How Friends would be different in 2019, according to the people who made it
When Friends arrived on Netflix at the end of 2017, it provoked debate and discussion as the 1990s sitcom was evaluated with a contemporary eye. Many younger viewers discovered the series for the first time, and criticised jokes levelled at women and gay people, while the show also faced accusations of fat-shaming.
It’s perhaps inevitable that a television show 25 years old would include now-outdated views and opinions. What’s more surprising, though, is how the cast and creative team involved with Friends have since responded to the criticisms.
The series’ lack of diversity is one point that’s been addressed by cast and members of the production.
“Even at the time, people were constantly pointing out that Friends wasn’t as diverse as the Manhattan of the real world,” actress Aisha Tyler – who played Ross’s love interest Charlie Wheeler – told The Guardian last year.
Reportedly, the possibility of more inclusive casting was actually raised at the show’s very beginnings, but, according to TV executive Karey Burke, series creators Marta Kauffman and David Crane pushed back since they wrote the Friends script with specific people in mind.
“I think now it might be a different conversation,” Burke suggested last year. “It might feel a little tone deaf to not be more inclusive.”
Cosimo Fusco – who played Rachel’s on/off boyfriend Paolo – has echoed Burke’s comments. As well as addressing the “disrespectful” way in which his Italian character was portrayed as “this greasy guy”, Fusco insisted in 2018 that “one of the six [lead characters] would have to be black” if Friends were made today.
Speaking exclusively to Digital Spy, the show’s executive producer and director Kevin S Bright actually argued that Friends had “aged really well”, but did acknowledge that certain cultural aspects would have to be tweaked if it were made in 2019.
“I think, probably, if anything would change about the show, it would just be to reflect more what’s going on in the world that’s happening today, but not in a topical way – more in a cultural way,” Bright said.
Besides race, another hot topic of conversation when Friends came to streaming was its portrayal of LGBTQ+ characters, with certain jokes being labelled as homophobic and transphobic.
The portrayal of one of Chandler’s parents has come in for particularly strong criticism. Not only is the trans character Helena Handbasket played by Kathleen Turner, a cisgender actor, but the way in which the character is portrayed also seems to confuse being trans with being a drag queen – two *very* different things.
Turner herself addressed these issues in a 2018 interview with Gay Times, admitting that “people thought Charles was just dressing up”. But while she acknowledged that Friends hadn’t “aged well”, she also suggested that the role of Helena was groundbreaking in its own way, since it offered some form of representation, however misguided, at a time when LGBTQ+ characters on television were less common.
But just last month, series co-creator Marta Kaufman actually singled out the show’s jokes about trans people, and its portrayal of Helena in particular, as the one aspect she’d like to go back and change.
“I think we didn’t have the knowledge about transgender people back then, so I’m not sure if we used the appropriate terms,” Kauffman told USA Today. “I don’t know if I would have known those terms back then. I think that’s the biggest [change I’d make].”
She also addressed a now-controversial joke in 2001 episode ‘The One With the Rumor’, guest starring Brad Pitt as an old schoolmate of Rachel’s who spread a false rumour that she had “both male and female reproductive parts”.
“We said your parents decided to raise you as a girl,” says Pitt’s character Will. “But you still had a hint of a penis.”
Kaufman admitted in May, “I might have not done the hermaphrodite stuff today if I had that to do over,” calling the episode a “period piece” that doesn’t entirely stand up 18 years later.
More and more, the Friends creative team appear to be acknowledging that, viewed through a modern lens, the show has some serious issues. (“It was a groundbreaking show, in that fully half the cast were women,” David Schwimmer joked during an appearance at the BAFTA TV Awards last month.)
Though it always comes with the caveat of reminding us that this is a show a quarter of a century old, there does appear to be a consensus among those who worked on it that Friends would have to look and feel quite different were it to be made today.
