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The writers behind Friends have recalled how they were forced to stand up to an NBC executive who wanted to change Monica Geller’s storyline for the show’s pilot episode.
David Crane and Marta Kauffman, 67, co-created the hit Nineties sitcom starring Matthew Perry, Jennifer Aniston, Lisa Kudrow, Matt LeBlanc, David Schwimmer and Courteney Cox as a group of twenty-somethings living in New York City, which ran for 10 seasons from 1994 to 2004.
In the script for the show’s pilot episode, Crane and Kauffman received pushback from the network for including a plot line in which Monica sleeps with someone on a first date.
“The guy who was in charge said: ‘We’re not going to like Monica because [in the pilot] she sleeps with a guy on the first date,’” Crane told The Times. “We made the argument that it makes her sympathetic.”
In “The Pilot” Monica sleeps with her co-worker, who is nicknamed “Paul the wine guy” on a first date after he claims he hasn’t had sex with anyone since his last breakup two years before. As the episodes continues, it emerges Paul lied to trick Monica into having sex with him.
“The network, in trying to prove that the audience wouldn’t like Monica if she sleeps with a guy on the first date, distributed a little questionnaire to the audience at our dress rehearsal,” Crane revealed.
“And it was so skewed. The question was like: ‘When Monica sleeps with a guy on her first date, is she a) a slut or b) a harlot?’”
Despite the leading nature of the questions, the Friends audience opted for a third, unlisted, response. “People wrote in saying: ‘No, it’s fine,’” Crane said.
Elsewhere in the interview, Kauffman revealed that Monica and Chandler’s much-loved on-screen relationship had originally been written as a one night stand.
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“But they received such a strong reaction from the audience in London that it actually altered where we were going with the storyline,” she said.
Perry died from a fatal ketamine overdose last October. Five people, including his personal assistant and two doctors, have now been arrested and charged in relation to his death.
After playing his on screen girlfriend for many years, Cox has said she still “talks” to Perry after his death. “I’m so thankful I got to work so closely with him for so many years,” she said during an appearance on CBS’ Sunday Morning. “He visits me a lot, if we believe in that.”
“I talk to my mum, my dad, Matthew,” she said. “I feel like there are a lot of people that, I think, guide us. I do sense – I sense Matthew’s around for sure.”
