculous. I was just making a joke. I mean, I know the sign says ‘no jokes about bombs,’ but shouldn’t the sign really say ‘no bombs’?! I mean, isn’t that the guy we really have to worry about here? The guy with the bombs? Not the guy who jokes about his bombs. Not that I have bombs!”
For obvious reasons, the story had to go. The writers quickly scripted a new airport scenario, in which Chandler and Monica wind up competing with another pair of newlyweds to get the honeymoon upgrades. They reshot the scenes and recut the episode, making no mention of the change.73 It was a relatively minor tweak, given what was happening throughout the entertainment industry. Dozens of series and films were being reedited or put on hold, and most live events (including every award show) were either rescheduled or canceled. It wasn’t just a matter of poor taste; it was a matter of public safety. An auditorium full of high-profile people was considered a security risk. September 11 changed the way we watched television, and not just the news. Viewers were hyperaware of any mention of the Pentagon or shots of the Twin Towers (many of which were digitally removed). No one needed to see big action-movie explosions, nor did they want to watch a bunch of celebrities walking down the red carpet. And they really didn’t need Chandler Bing making cracks about being a terrorist.
What they needed was Chandler making cracks about being a newlywed. They needed Monica to be her same old neurotic self, worrying about keeping her apartment clean (not worrying about anthrax like the rest of us). They needed Ross and Rachel to keep up this whole will-they-won’t-they thing—even if it was getting slightly ridiculous after eight years and an accidental pregnancy. That didn’t matter right now. What mattered was that they were there, a constant. Like those anchors who had ushered us through the attack and its aftermath, they, too, were familiar and trusted faces we could turn to for solace.
“I think Friends was like comfort food for people at that time,” Kauffman reflected years later. “And I was really honored to be comfort food.” For some, Friends presented a hopeful future—the possibility of normalcy restored. For others, it was a relic of a time before the attack. Ninety-nine percent of the show remained unchanged, and even the few subtle changes felt like a creative risk. Seeing Joey in a T-shirt printed with the name “Capt. Billy Burke” (an FDNY captain who was killed trying to rescue others in the North Tower) could trigger a cascade of associated memories and mental images that had no place in the world of Friends. But to deny those memories and images entirely would be a cruel disservice to a grieving audience. It would be disrespectful to New York, the city that so many viewers had come to know through Friends’ lens, and had overnight become a place that people feared. It was now more clear than ever that Friends’ version of Manhattan was a fantasy. But underneath the surface, the show conveyed a very real message shared by New Yorkers and Americans everywhere: It happened, and we’re still here.
Weeks passed and on set it was back to business as usual. When it came time shoot the holiday show, the producers had an idea. Bright called Warner Bros. to ask if they would foot the bill to fly out four hundred people for the taping. In October, they shot “The One with the Creepy Holiday Card” for an audience of surviving family members of the first responders and victims who had perished in the attack. “That was an amazing night,” he recalled. “Can’t even really put it to words. Great feeling of giving these people, who had just gone through the worst possible thing, a little break and a little smile again.”
In the long term, TV comedy would struggle to reshape itself in a post-9/11 world. “There’s going to be a seismic change,” predicted Vanity Fair editor-in-chief Graydon Carter. “I think it’s the end of the age of irony. Things that were considered fringe and frivolous are going to disappear.” But in the immediate aftermath, when the wound was still wide open, shows like Friends became more relevant than ever. It was an entertaining diversion, and for the moment, diversion was important. Matt LeBlanc remembered opening the Los Angeles Times and reading that Friends was no longer America’s favorite comedy, but America’s favorite comfort-food show. “I don’t know how that happened,” he recalled. But he and the others took it to heart. “We all said, ‘Wow, that’s a lot of responsibility. So, let’s try to be our best.’”
On September 27, Friends debuted its eighth season to an enormous audience—its largest since the Super Bowl episode five years prior. “The One After ‘I Do’” reached almost 32 million people, and concluded with a dedication: “To the people of New York City.” The same viewers who’d been moving on at the end of Season Seven returned in droves and stayed put. It became the highest-ranked season of the series’ run, and for the first time, Friends was not only the top comedy, but the number-one show on television. The eighth season would also earn Friends its first Emmy for Outstanding Comedy Series.
