For former TV writer Patty Lin, working on the smash sitcom Friends wasn’t the “dream job” she expected it to be.
In her upcoming memoir End Credits: How I Broke Up with Hollywood, Lin said the star-studded cast of Friends — including Jennifer Aniston, Courteney Cox and Matthew Perry — would “deliberately tank” jokes, knowing it would trigger a rewrite.
Lin was a writer on Season 7 of Friends from 2000 to 2001. Her other TV credits include Freaks and Geeks, Desperate Housewives and Breaking Bad.
“The actors seemed unhappy to be chained to a tired old show when they could be branching out, and I felt like they were constantly wondering how every given script would specifically serve them,” Lin wrote in an excerpt of her memoir published by Time.
Though Lin was a dramatic writer, not a joke writer, she knew when she was offered the Friends writing spot, she couldn’t turn it down. Lin said the high-pressure gig left her with imposter syndrome, and the worry she may have been hired in part because of a diversity initiative at NBC to bring on more writers of colour.
Lin recalled that the large team of Friends writers were “cliquey,” like the “preppy rich kids in my high school who shopped at Abercrombie & Fitch and drove brand-new convertibles.”
Lin said her excitement to be working on Friends “wore off fast.” During table reads with the cast, she claimed that “dozens of good jokes would get thrown out” because a lead actor “mumbled the line through a mouthful of bacon.”
“Seeing themselves as guardians of their characters, they often argued that they would never do or say such-and-such,” Lin wrote. “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.”
She said the stars would “vociferously” voice their grievances with each script.
“They rarely had anything positive to say, and when they brought up problems, they didn’t suggest feasible solutions.”
Lin said she “didn’t learn that much” at Friends, save for one lesson: “I never wanted to work on a sitcom again.”
Lin is not the only one to criticize Friends since it ended in 2004. In March, Aniston, who played Rachel Green, said modern audiences would likely not approve of the jokes uttered on the sitcom.
“There’s a whole generation of people, kids, who are now going back to episodes of Friends and find them offensive,” she said.
Aniston blamed the offensiveness on a combination of “things that were never intentional” and elements of the program that just lacked thought.
Friends, a comedy about six young people in New York, has long since been criticized for a lack of diversity. All of the show’s main characters are white. While actors of colour appeared sparsely in short cameo roles, the most prominent, non-white actor on the show, Aisha Tyler (who played Charlie Wheeler), appeared in only nine episodes.
Some of the jokes in Friends have also been labelled transphobic or homophobic.
Friends began in 1994. It is one of the most profitable sitcoms ever created, bringing in reportedly US$1.4 billion since its initial debut.
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