Friends Writer Reveals the Cast Members 'Rarely Had Anything Positive to Say' to Him
Working on Friends might seem like a dream come true, but the reality was very different: one of the writers revealed just how insufferable the main actors could be.
Friends is one of the most popular sitcoms in the world, and while its run ended all the way back in 2004, it’s still as viewed as ever thanks to streaming platforms. The jokes and bizarre situations from a few decades back are still as funny as they were then, and the cast of the show is still largely loved by global audiences.
When you’re watching Friends, you can’t help but feel like working on that show would be a phenomenally positive experience, right?
Well, admittedly, it was quite the opposite at times as Patty Lin, the series’s former writer who worked on Season 7, revealed in her book End Credits: How I Broke Up With Hollywood.
“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. They all knew how to get a laugh, but if they didn’t like a joke, they seemed to deliberately tank it, knowing we’d rewrite it,” Lin wrote.
Whenever the actors felt like they personally didn’t want a particular line, they would “mumble it through a mouthful of bacon.” According to Patty Lin, this way, the cast threw hundreds of great jokes out — and the creators of Friends were OK with that. They never intervened or prevented the actors from tanking parts of the script.
“They rarely had anything positive to say, and when they brought up problems, they didn’t suggest feasible solutions. 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,” Lin elaborated.
Apparently, the Friends actors were not keen on giving proper feedback to their writers: they expected their scripts to be exactly how they saw them but provided little to no actual guidance. This was driving the show’s writers crazy as they had to create more and more content as their previous efforts were constantly set on fire.
Patty Lin worked on Friends for the entirety of Season 7, but she never returned for Season 8 or any other consequent entry. She was feeling burnt out by what seemed like a never-ending cycle of “write, rewrite, repeat” without any positive feedback.
So perhaps, it wasn’t all fun and games behind the scenes of the most beloved sitcom ever.