It’s hard to imagine any of that happening had 9/11 not happened first. In any other year, the season would have been either over-the-top or simply tired—and certainly the last. The truth is Season Eight was not Friends’ finest, though it was the most successful. It had the vigor of a much younger series, and that renewed creative energy overshadowed some of the fundamental flaws. The driving storyline was needlessly complicated: Ross and Rachel are having a baby, but still aren’t together for some reason. The Joey-loves-Rachel arc made everyone uncomfortable (including the actors). Above all, the show had aged out of its premise, and its audience had matured, too. If the attack hadn’t happened, then Friends likely would have continued its gentle decline. Instead, it was revived by the tens of millions who turned to it for comfort, distraction, escape, hope. Suddenly, the show had a reason to go on.
* * *
The problem was, it was supposed to be ending.
* * *
“Now, uh—are you guys coming back next year?” Jay Leno asked Matt LeBlanc. It was January 30, 2002, and LeBlanc was there to promote Friends as it headed into another sweeps period. The interview was going fine; they talked about cars and showed a clip from an upcoming episode. Leno congratulated LeBlanc on the show’s big rebound, and LeBlanc gave a polite if subdued thank-you. (Naturally soft-spoken, LeBlanc often came off as subdued in comparison to Joey.) He’d just accepted the People’s Choice Award for Favorite TV Comedy on behalf of the whole cast, dedicating the award to the people of New York. “To be a part of something that, right now, takes place in New York, is a special honor,” he said. At another point in the interview, Leno made a crack about why the Hollywood Foreign Press Association hadn’t given Friends a Golden Globe: “Oh, it’s foreigners. They don’t know! They’re all in that ‘jihad’ crap.’” Yikes. No more compassionate monologues or stirring reminders to stand united. The Very Special stage of public mourning had passed, and now came the jihad jokes.
LeBlanc, thank God, didn’t laugh or add a comment, but just looked down vaguely into his lap for a moment, then moved on: “But the People’s Choice, that’s what counts...” He’d been doing this for eight years, and knew how to sidestep an awkward moment and keep the conversation going. He surely also knew that the American public did not want to see one of its Friends engaging in terrorism humor or political commentary, correct or incorrect. US troops were departing for Afghanistan by the thousands, and now, a potent mix of fear and anger was welling up inside the country. Americans were still glued to the news every day, and still rushing back every night to their favorite comedies to soothe themselves to sleep. That was LeBlanc’s job, and he knew it. The question was, would he keep doing it.
“Are you guys coming back next year? Have you decided?” Leno asked. For the first time, LeBlanc seemed to freeze up. He shifted in his seat, clasped his hands tightly, and then shifted in his seat again.
“Uhhhh, we’re—y’know. We’re kinda right in the middle of talking about all that.” LeBlanc shrugged. “Y’know, we’ll see what happens, I dunno.”
“Fifty-fifty odds?” Leno pressed. LeBlanc nodded his head and made some noncommittal noises.
“I don’t know. We’ll see...” Leno quickly launched into another question, talking over the end of LeBlanc’s answer. Low-talker that he was, it was hard to hear LeBlanc add: “We’d like to come back.”
The good news was that everyone wanted that. The network, the studio, the audience, and even the critics had welcomed Friends back with open arms, and no one was ready to let go again. Not right this minute, anyway. Survivor and its peers were still a powerful presence on the television landscape, but for now, people had had enough of reality as well as reality TV. “I’d rather try to lose myself in a sitcom than another soul-numbing reality show,” wrote critic Bruce Fretts. Even lackluster shows were preferable, he added. “The one-hour premieres of Frasier and Spin City, for example, were so predictable they felt like repeats. Normally, I would mean that as a criticism, but right now, it’s just what the doctor ordered.”
Friends was now beating Survivor every week, and it was not having a lackluster season. It wasn’t a return to the pure, frenetic fun of Seasons Five and Six, but there was something new and compelling to the show now. It seemed to have a sense of purpose, and an awareness of the specific job it had to do: be funny. Be not reality. For NBC, Friends played another crucial role. It was the network’s comedy ballast, and if the show did end with Season Eight, Jeff Zucker would have nothing on deck to replace it. Among other things, this was not a good time to lose such a vital source of revenue.
