Friends’ finale wraps a decade of `lucky accidents’

By: Rick Porter, Zap2it.com
Posted In: Entertainment

Something to ponder as the final episodes of “Friends” make their way onto NBC: Would the show have lasted as long as it did without the Ross-and-Rachel love story?

Hindsight’s easy, but “probably not” seems like a safe answer. Yet that romance, which has run through “Friends” for all of its 10 seasons, only happened because of a “lucky accident,” co-creator Marta Kauffman says.

“In the initial pitch, there was no Ross-and-Rachel as a romantic entity,” says her “Friends” partner, David Crane. “We sort of discovered it when we were doing the pilot.”

The history of “Friends,” and probably a lot of other enduring shows, is dotted with moments where things just came together. Crane and Kauffman are hard-pressed to explain just what it is about “Friends” that has made it so popular for a decade.

“Whenever people ask us where we are in (the sitcom pantheon), or where we’re going to be, it’s kind of a daunting question for us,” Crane says. “I’d like to hope that years from now, people can look at the reruns and say `That’s still a really funny show.’ If that happens, whatever sort of label they put on it, I’ll be thrilled.”

Crane and Kauffman, who worked on HBO’s “Dream On” for several seasons before creating “Friends,” finish one another’s sentences like an old married couple (they’re not). When they speak, you can also hear a little bit of the characters in their voices: There’s a little bit of Chandler in the way Crane says “It’s so not what we focus on,” and when Kauffman says Courteney Cox’s delivery of Monica’s exclamation “I know” cracks her up, she sounds almost exactly like the actress.

If “Friends” broke the sitcom mold in any way, it did so by putting the six principals on equal footing and making them all about the same age. “There was concern at NBC initially that all the characters were right in the same demographic,” Crane says. “They pushed for us to add an older character _ `Where’s Pops who owns the coffee shop?'”

Kauffman also says that thanks to the cast’s unusually strong chemistry, the writing maxim of “show, don’t tell” didn’t always figure into “Friends.”

“You learn when you start writing that you’re supposed to always make things dramatic. You don’t talk about them,” she says. “That wasn’t necessarily true for this show. It was always better when we put the six of them together and they talked about something than if you saw it. That was really surprising.”

Crane and Kauffman realize that “Friends” fans will come into the series finale on May 6 with their own feelings about the way the show should end. They tried not to think too much about that, though.

“We tried not to focus on how people were going to scrutinize us,” Crane says. “That’s kind of paralyzing. … We’re certainly aware that people have expectations and are invested in certain things, but ultimately for us, it comes down to, `OK, what’s a story we’re proud of and has surprises in it for us?’ Then we just hold our breath.”

“We really wanted it to be funny _ we didn’t just want it to be sad,” Kauffman adds. “But we also wanted it to be moving. It can be a very tricky line to walk.”

They’re keeping an eye on smaller details in the final episodes as well. During a recent conference call, a reporter jokingly asked the producers if Central Perk barista Gunther (James Michael Tyler) had any shot of ending up with his long-time crush, Rachel (Jennifer Aniston).

It drew a laugh from Crane, but it’s apparently also a plot point in one of the final three episodes. “I don’t want to give anything away about the finale, but as you’ll see, that’s a question we were asking ourselves as well,” he says.

One “Friend,” Joey (Matt LeBlanc) will continue his TV life in an NBC spin-off next fall. (Kauffman and Crane aren’t directly involved in the show, which is being overseen by “Friends” exec producers Kevin Bright, Shana Goldberg-Meehan and Scott Silveri). As for the rest of the characters, Kauffman and Crane say they tried with the finale to leave them in “a really good place.”

“We set out to make it feel as if they were all going to be OK,” Kauffman says.

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KRT Campus Newswire