Friends: they’ll be there for you when the rain starts to pour. Sure. But will they still be there for you at the table read? Maybe not. Friends fans were rattled this week by claims from Patty Lin, one of the adored sitcom’s former writers. Lin, who worked on the show between 2000 and 2001, painted a bluntly damning picture of the show’s collaborative environment, accusing the six leads – Jennifer Aniston, Courteney Cox, Lisa Kudrow, Matt LeBlanc, Matthew Perry and David Schwimmer – of “deliberately tanking” jokes they didn’t like. “Dozens of good jokes would get thrown out just because one of them had mumbled the line through a mouthful of bacon,” wrote Lin, in an extract from her new memoir. “Seeing themselves as guardians of their characters, they often argued that they would never do or say such-and-such. That was occasionally helpful, but overall, these sessions had a dire, aggressive quality that lacked all the levity you’d expect from the making of a sitcom.”
Dire and aggressive?! It’s refreshing to hear words so coldly unminced, especially regarding a series whose behind-the-scenes mythmaking usually veers towards the saccharine. Ordinarily, Friends fans thrive on tales of off-camera bonhomie. The 2021 reunion special offered a potently nostalgic catch-up with the show’s cast, cropdusted with behind-the-scenes insights (Schwimmer and Aniston had the hots for one another!). Friends: The Reunion was a huge hit both in the US and here, where it became Sky One’s most watched programme ever. But it was guilty of perpetuating this kind of dewy-eyed myth about the show. As Lin’s comments show, there’s always more to it. It’s time viewers stopped romanticising the process of making TV. Good television isn’t born of love, but of labour – and all the friction and unpleasantness that comes with it.