On set, things progressed as planned, though no one was quite sure anymore what the plan was. In the writers’ room, it was just as unclear. “We didn’t know what we were going to do with Ross and Rachel as a couple,” Crane recalled. They knew she was going to have the baby, and that it would be his, but that was it. If this was really the last year, the characters could finally get together. But if they were going to come back for one more, then they’d have to make it seem plausible that these two people who loved each other and had a baby and lived together were not a couple. For months, said Crane, “we were really walking a line and leaving open the possibility that they could end up together in this season.”
No one had any idea how Season Eight was going to end, least of all the audience. The press was tossing out bizarre rumors about the finale plot. The Star quoted “well-placed sources” as saying that Rachel was going to die in childbirth, leaving her baby to Monica and Chandler. That seemed even less plausible than Ross and Rachel not being a couple, but who the hell knew? The season wasn’t heading in an obvious direction, because nobody knew how things would end off-screen.
There were the usual rumors about the cast, too. Depending on the magazine, it was either Kudrow or Schwimmer, or both, who were ready to leave, while the others were happy to stay for another season. It might have been true, or it might have been the media repeating the same old Friends folklore. Kudrow and Schwimmer had long been pegged as the difficult ones or the leaders when it came to negotiations.74 In public, no one said anything other than that they were talking about it, and like everything else, it would come down to a vote. “The neat thing about being a part of this cast is it’s six people, so the majority rules—on just about everything,” LeBlanc had explained on Leno. “On where we go for lunch, right up to whether we’re coming back.”
There are only six people who know the truth about how those votes went, and thus far they’ve managed to keep it between themselves. But if I had to, I would guess that in 2002 it was either unanimous or close. It wouldn’t make sense to leave now. Going out on top had always been the goal—and they were number one, for the first time. But the show had gotten a second wind, and the audience was more devoted then ever. Why leave? For all those movies that were doing so well?
This time, no one waited until the last minute. There were no high-stakes games of chicken or threats from the network. It was just the opposite. The cast indicated they’d be willing to discuss another year, and Zucker tripped over himself to make an offer. On February 11, less than two weeks after LeBlanc’s ambiguous answer on Leno, Variety reported that, “They’ll be there for another year: The cast of Friends has agreed to return for the ninth—and final—season.”
For one more year of Friends, NBC would pay Warner Bros. $7 million per episode, enabling a raise to $1 million apiece for the cast. It was a landmark deal—which made the show the most expensive half hour on television—though Zucker said it was the easiest deal he’d ever made. He’d bought himself another year to find something to fill in the enormous gap the show would leave on the network. “It’s no secret how important Friends is to NBC,” Zucker told the press. “We are obviously thrilled and relieved.”
With this renewal, the cast got the deal they’d asked for in 2000. They were now among the highest-paid casts in TV history, if not the highest-paid individuals (Kelsey Grammer had just signed a deal for $1.6 million per episode of Frasier). The deal came together with an unprecedented lack of haggling, but the salaries still raised a few eyebrows. Even the actor-friendly People couldn’t resist the headline: “Friends Not in Need.” In the long term, this deal would become part of the show’s legacy—the moment when “Friends money” became a thing. People would cite it as example of either bloated star salaries or the power of a unified front. But in the short term, the big news was that Friends was coming back—for one more year.
For the first time, the cast released a joint statement to the public, along with Warner Bros. and NBC. “We are enormously pleased and excited to be returning for a ninth season,” the actors said. “We could not ignore the outpouring of public support for the show, and we are looking forward to creating one more season with the best writers, producers, directors, and production people in television.” Across the board, the message was clear: no more high-profile contract negotiations or jockeying in the press. Those days were over, and this was it. The actors, the network, and the studio all stated in no uncertain terms how glad they were that the show would be back for another year, and that it would be the last. Bright, Kauffman, and Crane chimed in, expressing gratitude for the chance to give Friends a proper farewell: “We will devote the entire twenty-four episodes of the final season to wrap up storylines and send our characters off into the world.”
No cliffhangers this time. Friends would return once more, to say goodbye.