Friends was never a fairytale behind the scenes – stop pretending otherwise

This week, Patty Lin, a writer on the hit 1990s sitcom, offered a damning assessment of the show’s collaborative environment. It’s time people stopped romanticising the making of their favourite TV series, writes Louis Chilton – the Friends don’t always justify the means

‘Friends’ stars Courteney Cox, Jennifer Aniston, and Matthew Perry (Warner Bros/Getty Images)

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.

There are, of course, plenty of series that are warm and chummy behind the scenes, with castmembers who refer to each other as “family” in coos of soppy affection. But for every one of these dream scenarios, there is another that’s an absolute nightmare, and probably a dozen more that fall somewhere in the middle – TV series that are simply jobs, with highs and lows like any other job. All are capable of producing great television; all are equally capable of producing rubbish.

Perhaps it is harder to separate the dream from reality when it comes to a series like Friends, a sitcom that has always lived somewhere in the postcode of “comfort viewing”. It’s baked into the show’s core appeal: Ross, Rachel, etc etc are not just each other’s friends, but the friends you are supposed to wish you had. When claims of discord surface, such as those put forward by Lin, the image of these people as our convivial chums dissolves before our eyes; we are forced to re-imagine them as prickly and self-serving thespians.

That’s not to say that the series’ issues have been totally hidden until now, of course. Friends has faced increased scrutiny in recent years for its problematic jokes and storylines – sexism; homophobia; unrelenting onscreen whiteness. Perry’s struggles with a serious drug addiction at the peak of Friends’ run are a matter of public record, something that gives many of his performances on the show a depressing edge in retrospect. Also a matter of public record is the lawsuit once filed by former writer’s assistant Amaani Lyle, who alleged that she had experienced racial discrimination and sexual harassment while working in the Friends writers’ room. The harassment lawsuit was thrown out of court in 2006, but it’s clear that behind the scenes, Friends wasn’t completely harmonious.

There is no happy ending to Lin’s story: she ultimately stepped away from the TV industry entirely. (Her memoir is titled End Credits: How I Broke Up with Hollywood.) She has written about the “imposter syndrome” she came to develop on Friends and elsewhere – a “common experience for racial minorities who work in fields where they lack representation”. It’s a shame, of course – the sort of bleak case study that you hope wouldn’t happen the same way now. But for things to get better, they must be spoken about bluntly and honestly. It’s fine to still love programmes like Friends. But save the romance for the screen.